THE NON-LOCAL CHURCH MINDSET (Santamaria)

The Non-Local Church Mindset

Contents

• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• WHAT WERE THE BAPTISTS LIKE BEFORE THE GREAT AWAKENING?
• THE MINDSET
• NAMES AND ORGANIZATIONS

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

Let’s zoom in on the U.S., since that’s where we have the clearest numbers. The short version: tens of millions of people who once had some church connection no longer attend or belong to a local church, and the drop has been steady for about 25 years.

I’ll give you a few anchor stats you can actually quote.

1. Attendance: weekly/monthly participation

Gallup / Lifeway synthesis

Around the year 2000, about 42% of Americans said they attended religious services weekly or nearly every week. (Lifeway Research)

By around 2010, that had dropped to 38%. (Lifeway Research)

In the most recent Gallup numbers (early 2020s), only about 30% say they attend weekly or nearly weekly. (Gallup.com)

So roughly one out of every four people who used to be regular attenders around 2000 is no longer in that category.

Pew 2025

Pew’s big 2025 survey finds:

33% of U.S. adults attend religious services at least once a month.

49% say they seldom or never attend. (Pew Research Center)

So about half the country is effectively “out” of regular local-church life right now.

2. Membership: belonging to a congregation at all

Gallup’s membership trend (church, synagogue, or mosque):

In 1999, 70% of U.S. adults said they belonged to a house of worship.

By 2020, that had fallen to 47%, dropping below half of the population for the first time in the 80-year Gallup series. (Gallup.com)

That’s roughly a 23-point drop in 20 years. In population terms, you’re talking tens of millions fewer Americans belonging to any congregation.

3. “Churchless” and “dechurched” specifically

Barna uses more church-focused categories:

As of one of their major studies, about 38% of U.S. adults were “unchurched,” meaning they had not attended a Christian church at all in the previous six months, except maybe for a wedding or funeral. Of that 38%:

• 29% are “dechurched” (used to attend, now don’t),
• 9% are “never churched.” (Barna Group)

In another breakdown, Barna estimated about 114 million churchless adults plus 42 million churchless children/teens – around 156 million U.S. residents not engaged with a Christian church at all at that time. (Barna Group)

That doesn’t mean all of them “left” local churches (some never had one), but it shows the scale of the non-connected population.

4. Generational collapse

Pew’s 2025 report also shows the generational cliff:

• Older adults (65+) are far more likely to attend monthly and identify as Christian.
• Young adults are much less likely to attend services at least monthly (about 25% vs. 49% of the oldest adults) and far more likely to be religious “nones.” (Pew Research Center)

So the “leaving” isn’t just a trickle; younger cohorts are starting adulthood from a much lower baseline of local-church involvement.

There’s no big, organized group called “The Anti–Local Church Movement,” but there are several streams of thought and practice that, in practice, reject or hollow out the New Testament idea of a concrete, accountable local church.

I’ll group them by attitude more than brand name, because that’s usually what you’re actually dealing with.

WHAT WERE THE BAPTISTS LIKE BEFORE THE GREAT AWAKENING?

Before the Great Awakening, Baptists in the colonies were like a scrappy little fringe band playing in the alley while the big denominations owned the concert hall.

They were there, but:

• Tiny in number
• Socially suspect
• Often persecuted or at least harassed
• Not yet the aggressive evangelistic force they would become because of the Awakening

I’ll walk through the main pieces you’d care about as a Baptist/historian.

1. Numerically: a small, scattered minority

By most estimates:

At the start of the Great Awakening (1730s) there were fewer than 50 Baptist churches from Maine to Florida, with only about 1,000 members total.

The Library of Congress notes that Baptists had existed in the colonies since the 1600s, but it was the Great Awakening that “galvanized them into a powerful, proselytizing force.”

So pre-Awakening:

• They’re present (since Roger Williams in Providence, 1638; Clarke in Newport; Swansea, etc.)
• But they are small, localized pockets, not a major denominational power.

2. Social and legal status: unpopular dissenters

In New England especially, Baptists were treated as dangerous troublemakers:

• Massachusetts passed a 1644 law banishing Baptists from the colony, branding them “incendiaries of the commonwealth” and “troublers of churches.”
• Baptist visitors like John Clarke and Obadiah Holmes were imprisoned and publicly whipped in Massachusetts in 1651 for their views on believers’ baptism and dissent from the standing order.

