Shenandoah sophomore Ava O'Rourke shows off her trademark end-of-race smile Tuesday, Aug. 25, coming home in seventh place at the Shenandoah Early Bird meet. O'Rourke led the Mustangs to a fourth-place team finish.
Shenandoah sophomore Ava O'Rourke shows off her trademark end-of-race smile Tuesday, Aug. 25, coming home in seventh place at the Shenandoah Early Bird meet. O'Rourke led the Mustangs to a fourth-place team finish.
Jillian Dammann, the 2026 Page County Fair queen, poses for a photo with fair board members Chanda Sunderman, Megan Steeve and Tony Shackelford.
Jillian Dammann, the 2026 Page County Fair queen, poses for a photo with fair board members Chanda Sunderman, Megan Steeve and Tony Shackelford.
One at a time, Pastor Steve Struecker and members of his northwest Iowa church remove sacred items from the Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church during a service marking its closure nearly 150 years after opening.
First, they carry out the font where the town's children had been baptized for decades. Then the lectern, followed by the altar’s missal, candles, communion cup and cross.
Lastly, the church itself is shuttered.
“We remember with gratitude to God all the blessings he has given to us and those before us,” Struecker tells congregants as they say their final goodbye to the church.
Zion and its sister, Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran in nearby Livermore, are among dozens of churches closing across Iowa, unable to sustain themselves as congregations shrink, pastors become harder to find and financial support dwindles.
Zion President Dave Hanselman said he didn't want the beloved church to be bought and "forgotten about," becoming a vandalized nuisance for the small, struggling town.
"What's happened to us happened to the whole town," he said. "We're not able to support ourself any longer."
David Hanselman stands for a photo at Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church in Lu Verne, July 30, 2026.
From 2010 to 2020, 285 churches closed in Iowa, a 6% decline. Across the same period, the number of Iowans who consider themselves church members fell by 211,000, a decline of 13%, according to the U.S. Religion Census, conducted by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies.
Those losses came at the same time Iowa's, increasingly urban, population grew 4.7% to 3.2 million people.
Hanselman said the congregation hung on for as long as possible. Struecker had decided to retire, and it was unlikely those who remained would be able to attract another pastor, he said.
“Our numbers just kept declining and declining,” as did the church's financial support, said Hanselman. The congregation also faced overwhelming costs to replace Zion's asbestos-filled roof and make other repairs. “And we weren’t picking up any young families with kids. ... It’s just what’s happening in small towns.”
Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church in Lu Verne, July 30, 2026.
It’s not only rural Iowa seeing such losses. Only three Iowa counties — Dallas, Adams and Keokuk — added church members over the last decade, the religion census shows.
Pottawattamie County saw a 14.2% reduction in church membership after a decade, according to religion census data compiled by the Des Moines Register. In 2010, there were 118 congregations with 36,210 total members in the county. In 2020, that had dropped to 110 congregations with 31,084 members.
Zion will be demolished. Immanuel's building could be sold to a local business. But many others, like the former Loucks Grove Church in Adair County, which closed in 1999, join empty schools, businesses and homes as abandoned reminders of the state's dying rural communities.
In addition to the demographics, churches are struggling with divisions around social and political issues. The United Methodist Church in Iowa, for example, has lost dozens of congregations in disagreements over LGBTQ rights and same-sex marriage.
The trend has broad implications for Iowa. Places of worship are critical to a state’s social, civic and political fabric, experts say: They're polling places, food banks and blood drive locations. They're also where friends offer counsel and emotional support and young and old, liberals and conservatives, mingle.
Also, with state and federal governments pulling back the social safety net, there are fewer churches, especially in rural areas, to provide a second line of support.
Ryan Burge, a political science professor of practice at Washington University in St. Louis whose research focuses on the impact of religion on American life, sees the decline hitting in rural Iowa hardest, since access to good jobs and child and health care and other services already is limited.
When he was growing up in northwest Iowa, said 72-year-old Hanselman, Lu Verne had three grocery stores, a hardware store, plumbers, electricians and other small businesses.
Life every Sunday was centered around church, bringing together aunts, uncles, cousins and neighbors.
Now, most of the businesses are gone. So, too, are many of the residents who belonged to Zion, with generations moving to larger towns to find jobs.
Lu Verne's population has dropped about 40% since 1980 to 260 people.
Now "people come and go," Hanselman said. "They move in, they move out. ... They don't really become part of our community."
Zion and Immanuel struggled to find a new generation of leaders, said Struecker, the churches' pastor. And while they were willing to carry on, longtime church elders were exhausted. "We could see the time to close had come," said Struecker, who farms near West Bend and began training to become a pastor at 50.
Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church in Lu Verne, July 30, 2026.
