Mega churches have replaced the Good News with a mission statement.
Here in Rockford, Illinois, a Rust Belt city well-acquainted with extraction and abandonment, that line isn’t satire. It’s an observation. You can’t drive across the east side without passing half a dozen colossal church buildings, their parking lots repaved more often than their theology. Inside, you’ll find stage lighting, fog machines, and sermons that sound suspiciously like quarterly business updates. If you drive west, over the Rock River, you’ll pass a dozen smaller sanctuaries. These are the old brick churches with crooked signage and overgrown hedges. The lights are off. The pews gather dust.
In my work as a therapist, I’ve sat with the shepherds of these flocks, who confess, quietly and often tearfully, that the Church is dying. Not changing. Dying. Some say it with a kind of weary relief, as if finally naming aloud what they’ve known for years, but didn’t have permission to speak. Others say it with resignation, their voices thin from holding up too much for too long. They speak of empty pews and aging congregations, of buildings they can no longer afford to heat, and the pressure to stay upbeat and innovate. Many of them have baptized, married, and buried three generations of the same families. What they grieve is not the loss of status or size, but the slow unraveling of something sacred, something that once held people together, and now struggles to hold at all. None of them say it flippantly because they’ve stayed, and love the flock, even as the pasture thins.
It reminds me of what’s happened to the land itself. This region was once a checkerboard of crop rotations and small farms that provided local goods and sustained families. Rockford made things that lasted. Spoken of now almost like mythology, this was the land of the monkey sock, the screw capital of the world, a manufacturing goliath built with many hands. It was a place of quarried limestone, used to build roads and homes with local stone and labor. Then the quarries closed. The factories shuttered. The fields gave way to monocrops, and the people were left to wander inside the skeleton of something that once provided. And now I see it happening again—this time in the sanctuary. Congregations are being mined for tithe, for clout, for spectacle. Rock bands and prosperity gospels work the crowd while the till stands open, not to offer, but to receive.
The Church has begun to mimic the economic logic of the industry that abandoned it. Build bigger. Consolidate. Extract. Move on. What follows isn’t meant to be a eulogy, exactly. It’s a reflection, maybe even a small lament. A slow walk around the ruins of Babel, with some help from Richard Rohr, Maslow, and a few thoughts from the therapy chair. There are still pockets of quiet faith out there. Faith with dirt under its fingernails, content to grow things instead of counting them. But it’s getting harder to hear that voice through the static. If the Tower of Babel was a warning label, we’ve peeled it off the pack and lit the match anyway.
As a therapist, I spend my days listening to people sift through the wreckage of their own lives. They are lives marked not just by trauma or loss, but by confusion. A kind of existential disorientation. They come in asking some of the same questions the builders must have asked when the mortar started to crumble: How did we get here? Why doesn’t anything feel solid anymore? Why doesn’t anyone understand me?
I used to think the Church could still be the place to hold those questions. Once upon a time, it was a vessel that held the complexity, the grief, the beauty, the doubt, and yes, the dogma too, but not as branding, and not as the product of a board meeting. But lately, it seems more interested in managing the brand. These days, the tower doesn’t just reach toward the heavens. It comes with WiFi and a gift shop. There’s a campus map in the foyer, a latte in your hand, and a QR code for online giving projected where the crucifix used to hang.
I’ve sat with pastors and priests in that same confusion, some who’ve grown sick from what they’re serving. “The church is dying,” they whisper. Sometimes they cry. Sometimes they laugh in a way that doesn’t feel right. They’re caught in the middle of an institution that once held the sacred, and now can’t hold much of anything. Certainly not silence. Certainly not a mystery. And in therapy, I see what happens when people have nowhere to put their anguish. It metastasizes into panic, into addiction, into rage. The Church, when it was at its best, offered not just answers, but a place to ask. Now, it too speaks in bullet points and marketing copy.
The builders of Babel wanted to make a name for themselves. I see the same instinct in my consulting inbox: churches asking how to grow their footprint, expand their “reach,” capture a younger demographic. They aren’t offering peace. They’re optimizing for engagement. And what gets built in the end is impressive. But like all “Babels,” it can’t bear the weight of the human soul.
It’s here that the voice of Richard Rohr begins to matter. A Franciscan priest and spiritual writer, Rohr has become a quietly subversive figure in modern Christianity. His work challenges the institutional Church, not with rebellion, but with depth. He critiques its obsession with purity over transformation, certainty over mystery, and control over grace. Though Catholic by vocation, Rohr’s appeal crosses denominations. He has found a massive following among mainline Protestants, evangelicals, and Catholics in spiritual transition, those no longer satisfied with black-and-white answers, but still drawn to the sacred. He writes of descent, paradox, and the long arc of inner change, offering something few religious institutions still know how to hold: permission to fall apart without being lost.