The memory of Münster and Anabaptist radicals made “Anabaptist” a scare-word. When magistrates and ministers heard “Baptist,” they often thought “political subversive” or “antinomian,” not “slightly odd Congregationalist.”

Over time, persecution lessened, and some toleration appeared (especially with the Toleration Act and royal pressure), but culturally, Baptists were still:

• Outside the tax-supported establishment
• Often poorer, rural, and of lower social status
• Easy to caricature as fanatics

So, pre-Awakening Baptists are marginal, not mainstream.

3. Theological/ecclesiastical condition

By 1700–1730, in the colonies, you basically had:

• “Particular” (Calvinistic) Baptists – especially in New England and some mid-Atlantic contexts, heirs of English Particular Baptist confessionalism.
• “General” (Arminian) Baptists in some pockets, but the big evangelical surge later will be among the Calvinistic side.

Before the Awakening:

• They are strong on believers’ baptism, liberty of conscience, and congregational polity.
• They are not yet the wild, aggressive evangelists of the backcountry revivals.
• Many of the older Baptist congregations are relatively sober, respectable, and cautious—and some will be suspicious of the emotional revivalism that explodes later.

Think of it as “confessional, small, and cautious” more than “restless evangelistic machine.”

4. Spiritual tone: some vitality, some drift, no mass movement

Like everyone else, Baptists lived in the broader pre-Awakening atmosphere:

• Churches existed, confessions existed, but there was a sense across the colonies of formalism and spiritual indifference creeping in.
• Historians regularly describe early 18th-century religion as respectable and rational, but often lacking experiential power, across denominations.

For Baptists specifically:

• Some congregations clearly preserved a robust experimental piety.
• But there is no indication that Baptists were leading any large-scale revival movement before the 1730s; they’re mostly surviving, not conquering.

In other words, they had the doctrine of conversion, but not yet the massive culture of revival that would define them in the South and West later.

5. Geography: coastal enclaves, not yet a frontier army

Before the Awakening:

• In New England, Baptists are few, clustered around places like Providence, Newport, Swansea, and a handful of other towns.
• In the Middle Colonies, you have scattered Baptist churches among the ethnic mix (Dutch, German Reformed, Quakers, etc.).
• In the South, we see the first Virginia Baptist church in 1714, and then slow growth until the post-Awakening explosion (by 1793: 227 Virginia churches, ~22,793 members).

So before the Awakening, the map is thin and coastal. The big inland/backcountry surge is future tense.

6. What the Great Awakening changed (by contrast)

The sharp edge of your answer actually comes from contrast:

Before the Awakening:

• < 50 churches, ~1,000 members from Maine to Florida.
• Socially suspect, marginal, sometimes persecuted.
• Confessional, but small and cautious.

After the Awakening:

• Baptists become “a powerful, proselytizing force,” especially in the South and West.
• New Light / Separate Congregationalists converted under Whitfield & co. start questioning infant baptism and become Separate Baptists, tying revivalist spirituality to Baptist polity.
• In New England, Baptist churches jumped from 21 to 79 between 1740 and 1760.

So: pre-Awakening Baptists are “seed stock,” not yet a movement. The Awakening takes that small, persecuted, confessionally stubborn minority and hooks it up to revival energy and backcountry expansion.

THE MINDSET

1. Radical “Just Jesus and Me” Individualism

Not a denomination, but an ethos:

• “I follow Jesus, not organized religion.”
• “The church is invisible; I don’t need a local one.”
• “I watch sermons online, that’s my church.”

Ingredients:

• Modern Western individualism
• Consumer Christianity (I “use” religious content but don’t bind myself to a people)
• Often—though not always—hurt or disappointed with real churches

Theologically, this ends up denying:

• Hebrews 13:17 (real shepherds, real submission)
• 1 Corinthians 5 (inside/outside, discipline)
• Acts 2:41–47 (added to a visible community)

It’s “anti-local church” in practice, even when the person insists they “love the church” in the abstract.

2. Anti-institutional / “Spiritual but Not Religious” Christianity

Cousin of #1, but more ideological:

• “All institutions are corrupt; Jesus never founded an institution.”
• “True faith is inward; structures and offices are human additions.”
• Sometimes dressed up as “I’m for the kingdom, not the church.”

This overlaps with:

• Some progressive/emergent strands
• Some mystical / New Age–leaning “Christian” spirituality
• The “exvangelical” world where the church is seen primarily as a site of trauma or oppression

Key move: treat any concrete, organized church as a betrayal of “pure” Christianity, instead of the apostolic norm.

