A Rhizomatic Reformation: Rethinking Church for the Exvangelical Generation

Estimated Reading Time: 4-5 minutes

Church closures outpaced new church openings in America for the first time on record this year. About forty million Americans who used to go to church no longer do. Christian affiliation has dropped from ninety percent of the population to sixty-five percent over the past fifty years. That's the decline story, and it's real.

But it's only part of the picture. Barna's 2025 research found Gen Z churchgoers now attend more often than any other living generation, close to two Sundays a month. Gallup found rising attendance and rising religious interest specifically among young men. PRRI found the opposite happening among young women, who are leaving faster than any group they track, opening the widest gender gap in church attendance Barna has recorded in twenty-five years.

Then there's the exvangelical movement: the memoirs, the deconstruction accounts on TikTok, the hashtag #churchhurt, a wave of women in particular naming spiritual abuse, purity culture, and a church tangled up in partisan politics as their reasons for leaving. More than one religion reporter covering this exodus has reached for a specific word to describe it: Reformation. A rejection of Christianity built around power, with no clear picture yet of what comes next.

I want to take that word seriously. Growth in one place, collapse in another, revival among young men, exodus among young women. None of it fits on a single line on a graph, going up or down. I don't think it's supposed to. We keep trying to read this moment with a grammar built for straight lines and simple verdicts. The moment itself won't sit still for that. That's not just a data problem. It's a question about what shape we even think church is supposed to have.

I've been spending time in the book of Acts lately and the past 8 years, reading the early church less as an institution still finding its final form and more as something the philosopher Gilles Deleuze had a word for: a rhizome. Think of ginger root, or crabgrass, spreading underground with no central trunk, sending up new shoots wherever conditions are right. Deleuze's own definition is simple enough to hold onto: any point in a rhizome can be connected to any other point and must be.

Most of the ways we argue about church, conservative or progressive, come from the same source: a hierarchical, either/or way of picturing structure that we rarely notice we're using. We picture “church” as a tree, with one trunk everything else has to answer to. Practical theologian Geoff Holsclaw has made the point well: because we already live in a connected, global world, we're already living inside rhizomatic processes whether we've named them or not, and ecclesiology especially needs a new way of thinking about itself. I think he's right, and I think Acts already knew it.

We argue about whether a church is too big or too small, as if size were the thing that mattered theologically. We swing between the megachurch with its polished worship, what a friend calls “the Jesus show,” and the house church that quietly comes apart under the weight of its own ordinariness. Both are still trees. One just has a bigger trunk.

What almost never comes up is the question Deleuze and his co-author Félix Guattari actually cared about: not size, but reach. The lines a movement travels along, where it disconnects, where it reconnects, whether it keeps going. A rhizome doesn't ask whether it's big enough or small enough. It asks whether it's still connecting to something.

What Is a Rhizome Church?

I use the term “rhizome church” for a network that keeps going and growing, connecting and disconnecting, moving into new territory and out of old territory, in Deleuze's language. It's incarnational in the fullest sense, letting the presence of Christ take root in whatever relational soil it lands in, rather than requiring everyone everywhere to replicate the same slate of “Christian” activities to count as real church. “Where two or three are gathered together” starts to sound different read this way: not a consolation prize for people who can't manage a real church, but the actual building block the whole network runs on.

A rhizome church doesn't need a flagship campus to be legitimate, and it doesn't need to survive alone in someone's living room to be legitimate either. What it needs is live connection, to Christ, to other parts of the network, to the culture it's taking root in. Cut off one part and the rhizome doesn't die. It sends up a shoot somewhere else.

Read Acts looking for an org chart and you won't find one. Read it looking for a rhizome instead, and the missing org chart starts to look less like an oversight and more like the point.

At Pentecost, the Spirit doesn't hand the church one shared language to unify around. It produces the opposite: people from a dozen nations hearing in their own tongue, no linguistic center imposed from the top. When persecution scatters the Jerusalem believers into Judea and Samaria in Acts 8, the church doesn't merely survive being broken apart. It spreads because it was broken apart, the way seed spreads when it's sown. Peter's vision and his visit to Cornelius's household in Acts 10 strip away the purity categories that had defined who counted as “in,” and the gospel takes root in a Gentile household on that household's own terms. And when real conflict follows in Acts 15 over what Gentile believers have to adopt to belong, the answer isn't one uniform practice forced on every group. It's a minimal, negotiated center that leaves room for real difference to continue. A tree can't do that. A rhizome can, because it was never built around uniformity to begin with.

Nearly every grievance behind the exvangelical exodus is, underneath it, a complaint about the tree: power collecting at a single trunk and getting enforced downward. Celebrity pastors whose failures took whole congregations down with them. Purity culture handed out as one script for everybody. Faith fused so tightly to a political party that leaving the politics has meant leaving the church too. A rhizome church can't be captured by a single political machine, because it has no one trunk for the machine to grab hold of.

Gen Z's data fits this better than either the “revival” headline or the “decline” headline on its own. The generation most at home in fragmented digital life is also the generation craving in-person, embodied gathering the most, while being the most willing to walk away from institutions that feel performative or coercive. That's not a contradiction. It's a rhizome-shaped generation looking for rhizome-shaped soil and mostly finding tree-shaped institutions instead. Where it finds something closer to a rhizome, a small, honest, locally rooted gathering of “two or three,” it tends to stay.

Gen Alpha inherits this landscape before they've made a single choice about it. They'll grow up assuming fragmentation and networked belonging the way earlier generations assumed institutional stability. A church that can only offer them a trunk to climb, or nothing at all, won't register as an option worth considering. A church that can offer them a living network they can enter at any point, leave and return to without shame, and root into their own relational world, has a real shot.

If this moment is going to become church, and not just an ex-church diaspora, it will need an ecclesiology that can hold what's happening instead of forcing it back into a shape it's already outgrown. That means asking less often whether a church is big enough or small enough, and asking instead whether it's still connecting to Christ, to its own context, to other parts of the network it can learn from.

The early church never had a trunk. It had roots running underground, connections that could reach any other point, and shoots coming up in unplanned places right when it looked, from above, like the whole thing was being destroyed. If American Christianity really is entering something like a second Reformation, that might be the most useful picture we have for it: not a tree waiting to be pruned back to health, but a rhizome that was never meant to have only one trunk to begin with.