Learning by Listening
A Feature Review of
Church Tomorrow?: What the ‘Nones’ and ‘Dones’ Teach Us About the Future of Faith
Stephanie Spellers
Hardcover: Morehouse Publishing, 2025
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Reviewed by Melanie P. Moore
Rather than lamenting the precipitous decline of church attendance or attempting a revised “outreach” to draw people into empty pews, Stephanie Spellers takes us out of the church bubble to ask what we can learn from “Nones” and “Dones.”
As she states in the introduction of her newest book, Church Tomorrow? What the Nones and Dones Can Teach Us about the Future of Faith, “Christians and other religious people are not the only ones talking to the divine, and we never have been. Just beyond the church doors, God is meeting people.”
Not unlike her previous book, The Church Cracked Open, which used the lens of racial reconciliation to explore possibilities for a radical transformation – literally breaking the church wide open in order to let a new version emerge – Church Tomorrow? proposes we “accept God’s invitation to change, (rather than blaming the ‘Nones‘ and ‘Dones’ for not joining us).”
Her concise survey of the history and numbers behind institutional church decline, which began in the 20th century, examines the current “Great Disaffiliation” not just from institutional church but from most of the institutions that structured U.S. society. Citing data from multiple recent studies of religious preferences, church attendance, the precipitous decline in membership of six mainline traditions, and the religious composition of each generation in 2024—all of which point to continuing decline—Spellers asks, “Where do we go from here?”
Sketching a picture of who the Nones and Dones are, demographically, politically, and by level of education, Spellers highlights primary cultural currents that have combined to move younger generations “beyond Christianity.” She cites socio-cultural scholars who have identified three main components—privatization (primarily modern technology), secularization (effectively ceding Christianity to the Religious Right), and pluralization (“a staggering number of ideologies and faith options competing for their attention”).
The overarching aim of the book is in the subtitle: What the Nones and Dones Can Teach Us About The Future of Faith. The book is structured around four questions Spellers asked of Millennial and Gen Z conversation partners:
- Share about your spiritual journey and what path led to where you are now.
- How and where do you experience the sacred?
- How and where do you experience community and belonging?
- What would you tell the church/organized religion if it were listening?
Opening with the example of Ezekiel, “a young prophet on the margins sent to speak to God’s people in the valley,” Spellers frames the Millennial and Gen Z view of the current state of the institutional church as a “valley of the bones” prophesy: “I am going to open your graves and bring you up from your graves … I will put my spirit within you and you shall live” (Ezekiel 37:11-14). The book seeks to discover “new life in the valley of the bones” by “combining [Millennial and Gen Z] insight with the church’s wisdom and treasures.”
With few exceptions, Spellers’s conversation partners identified as “spiritual but not religious,” citing various permutations of the following reasons for not joining a church: I don’t believe, churches hurt people, church isn’t worth the trouble (nice to have but not necessary), I can’t be labeled or pinned down, or I was never religious anyway. More than 50% named the Religious Right’s bigotry and control of the Christian narrative as a reason they sought distance from Christianity. One said, “Churches seem content with the current state and hate.”
On their spiritual-but-not-religious journeys, these generations have regular practices of connecting intimately with others, being creative and embodied, engaging the natural world, reflecting in silence, making meaning of their experience, expanding/combining spiritual traditions, and paying attention in a distracted world.
Spellers points out that “Pluralization and the era of infinite possibility both complicate the process of finding and forming community.” Today, people are finding community with chosen family, around music and the arts, in fitness and yoga groups, at work, and in alternative worship communities. “These ‘Nones’ and ‘Dones’ remind us what Trinitarian theology should have taught us all along: …we know God and practice God’s ways when we are in relationship.” The church should pay attention to these generations and meet them where they are to build relationships. One example is that they are used to short, interactive messaging. “Silent, passive reception of one clergyperson’s word as authoritative is downright weird [to them].”
Further, they want churches to “stop idolizing institutions, buildings, rules, and dogma.” They feel that “the church welcomes us into institutional maintenance.” Yet some acknowledged that creating their own spiritual practices, rituals, and communities can be exhausting, saying there is value in institutions which can do things at scale where individuals or small groups cannot.
Most of the people interviewed live in metro areas—Atlanta, Minneapolis, San Francisco, New York. By my count, more were not only from church-going families but from clergy families which is a fairly specific subset of Millennials and Gen Z. Spellers acknowledged the limited scope, especially compared to larger, more detailed studies, several of which she cited in the opening chapters. That said, her approach, which has been called “both prophetic and pastoral” presents a remarkably strong posture of listening with openness and curiosity.
The final section of the book outlines Spellers’s suggested responses to the prophesies of the Millennials and Gen Z. She candidly outlines three options for the church: 1) Double down by tending to the flock that loves what we love and prays as we pray; 2) Surrender and “‘…downplay Jesus—as if our savior is a marketing liability;” or 3) “Acknowledge all we now know…[and] walk alongside them as we together figure out how to advance the loving dream of God.”
Echoing Bishop Michael Curry’s line, “Jesus did not establish an institution,” she reminds us that we are the Jesus Movement. Spellers’s frank questions demand attention in the current moment: “Why have we so prioritized keeping peace within the body at the expense of the truth of the gospel and with little regard for relationship with people already rejected and left on the side of the road? Why aren’t we willing to take a biblically-based risk to protect the persecuted…?”
Observing that “’others just beyond the church are often eager to speak with us,” she calls for us to “go forth with curiosity and love” to learn from the “Nones” and “Dones” in our own orbit.
Stephanie Spellers, the canon in residence at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in New York City, is the author of The Church Cracked Open, Radical Welcome, and The Episcopal Way (with Eric law). In this book, she has provided a framework to transform church for tomorrow. She has published a 32-page “Resource, Reflection, and Action Guide” for groups or individuals to use as they read Church Tomorrow?
Melanie Moore
Melanie P. Moore is a writer and editor in Austin, Texas, where she is the Editor of Practicing Presence, The Abbey blog. Her website is faithindrag.com. Previously, she founded and led Badgerdog, Austin’s first writers-in-the-schools program (now a program of the Austin Public Library) and re-launched American Short Fiction. Her work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Atlanta Magazine, Creative Loafing, and Austin Travels Magazine, among other publications. She’s a member of St. David’s Episcopal Church.
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