3. “Organic / Simple Church” when it becomes anti-church

There’s a good version of house/organic church: small, simple, but still a real local church with elders, ordinances, discipline.

There’s also a bad version:

• “No pastors, ever — leadership is inherently corrupt.”
• “No commitment; we just meet when we feel led.”
• “No discipline; that’s ‘institutional abuse.’”
• “We’re just friends who love Jesus, not a church with any authority.”

At that point it stops being a simplified church and becomes an anti-church fellowship that explicitly rejects the New Testament’s household/order language (1 Tim 3; Titus 1) while claiming to be more biblical.

4. Hyper-charismatic / “direct revelation” anti-structure spirituality

Again, there’s a healthy charismatic world. I’m talking about the extreme edge where people say things like:

• “The Spirit is my only teacher; I don’t need elders or doctrine.”
• “Going where the Spirit leads” = never being tied to one flock
• Prophets and apostles roaming around, but no local accountability

You get:

• Endless “revival meetings” with no actual local church oversight
• People are perpetually “between churches” because “God moved me on” every time discipline or commitment arrived

The local church becomes a disposable staging area for personal spiritual adventures.

5. Online/Virtual “Church” as a Replacement, not a Supplement

There’s a place for livestreams, Zoom groups, etc. But a movement is quietly forming where:

• “My church is YouTube sermons + Discord.”
• No supper, no discipline, no shepherds who actually know you, no gathered body in one place.

That’s a functional anti–local church movement; it denies Hebrews 10:25’s emphasis on assembling ourselves together in a way that implies embodied, mutual life.

6. Cults or sects that hollow out local church reality

Some groups keep the word “church” but gut the New Testament pattern:

• All authority centralized in a remote hierarchy or prophet
• Local “congregations” exist but are not true self-governing churches with biblical elders and discipline
• Belonging is to the organization, not to a real local body

This is a sort of “anti-local church” via replacement: the real locus of identity is the sect, not a concrete flock in a concrete place.

7. Anti-membership Evangelicalism

This one looks orthodox but behaves subtly anti-church:

• “We don’t do membership; just come as you are forever.”
• No clear sense of who is “inside” for discipline, or who is the flock for which elders must give account.
• People drift in and out, consume services, never actually bind themselves.

It doesn’t say “local church is bad,” but by denying any covenantal commitment or boundaries, it makes New Testament church order unworkable. That’s a soft anti-local-church movement dressed in evangelical clothing.

How to summarize all of this

Most anti–local church movements, formal or informal, share the same root:

They retain “Jesus,” maybe retain “the universal church,” but reject or relativize the concrete, accountable, structured local assembly that the New Testament actually regulates.

So if you’re answering someone, you can gently bring it back to:

• The Bible doesn’t only give us “Jesus + my inner life.”
• It gives us Jesus and elders, discipline, ordinances, gathered worship, a household, “them that are within,” and shepherds who will give account for particular souls.

Any movement—right, left, mystical, charismatic, minimalist—that says, “That stuff is optional” is, in effect, an anti–local church movement, whatever title it sticks on the door.

NAMES AND ORGANIZATIONS

There really aren’t many groups that come out and say, “We are officially against belonging to a local church.” That’s like starting a gym whose mission statement is, “We’re against exercise.”

What you actually see is:

• Authors/networks that encourage people to leave the “institutional church.”
• House / organic church networks that (rightly or wrongly) are used as exit ramps from ordinary congregations
• Loose online communities of the “done with church but not with God” crowd

I’ll map some of the better-known nodes, with the caveat: most of these claim they are actually doing church better, not abolishing it. Whether they really uphold New Testament local-church life is exactly the debate.

1. “Churchless”/“Dones”/“Revolutionaries.”

These are more sociological labels than denominations, but they come with real books and platforms.

George Barna’s “Revolution” and “Revolutionaries.”

Barna describes a band of “Revolutionaries” who are “abandoning the local church building” while trying to “become the church that Christ intended” without regular congregational life. (Amazon)

He’s not forming a denomination, but he does give theological cover to people who say, “I’m done with local church; I’ll assemble my own ‘robust faith experience’ from podcasts, small groups, causes, etc.”

The “churchless” category in Barna research

Barna has poured a lot of ink into “churchless Christians” and the “unchurched who still identify as Christian,” including the book Churchless: Understanding Today’s Unchurched and How to Connect with Them. (Barna Group)

Again: that’s a description, not a church – but it’s a whole ecosystem that normalizes the idea that being Christian without belonging to a congregation is a stable end-state, not an emergency.