Rohr says we grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right, not as license, but as invitation. The descent doesn’t excuse sin, but neither does it condemn the sinner. It opens the door to the kind of grace that breaks us open and remakes us from the inside. That’s a hard sell in a church culture obsessed with excellence, relevance, and strategic growth initiatives. Failure doesn’t trend. Paradox doesn’t preach. And yet, every mystic worth reading tells us the same thing: the way up is down. Rohr calls it “falling upward.” The idea that transformation doesn’t come from climbing higher but from being stripped of the ladders entirely. We come to wisdom not through conquest, but through surrender. Through the wilderness. Through the kind of quiet that makes you question every illusion you once knew with certainty.
This doesn’t play well on stage. It’s not sexy. You can’t build a satellite campus around it.
But it’s real.
The spiritual desert has always been the crucible where illusions die. In therapy, I see that too. People come in looking for solutions, but what they really need is space. A place to fall apart without being judged or fixed. A place to let go of the performance and admit they’re scared, angry, tired, or lost. Rohr’s genius is that he gives theological permission for that unraveling. He speaks of a God found in the tension between opposites, in the unresolved spaces, in the compost heap of your failed certainties. Rohr doesn’t offer escape. He offers depth, like good soil, not poured concrete. Somewhere beneath that depth runs living water, though not always visible from the surface. And depth, like good soil, takes time and rot.
Contrast that with Babel. There, the goal was altitude, uniformity, and control. The builders didn’t want to know God; they wanted to reach Him. Skip the wilderness. Bypass the wandering. Get straight to heaven, no questions asked. And now? The tower’s been modernized. It has a podcast. You can tithe from your phone while stuck in traffic. The worship team has a brand. And somewhere in the fine print, if you squint past the LED lights and the PowerPoint slides, you might still find the Gospel. But it’s quiet now. It whispers beneath the noise, waiting for someone willing to descend.
In the therapy room, I hear the echoes. No one asks how to self-actualize. They ask why they feel numb, why the anxiety will not go away, why success does not satisfy, or why their relationships feel like transactions. They are not chasing the top of a pyramid. They are trying to understand what broke, and whether anything real can grow in its place. Still, Maslow’s hierarchy lingers on classroom posters, in HR manuals, as a model for a certain kind of growth. Food, safety, love, esteem, and then self-actualization: the “you” you were meant to be, fully realized once the boxes are checked. It sounds clean. Linear. Reasonable. But the soul does not work that way. Not in the wilderness. Not in Rockford. Not in the hollow places where the old certainties no longer hold.
Maslow charts a path of fulfillment that rises with each rung. But for many I see in therapy, and in the Church, the climb has stopped making sense. They need a path that doesn’t go higher, but deeper. Rohr offers that different ladder, one where the rungs aren’t built from achievement, but from descent. His path isn’t about becoming more of yourself, but becoming less attached to the self you thought you had to be. In his view, the second half of life doesn’t crown the ego; it cracks it open. Maslow points upward. Rohr points inward, then downward, into the muck. The difference is subtle but crucial. Maslow says: You’ve earned this. Rohr says: You’ve been undone, and now something deeper can begin.
In Rockford, that difference shows up in the space between pride and grief. This is a city that once made things, machine parts, fasteners, hard goods with weight and permanence. When that vanished, we didn’t evolve. We mourned, slowly and without permission. The prosperity gospel doesn’t play well here, except in places that pretend the grief never happened. The landscape remembers. It’s a patchwork of rusted factories, cracked sidewalks, and churches that were built to last but now echo with silence. Faith here has to grow low to the ground. It doesn’t rise like glass towers. It creeps through the broken concrete and clings to whatever light is left. It is not triumphant. It is tenacious.
In therapy, I often feel caught between the two ladders. Clients want to “fix” their lives. They’re not asking how to self-actualize. They’re trying to understand why the scaffolding they built their life on no longer holds. They come in chasing Maslow, but often find Rohr: the painful gift of being broken open. Of discovering that transformation isn’t about climbing higher, but surrendering to what they can no longer control. The Church used to know something about that. Before it became obsessed with branding and metrics and appearing successful, it offered something harder and holier. It didn’t hand out blueprints. It offered bread, wine, and silence. Now it offers sermon series with titles like “Level Up.”
Now, if you’ll all open your hymnals and turn to the section titled Lamentations for a Diminished Thing, we’ll begin.
VII. Hymn from the Hollowed Place
We walk inside a hollowed mine,
calling it a city.
The strength is gone,
but the echo stays
the sound of something once sturdy
collapsing quietly beneath the hymns.
The workers come,
the mothers come,
those who once built with hands and prayers.
Now they speak in scattered tongues:
therapy words,
diagnosis words,
verses with the marrow boiled out.
They say,
“I don’t know what I believe anymore,”
and Christ does not correct them.
He listens.
