The following are excerpts from an interview by The Door with Mike Regele, author of Death of the Church.  Mike is also the founder of the demographics company, Percept.

DOOR: What's causing the death?

REGELE: First of all, we're in a time of tremendous change and it's change itself that's causing a lot of this to occur. We're in this time of transformation, where our economic structures, our intellectual structures, everything is shifting. We hear a lot about moving from an industrial age to an information age, for example.  Moving from modernism to post modernity. Those kinds of things. Those by analogy are only understood as the kind of forces that changed from the monolithic, the position the Roman Catholic Church held in Europe, to the Protestant Reformation, the Renaissance, and ultimately, the Enlightenment. It's that level of change. The fundamental restructuring of society and the way it relates to itself.

But what we're experiencing is something very different from what most human beings have ever experienced. Change has never come this quickly. Basically, the church is caught in a paradigm shift from the modern to the post modern world. The weight of tradition which we've had going for us for 2,000 years is gone. In the past, people subscribed to a tradition because in a pre‑modern world there were no other options. If you were born into European civilization after Constantine there was no question that you were Christian. And if you were out on the edge of the empire, you were either converting or losing your head.

Well in the post modern world, the choice thing has been completely existential, so that, ultimately, I am a consumer for what I'm going to believe to be real. And the problem for the church is that it's not used to operating in an environment like that ‑ kind of a free‑market environment, where it has to go out into the market place of ideas and try and tell its story.

Look in your average Presbyterian Church. In the back on Sunday morning, look out over the congregation. What color do you see? Gray.

And if you turn around in the front, it's white - Anglo. That is our reality. And the only group worse is the Methodists. We have a phenomenal generational disconnect. We have a racial/ethnic disconnect.

We've been talking about inclusivism now for a long time. But we're less inclusive now than we've ever been. We are woefully under-represented by all racial ethnic groups other than Anglos.

We're also having a generational disconnect in that we talk about three adult generations what we call the builders, or the GI generation that fought in World War II, or the silents or the generation that wasn't quite old enough to get to fight in World War II, but went into middle management; as well as the boomers. There's a tremendous disconnect between the boomers and the traditional mainline Protestant denominations- they just aren't there. And if we've disconnected from these younger generations, and we're not doing the job connecting with these generations, then you're not going to be around. It's not terribly hard to figure out.

DOOR: This is all the way across the Christian spectrum?

REGELE: Yes. Although certain traditions are having more trouble with it than others. The biggest problems are with the historic, mainline traditions. So that would be all the Presbyterian denominations, the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church (although the Episcopal Church is doing better than most), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Missouri Synod Lutheran. The Roman Catholic Church is actually doing a little better with the younger generations. I don't know why, but their numbers aren't quite as bad.