Blockbuster eventually crashed up against the stark reality of the convenience of Netflix, founded in 1997. How could Blockbuster compete with a flat fee, unlimited rentals from the comfort of your own home, and no late fees? Netflix began to boom as DVD players became cheaper, starting around 2002. By the time Netflix began streaming movies on-demand on its online platform in 2007, whether Blockbuster knew it or not, it was dead in the water.
As Blockbuster’s death spiral began, they tried to copy Netflix in an effort to compete with them. First, they introduced their own DVD mailing businesses. My family, as loyal Blockbuster customers, switched from Netflix to their mailing service for a while. They even tried out some online streaming of their own. Nothing worked. By 2013, all corporate-owned Blockbuster stores were shuttered, and the DVD-mailing business was closed down. Why did nothing work?
Experts disagree on why exactly Blockbuster’s attempts to compete with Netflix did not save its business. I think it comes down to one thing: Netflix had a vision and Blockbuster did not. Netflix understood that the entire culture was fundamentally changing. They launched their streaming service in the same year that Apple announced the iPhone.3 Both Netflix and Apple knew that just tweaking their business model was not enough; they had to understand the cultural moment and propose simple and bold solutions that could meet that moment head-on. Blockbuster, weighed down under so much infrastructure from building a business for a different era, was not agile enough to compete. Instead of responding boldly with new initiatives that would inspire the marketplace, Blockbuster reacted defensively and ended up just slowing their decline.
What does this have to do with the Catholic Church and our parishes specifically? It provides a cautionary tale as we discern the best way to tackle the current situation of decline in many of our parishes. It is no secret that the Catholic Church in the West today is hemorrhaging members. Most of us have heard some the dire statistics, but it helps to look briefly at the current situation and the numbers.
From 2007 to 2014, the share of Americans who identify as Catholic dropped from 24 percent to 21 percent. Of those who still identify as Catholic, 35 percent belong to the “Baby Boomer” generation (born between 1944 and 1964), while only 22 percent are Millennials — currently the largest generation in the United States.4 This means that the dire condition of many Catholic parishes will only worsen over the next couple of decades, if nothing changes. This is why it seems that every few months we hear of new parish closings in what were formerly bastions of Catholic life and culture.5 According to CARA (Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate), which is affiliated with Georgetown University, the number of parishes in the United States peaked in 1990 at 19,620 parishes. By 2018, even with parishes continuing to open in certain parts of the country, that number was down to 17,007.6
Granted, there are still many committed, faithful Catholics who love the Church and continue to be active members of their local parish, and signs for hope exist across the country. Yet too many Catholics are simply walking away.
Our cultural moment is changing, and it is becoming increasingly apparent that we are entering into a secularizing age. With respect to this secularization, the United States just passed a critical threshold this year, with the “nones,” or those who claim no religious affiliation at all, surpassing Catholics and evangelicals as the largest religious group in the United States.7 In the early to mid-1970s, only about 5 percent of the U.S. population called themselves “nones.” By 1995, that number was still just below 10 percent. In the last twenty-five years, the number has shot up to over 23 percent in the United States. In a country of around 325 million people, that means about 75 million of them no longer claim a religious affiliation. We are living in an era of rapid secularization and cultural change, unlike anything this part of the world has ever seen. For the Church, this means that renewal — both at the highest level and in every parish — is not just a nice idea; it is imperative. What we need is a new apostolic age.
With my apostolate, L’Alto Catholic Institute (laltocatholic.com), I have worked personally with dozens of parishes who are seeing these discouraging trends played out in real time. The leaders in these parishes recognize that their membership is declining and aging but feel overwhelmed and at a loss for what they can actually do about the problem. This on-the-ground experience has proved to me that, given the macro changes that are taking place culturally, parishes can no longer view themselves as gathering places for the faithful. Rather, they must see themselves as missionary outposts in a new and strange land. We, as a Church and as parishes, no longer operate in a Christian culture. In this post-Christian moment, we are called to be radically on mission.
Working with parishes, I have become convicted that while the increased conversation around parish renewal happening in the professional Church world today is encouraging, a greater emphasis on helping parishes change their culture to meet the culture head-on needs to be diffused more widely. The result is this book.
To put it plainly, I have personally seen too many parishes trying to stem the tide of declining membership by simply tweaking tactics. Too often, unsure of what else to do, parishes seek to fix a much deeper problem with surface-level solutions. “Let’s try a new program! A different curriculum! That new Bible study! A few more greeters at Mass! A new mission statement!” The problem is that none of these solutions addresses the core problem. When parishes focus their renewal efforts around things like “engagement,” they are putting Band-Aids on a much deeper wound.
It is up to us to ensure that the Church does not respond to this cultural moment like Blockbuster, by just chasing the trends, always a step behind, desperately hoping to cling to some of her membership and manage decline. My hope is that the Church takes this difficult cultural moment and uses it to boldly lean in to her perennial vocation: to be on mission to save souls.
This is what Pope Saint John Paul II called for when he proclaimed the New Evangelization. This phrase “new evangelization” has come to mean all kinds of things in the Church, including in some contexts especially the use of new media in sharing the Gospel. Yet John Paul was calling for more than that. He was inviting the Church to dramatically reorient herself in the present age, given the cultural trends. Prophetically aware of the challenges already facing the Church and those to come, this great pope proclaimed that he saw “the dawning of a new missionary age, which will become a radiant day bearing an abundant harvest, if all Christians … respond with generosity … to the calls and challenges of our times.”8
The Crucial Role of the Parish
The parish is the Church’s great missionary opportunity. Think about it: All of our “church planting” has already been done! We have outposts of Catholic faithful set up throughout the world, ready to encounter the broader community and culture in which they are placed. Yet too often, especially in the United States, the parish experience is not mission-focused at all. For many Catholics in the United States, the parish experience could be summed up in one word: comfortable. The familiar culture of far too many parishes involves polite suburban people gathering together socially on Sunday mornings and mumbling their way through common prayers before returning to the “real world.” We are seeing the results of this culture all too clearly.
To understand how we got here and what we can do about it, it helps to look more closely at what a parish is, and what it is supposed to be. Did you know that the parish itself is not a building but an area of land? They still call counties “parishes” in the state of Louisiana, a traditionally Catholic area, and this is itself instructive. When we are talking about a parish, we are not referring only to a building owned by the Catholic Church and the Catholics who choose to become members, we are also referring to a geographic region.
Over the centuries, the Church has divided up the entire world into these parishes. By doing so, she has planted outposts of her mission in local communities around the world. Each parish is a local instantiation of the universal Body of Christ. The reason for this is not just to have a place for Catholics to gather, but to show the community of Catholics in any particular area the extent of their shared mission field. Within a given parish’s