He stays.
He does not explain the silence.
He does not rebuild the tower.
He gathers what’s left,
kneels in the dust,
and calls it holy.
Let the hymn echo a moment longer.
* The sanctuary settles. An infant coos. A mother snaps her fingers through gritted teeth. Somewhere, a cough stumbles through the silence like an amen with no conviction. The air shifts, not quite reverent, not quite restless. *
And now, beloved, let us speak plainly of what’s become of Babel.
The Babel story was never just about language. It was about the illusion of unity: everyone speaking the same tongue, chasing the same goal, convinced that ambition itself was holy. It is easy to hear that same cadence today. In politics, in the media, even in ministry, everyone is talking. No one is listening. Each angle is convinced it is speaking sense while the other just refuses to understand. We have built towers of ideology, platforms of performance, and digital sanctuaries where clarity is promised but rarely delivered. The noise is constant, and underneath it all is something quieter, something heavier. Loneliness.
The digital age did not invent our disconnection, but it gave us new ways to perform it. We are more visible than ever, but harder to reach. We curate instead of converse. We present rather than participate. Even therapy reflects this shift. I have clients ask for strategies to “win” arguments with their spouse, or to navigate coworkers who believe all the wrong things. There is less interest in what lies beneath the tension, less curiosity about the grief behind the anger. Fewer people want to explore how we got so fractured in the first place. The goal is to be right, not to be known.
We see the pattern everywhere. Just east of Rockford, the Chrysler plant in Belvidere has been silent for two years. The workers were told it would reopen. Elected officials made promises. Speeches were given, photos taken, federal dollars pledged. But the doors remain closed. What used to provide has become a backdrop for performance. Communities like Belvidere and Rockford don’t need more visibility. They need something real to hold. And too often, they are handed slogans instead of support.
The Church once served as a counterweight to all this. It was an embodied community, stubbornly local, where you sat beside people you did not entirely like and still called them brother or sister. It held tension instead of amplifying it. Now, many churches have become political performance halls, leaning into culture wars, doubling down on certainty, and selecting congregants more for their alignment than their presence. The container that once held our contradictions has become another venue for tribal identity.
Like Babel, our institutions are still speaking. Loudly. But the language has become a kind of noise; a transactional, anxious, package of clarity, rarely offering connection. Rohr calls this the first half of life obsession: the need to define, divide, and defend. It is what happens when you mistake your ego for your soul. Institutions, whether churches or governments, begin to forget how to hold tension and instead start manufacturing enemies. And the cost is not only political. It is spiritual. The soul needs contradiction. It needs silence. It needs to know that not every confusion is a crisis. These are often the things forgotten in Babel’s shadow.
When I feel the noise rising, whether political, religious, or digital, I go outside. I dig. I plant. I try to listen for something older than all of this. There was a community garden I used to help tend near the west side of Rockford. It was not much. A few raised beds. A compost bin that leaned like an old man in the wind. But things grew there. Beans curled up a broken fence post. Tomatoes burst, sometimes too early, sometimes just in time. A neighbor once came by and said, “I didn’t think anything good could grow here.” I nodded. We stood in the dirt together for a long time and did not say much more.
In the therapy room, it is the same: people come in with what is left, hoping something can grow from it. And it can. But not quickly, not loudly, and not from certainty. Rohr speaks of the smallness required for transformation, the idea that to meet God, or truth, or peace, we usually have to come undone first. Not in the polished, Instagrammable way, but in the desert kind of way. The garden knows that too. Things must fall apart, decay, become unrecognizable. Only then can they feed something new. Rockford has taught me this. So has the Church, even in its decline. Even in the silence of those boarded-up sanctuaries. Maybe especially there.
Babel didn’t end with a curse. It ended with dispersion. With people being sent back to their places, their languages, their particular lives. The tower fell, but the story didn’t. It just stopped trying to reach heaven by force. I walk through my community, meditating on this as I pass shuttered buildings, familiar faces, and the quiet persistence of people who keep showing up. So many of them carry disappointment like an old coat they cannot quite throw away. The plant closed. The school consolidated. The church split. And still, they show up.
They coach Little League. They check on their neighbors. They bring casseroles when someone dies. What was scattered was not destroyed. It was returned. Replanted. The people here do not pretend it is all okay, but they keep showing up to what is theirs. The edge of our grief, it turns out, may also be the edge of new growth. Not in the tower, but in the ground. Not in the grand, but in the particular.
I keep a copy of Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things” on my office wall. Clients often pause at it, the way you might pause at a roadside chapel with a cracked door. It says more in a few lines than I can in a session:
When despair for the world grows in me…
I come into the peace of wild things…
Maybe the Church still can be that place—not the tower, but the field. Not the broadcast, but the quiet. Maybe faith, like the land, is most alive when it’s no longer being mined.
Image via GetArchive.