The “Done with church but not with God” world

Sociologists Packard & Hope labeled a group “the Dones”: people “done with church but not their faith.” (Todd W. Ferguson, Ph.D.)

Around that, you now have blogs, podcasts, Facebook communities, etc., explicitly aimed at folks who want spirituality without ongoing congregational commitment.

None of those is “First Anti-Church Baptist of Nowhere,” but together they form the cultural anti-local-church movement.

2. “Leave the institutional church” writers and networks

Again, these folks usually insist they do believe in church – just not the historic, structured, pastor-and-flock thing.

Frank Viola & the “organic church”/“Pagan Christianity?” stream

In Pagan Christianity? Frank Viola and George Barna attack a huge chunk of historic church practice as “pagan,” and advocate for “organic church” – “a living, breathing, dynamic, mutually participatory, every-member-functioning, Christ-centered, communal expression of the body of Christ.” (Goodreads)

Follow-ups like Reimagining Church paint a picture of church “free of convention, formed by spiritual intimacy, and unbound by four walls.” (Life and Leadership)

Many readers use this as justification to leave any regular local congregation and join loose, fluid gatherings instead.

Neil Cole, Church Multiplication Associates, “Organic Church”

Neil Cole is a major catalyst in the organic/simple church movement and the founder of Church Multiplication Associates (CMA). (starlinginitiatives.com)

He explicitly promotes “organic church” as decentralized, rapidly multiplying, low-structure groups. Some of that is healthy critique; in practice, it often bleeds into suspicion of any ongoing structured local body.

Important nuance:

Viola and Cole don’t say, “Don’t belong to any church.” They say, “Rethink church so radically that most historic congregational forms are illegitimate.” Functionally, that lands a lot of people in a post-congregational wilderness, even if the authors themselves would say they’re pro-church.

3. Simple / house / “at home” church networks

These are not inherently anti-local church at all; in many cases they are local churches. But they consciously position themselves against “institutional church,” and people often use them as a way of exiting accountable congregational life.

Examples:

• Simple Church Global / Simple Church at Home – a “global network of house churches” gathering in homes for fellowship and relational Bible study. (simplechurchathome.com)
• SimpleChurches.ca – a network of house churches in the Vancouver area, inviting people to “join a simple church” or start one.
• Various denominational “simple church” initiatives (e.g., Foursquare and Adventist Simple Church networks) that intentionally move away from traditional congregational structures. (foursquare-org.s3.amazonaws.com)

Again: these networks explicitly do see themselves as churches. The “anti-local church” element creeps in when:

• There’s no meaningful eldership or discipline
• Participation is completely fluid, no covenantal belonging
• People are perpetually starting and leaving groups with zero accountability

Then “house church” becomes just a sanctified small group, not the New Testament “church of God which is at Corinth” sort of thing.

4. Online-only “church” and spiritual-but-not-religious communities

This is even less formalized:

• Countless YouTube, TikTok, Discord, and podcast “communities” where people explicitly say they’re replacing church with online content;
• “I’m spiritual but not religious / I love Jesus but not the church” groups and collectives, often highlighted in articles about “churchless Christians” or “post-Christian cities.” (Facebook)

These rarely incorporate as “organizations,” but they function as alternative homes for Christians who want out of local churches.

Why you won’t get a tidy list

So when you ask, “Give me all the organizations that stand for this,” here’s the honest reality:

• Very few ministries will say out loud, “We are opposed to belonging to a biblical local church.”
• The anti-local-church stance usually appears as:
  • “done with church but not God,”
  • “churchless Christian,”
  • “We are the church, so we don’t need churches.”
  • or “institutional churches are unbiblical; we just meet organically.”

If you’re writing as a theologian, it’s probably wiser to:

• Trace the ideas and texts (e.g., Barna’s Revolution, Viola’s Pagan Christianity?, the “Dones” literature, etc.),
• Describe the sociological patterns (churchless, deconstructed, spiritual-but-not-religious),
• And then show from the New Testament how those patterns short-circuit the actual commands about elders, discipline, gathered worship, and identifiable flocks.

You’re not up against one denomination called “The Anti-Local Church Organization.” You’re up against a cultural mood that says, “Jesus: yes. Concrete flock with shepherds and discipline: optional.” That’s a subtler and more pervasive foe.