Why did Lyz Lenz’s church fail? Why do so many others?

“Middle America resists representation,” writes Lyz Lenz. Not be­cause it’s bland or passive, but because it’s “a dissonant space, pulled between the extremes of the coast,” built on a precarious tension between contradictions and opposites. Never was this complexity clearer to Lenz than in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. As her marriage crumbled, she set out on a quest to learn “why churches across America are failing.”

Lenz begins by reflecting on her own experience with a failing church. In 2010, she tried to plant a church called Stone­bridge with the help of her husband and six other people. Lenz envisioned a church where women could be pastors and gay people would be welcome. But she was met mostly with silence by her fellow planters. The pastor directing the effort simply berated her for not updating the church’s website.

Four years into the plant, things began to unravel. The pastor told Lenz she lacked faith for not supporting his plot to take over a Methodist church for Stone­bridge. “No amount of faith is gonna justify a coup d’etat on aging Methodists” was her wry response. After being labeled as an emotional woman and reminded by her husband that she was not an elder, Lenz relinquished her dream. Stonebridge closed, and she gave away her ministry materials, taking what was left to the dumpster, “like so many offerings of failure.”