The Final Service Podcast: Why Are Churches Disappearing?

I attended Catholic elementary and high school and still attend Roman Catholic mass, although not every week anymore. Yet when I do attend, I make two observations. First, a majority of the attendees are over 65 years old. That begs the question: Who will attend when they're gone? Second, there are fewer people at church. That begs the question: How long can a church survive with a dwindling attendance?

 So when I heard from Mateo Schimpf, an editor/producer at Colorado Public Radio, that they had recently released a four-part documentary series about U.S. church closures called The Final Service, I was intrigued.

The show is reported and produced by Mateo alongside co-host Ray Suarez, and is distributed by PRX.

This is the state of religion in the U.S. that the show records. In 2024, about 30% of U.S. adults attended religious services weekly, and an additional 9% attended almost every week. This means approximately 39% of Americans attended religious services at least twice a month. However, church attendance is declining, especially among younger generations.

Catholics continue to lose more members than they gain, though the retention rate for Hispanic Catholics (68%) is somewhat higher than for white Catholics (62%).

Less than 5% of Americans identify as members of non-Christian religions, which is unchanged since 2013, including Jewish Americans (2%), Muslims (1%), Buddhists (1%), Hindus (<1%), and Unitarian Universalists (<1%). White mainline/non-evangelical Protestants also continue losing more members than they replace, and at higher rates than other Protestants.

Even the number of evangelicals, a loud voice in politics and culture wars these days, has declined.

Mateo says: "Pretty early on in the reporting process, we realized we were going to have an audience problem. Church membership had fallen off a cliff in the U.S., and congregations were closing down left and right... And a lot of Americans were happy about it."

Mateo asks: "How could we convince people to care about a radioactive topic in so many parts of this country?"

Mateo concludes: "Our basic criteria for story selection were that the personal stakes for each character must rise above religion, and the fate of a single building. That meant spending a lot of time making phone calls and mapping out each episode in pre-production. For example, how would Julian DeShazier's feelings about race in America shape a story about his church on Chicago's South Side? The result is a series of four, distinct episodes that deal with love, loss, and identity much more than they do God."

Thanks to Mateo and co-host Ray Suarez, the four episodes of The Final Service crackle with questions about the reasons for religion's decline. To its credit, the show doesn't simplify the reasons for this shift. Instead, it expands on the confluence of demographic trends, economic growth, political polarization, and church malfeasance as a constellation of reasons for the decline.

The Final Service co-host Ray Suarez, is currently the host of the PBS series "Wisdom Keepers" set to premiere on the public network in June 2025. He was a visiting professor at NYU Shanghai in 2022, and was previously the John J. McCloy Visiting professor of American Studies at Amherst College. For seven years from 2018-2025, Suarez hosted a radio program and several podcast series: On Shifting Ground for KQED-FM, Going for Broke for the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and "The Things I Thought About When My Body Was Trying to Kill Me" on cancer and recovery for Evergreen Podcasts.

His latest book, on modern American immigration to the US, "We Are Home: Becoming American in the 21st Century," was published by Little, Brown in 2024. Suarez joined the PBS NewsHour in 1999 and was a senior correspondent until 2013. He hosted the National Public Radio program Talk of the Nation from 1993 to 1999. In his more than 40-year career in the news business, he has also worked as a radio reporter in London and Rome, as a Los Angeles correspondent for CNN, and as a reporter for the NBC-owned station WMAQ-TV in Chicago. From 2020-2022, he was one of the US correspondents for Euronews. 

Mateo Schimpf has been working in multimedia production since 2017. Mateo spent the early years of his career working on film docs in Latin America before making the full leap to audio journalism in 2020.

He was a reporter, producer, and editor for an international news program on KQED-FM in San Francisco before joining Colorado Public Radio.

Here are the summaries of the four episodes:

# 1 - The Mayordomos—This is the first chapter in a four-part series about church closures in America.Lorraine Pacheco is the caretaker for a tiny church in an even tinier town in the eastern plains of New Mexico. As she gets older and her congregation shrinks, she starts to wonder if it will survive after she’s gone.

 

# 2 - Little Lithuania—Christian Allyn is proud to be Lithuanian. So when he learned that the archbishop would close his Lithuanian church in Waterbury, Connecticut, he decided to step in. Can his appeal save St. Joseph’s Church?

 

# 3 - Chicago—Julian Deshazier is a rapper and a pastor. That sounds like it would appeal to kids from his old neighborhood on the South Side. But getting them to show up to church on Sundays isn't easy.

 

# 4 - Stigma -- A church in decline tries to reinvent itself, and its young members struggle with how to talk about Christianity.

 

I strongly recommend The Final Service. The show travels the nation from Connecticut to New Mexico, interviews people of different religions, and starkly depicts the problems endemic to decline. Thanks to Mateo Schimpf and Ray Suarez, listeners feel the pain, anguish, and sadness of the people directly affected by this decline. After all, what do you do with an empty church?