In the past week two things have happened that have made me ponder the relationship between those two things.  About a week ago I visited a rural funeral home that for years had done a very high majority of traditional funeral services that included embalming, visitation, casketed remains, a burial vault sale, and all the professional services a mortuary could provide.  When I visited with a couple of the funeral directors in their offices I noticed a white board with the current death calls on the board.  Behind the names of about half of them it said, “DCNS”.

I asked what “DCNS” meant.  Pretty matter of fact I was told, “Direct Cremation, No Service”.

The second thing I noticed last week was the front page feature article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune (the largest circulation newspaper in Minnesota) Sunday’s edition.  It was entitled, “Fastest Growing Religion is None”.  The article went on to describe the drop in religious affiliation among Minnesotans and, maybe more importantly, how that number grows with youthful ages.  You can read the article here.

The newspaper article shows that the younger you are, the less you are inclined to be part of organized religion.  Their poll goes from 11% of the Silent Generation (born from 1928-1945) who are not part of organized religion to the Younger Millennials (1990-1996) who disregard organized religion at a 36% clip.  Outside of that empirical data the rest of my hypothesis on this page is just my anecdotal thoughts.

First of all, I really believe strongly in the power of some type of memorial that allows people to grieve.  I’ve not done death removals for over five years, but did do over 30 years of being the first call for families.  One of the first questions that I asked at the place of death was what church the family belonged to and I would offer to call the officials from that church to come in for the arrangement conference.

Getting that answer on a church affiliation – and even if it was from a family that only used the church for baptisms, confirmations, weddings, and funerals – put the seed in their mind that that was the proper spot for Grandpa’s services – and gave them an easy idea for the officiant/leader of the service.  I did not do this for any business or moral reason.  I offered this service just for the practicality of getting the process going.  It just made sense — and membership in a church gave the family the sense of belonging and opportunity.  Whether it was for a funeral service or a memorial service, place is important — and church going family members had a sense of place.

So, seeing these two things last week has made me wonder — what is the correlation between church membership and no services for the deceased?  With no membership in a church, the family has no easy decision as to where and who.  A funeral chapel could be the where, but what about the who?

Maybe a lot of these non-church going families have no idea about the who.  Yes, it could be a funeral celebrant suggested by the funeral home or a family friend, but maybe it is just as easy for the family to say, “We don’t want services” when they really mean “We don’t know who would do the services”.

I don’t have the answers — I’ve only got questions.  but if you look at the statistics of the people dying and 11% of them are unchurched and we have the number of DCNS that we have now, just think in the future when we have a population that is dying that has a 36% or higher number of non-churched people.  What might the death care industry look like at that time?

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