Iowa's mainstream churches have seen the largest drops in membership: Methodist, Lutheran and other Protestant denominations have fallen about 30%; evangelicals, 12%; and Catholics, 8%, the religion census shows.
Likely propelled by immigration, a small category called "other religions," which include Hinduism and Buddhism, spiked 59%, and Orthodox Christians climbed 44%.
The Catholic Archdiocese of Dubuque is now merging parishes and closing some churches, as have other Iowa dioceses in recent years, citing declining membership, fewer baptisms and aging priests. Those trends also have hit the United Methodist Church, which, separate from its disagreements over LGBTQ issues, voted in June to close 11 churches in Iowa.
Over time, Zion's members dwindled to about a dozen, Hanselman said. Still, the decision to close the church was hard. It's where generations of families were baptized, confirmed, married and buried.
“It’s going to hurt in really tangible ways, and we’re not going to realize it until it’s too late,” said Burge, who sees Iowa and the nation losing hundreds more churches in the years ahead.
"There was a lot of history in that old church for me," Hanselman said. "Now it's over."
Demographics are against rural states like Iowa that lag behind the U.S. population growth rate of 7.4%, said Burge, the Washington University professor.
"The fastest-growing churches in America have one commonality — they're in a place of population growth," he said.
Churches also struggle as a growing number of people decline to formally affiliate with any religion, identified in demographic data as "nones." And the chance of attracting those people is low, Burge said. "Eighty-five percent of people who grew up without religion still have no religion as adults."
Pastor Steve Struecker leads a service at Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church in Livermore. Faced with declining membership, Immanuel, along with a sister church, Zion Evangelical in Lu Verne, closed this summer, one of dozens of churches that have shuttered over the past decade.
Even 49% of people who who identify with a particular religion say they seldom if ever go to services, according to a Pew Research Center survey in 2025.
Iowa "nones" climbed to 26% of the population in 2025 from 21% in 2013, said Robert Jones, founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that researches the intersection of religion, culture and public policy.
That change tracks the national trend. Americans with no church affiliation make up 28% of the population, up from 21% in 2013, according to PRRI's American Values Atlas.
"We see young people, 30 and younger, leaving churches," Jones said. "A lot of it is around the politics of sexuality," with about 70% of young Americans supporting marriage equality.
In Iowa, 58% of residents support same-sex marriage, compared to 65% nationally, according to PRRI's survey.
"Churches have staked out a position that's very different... and that's created a lot of tension," Jones said. "When we ask young people why they've left, more than a third say... it's because of the negative teachings about LGBTQ people."
The opposite also is true: Members have left some mainline Protestant churches because they feel they've become "too liberal in their approach to same-sex marriage" or other social issues, he said.
Jones said it feels like America is becoming more conservative about social issues. But white evangelical Christians, whose views on those topics have gained increased prominence through their support of President Donald Trump, also are experiencing decline.
Iowa members of evangelical congregations shrank to 20% of the population in 2025 from 23% in 2013, PRRI's data shows; and nationally, membership fell to 13% from 17%.
The result of the 2024 elections, which returned Trump to the White House and gave Republicans full control of Congress, is "moving the country further to the right than it actually is," Jones said. He pointed, as an example, to data showing 6 in 10 Americans support providing immigrants in the country illegally a path to citizenship, in contrast to the GOP's advocacy for their deportation.
The interior of the abandoned Loucks Grove Church north of Greenfield in rural Adair County.
In Lu Verne, Carter Nath and his wife, Caley, are still looking for a new church.
Nath, a Kossuth County supervisor who farms and runs a business tuning and repairing pianos, had been a member of Zion for about five years but served as the church's organist and pianist for nearly a decade.
His connection to the church ran deep, with an ancestor among the group that founded it in 1880. Along with providing music for services, Nath, 28, helped lead Bible studies, served as treasurer and helped with the church's Christ Kids Club, which brought as many as 35 children to Zion every Wednesday.
He met his wife at Zion and proposed to her there.
Nath and his wife are taking their time in finding a new church home, worshipping in Algona, Humboldt and elsewhere. But it won't be like going to church with people in your community, he said.
"It goes beyond knowing everybody's name," he said. "They're part of your everyday life. ... There's a sense of community, coming together and praying together."
And while Nath and others will likely find a new spiritual home, both he and Struecker, the former Zion and Immanuel pastor, worry about elderly members who are unable to drive to — or unwilling to join — a new church.
One elderly member who resisted going to another church often asked Struecker to keep Immanuel open. "She didn't want to go anywhere else," he said. Her husband's funeral was held at Immanuel, and she wanted hers there, too.
The woman, Audrey Rutz, died in May and her funeral was Immanuel's last.
"She wanted it to be me" who led the service, Struecker said. "I was the church's shepherd."
