I was their church consultant in 2003. The church’s peak attendance was 750 in 1975. By the time I got there the attendance had fallen to an average of 83. The large sanctuary seemed to swallow the relatively small crowd on Sunday morning.
The reality was that most of the members did not want me there. They were not about to pay a consultant to tell them what was wrong with their church. Only when a benevolent member offered to foot my entire bill did the congregation grudgingly agree to retain me.
I worked with the church for three weeks. The problems were obvious; the solutions were difficult.
On my last day, the benefactor walked me to my rental car. “What do you think, Thom?” he asked. He could see the uncertainty in my expression, so he clarified. “How long can our church survive?” I paused for a moment, and then offered the bad news. “I believe the church will close its doors in five years.”
I was wrong. The church closed just a few weeks ago. Like many dying churches, it held on to life tenaciously. This church lasted ten years after my terminal diagnosis.
My friend from the church called to tell me the news. I took no pleasure in discovering that not only was my diagnosis correct, I had mostly gotten right all the signs of the impending death of the church. Together my friend and I reviewed the past ten years. I think we were able to piece together a fairly accurate autopsy. Here are eleven things I learned.
- The church refused to look like the community. The community began a transition toward a lower socioeconomic class thirty years ago, but the church members had no desire to reach the new residents. The congregation thus became an island of middle-class members in a sea of lower-class residents.
- The church had no community-focused ministries. This part of the autopsy may seem to be stating the obvious, but I wanted to be certain. My friend affirmed my suspicions. There was no attempt to reach the community.
- Members became more focused on memorials. Do not hear my statement as a criticism of memorials. Indeed, I recently funded a memorial in memory of my late grandson. The memorials at the church were chairs, tables, rooms, and other places where a neat plaque could be placed. The point is that the memorials became an obsession at the church. More and more emphasis was placed on the past.
- The percentage of the budget for members’ needs kept increasing. At the church’s death, the percentage was over 98 percent.
- There were no evangelistic emphases. When a church loses its passion to reach the lost, the congregation begins to die.
- The members had more and more arguments about what they wanted. As the church continued to decline toward death, the inward focus of the members turned caustic. Arguments were more frequent; business meetings became more acrimonious.
- With few exceptions, pastoral tenure grew shorter and shorter. The church had seven pastors in its final ten years. The last three pastors were bi-vocational. All of the seven pastors left discouraged.
- The church rarely prayed together. In its last eight years, the only time of corporate prayer was a three-minute period in the Sunday worship service. Prayers were always limited to members, their friends and families, and their physical needs.
- The church had no clarity as to why it existed. There was no vision, no mission, and no purpose.
- The members idolized another era. All of the active members were over the age of 67 the last six years of the church. And they all remembered fondly, to the point of idolatry, was the era of the 1970s. They saw their future to be returning to the past.
- The facilities continued to deteriorate. It wasn’t really a financial issue. Instead, the members failed to see the continuous deterioration of the church building. Simple stated, they no longer had “outsider eyes.”
Though this story is bleak and discouraging, we must learn from such examples. As many as 100,000 churches in America could be dying. Their time is short, perhaps less than ten years.
What do you think of the autopsy on this church? What can we do to reverse these trends?
Posted on April 24, 2013
With nearly 40 years of ministry experience, Thom Rainer has spent a lifetime committed to the growth and health of local churches across North America.
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473 Comments
maybe churches are dying because the bronze age superstitions they are based on are no longer as relevant in modern society. the evangelicals tend to be more vibrant because people are naturally prone to be sucked into emotion laden relationships in a society that is more and more detached from each other, adopting the beliefs of the leader. christianity will go the way of mithraism, paganism and in a thousand years jesus will be listed with zeus, thor and neptune in a book of ancient myths.
Thank you Thom . . . Possibly it was you who said that the sadest day in the life of most churches is their 40th birthday. Like people, churches become more comfortable around 40, inwardly forcused, taking fewer risks, losing energy and lumbering toward the finish line. You may very be a prophet with your prediction of 100,000 dying churches in the US. A Spirit empowered Planting Movement is the brightest hope for God’s Kingdom in North America.
Considering that the churches I have most recently been a member of are 150, 102, and 149 years old, I don’t see age of the parish /community/ to be a factor. The 150y/o parish died in all but name, surviving because another parish (which had broken off from it in the ’60s) chose to merge with it and sell their building instead; the 102y/o parish is struggling but not actually dying yet; and the 149y/o parish is doing pretty well having a couple of adult baptisms a year and a slew of babies, a very wide range of cultural, socioeconomic, and racial backgrounds (there is no majority race at the parish at all, whites only making the plurality by a few %age points).
I think that parishes go through many phases in their lives, like any group does, and getting through some of the early stages’ struggles without direction can kill the group’s momentum, and even kill the group outright. Given the two-fold issues of the movements in the secular world which pose serious challenges to our traditional ideas of our place in the structure of society *and* the serious changes that the Spirit has been working in the universal church over the last 20-40 years, some of those phases’s struggles can become explosive, implosive, or apathy-inducing.
I agree that church planting is a vital tool for us, but we must have more than the courage to found new churches – we have to have the courage and co-creativity to re-discover what “church” looks like in the first place, while somehow not loosing the vitality of our spiritual ancestors given to us through traditions and ancient wisdom.
Thom, thanks for the article. It hurts, but it’s on point. This was suggested reading from one of our ex-priests. The sheep attacked him viciously and ran him off. He’s now growing wonderfully as a junior priest at a larger, older church Our church has been wracked over the years, but we have a faithful remnant that is slowly growing. Please share my contact information with Larry.
Larry, our Diocese is looking for a church planter. We are trying to stay faithful to Scripture and out Anglican traditions.
Please contact me. I am a layman, but an active layman. I serve as Junior Warden (physical plant, etc.) and a vestryman. If we can find some common ground, I’ll introduce you online to some people. I’m a layman, but I have the ear of several priests and both our Bishops.
Thank you.
Dan Frain
Powerful and completely on point. I am reminded of two congregations here in Atlanta, both of which “died” in different ways primarily because of an inward focus and failure to minister to the needs of the community/neighborhood where they were physically located.
One was Moreland Avenue Baptist Church located in the neighborhood where I grew up. Their campus was an entire city block and included child care facilities, a gymnasium, educational buildings as well as the church. As the area changed both economically and racially, the congregation shrank, never reaching out to those who lived on its doorstep in its in-town very residential neighborhood. (This was the church where my high school baccalaureate service was held in 1967. They started what I guess was a “sister” congregation further out in the suburbs carrying the name of Moreland Springs Baptist Church. Eventually the main campus was sold to the congregation of First Iconium Baptist Church where the Rev’d Timothy McDonald is the senior pastor. As best I can tell, it is doing fine. Within the last year I saw an announcement in the newspaper that the final service for the sister congregation would be held.
The other congregation “died” in a different way. It was First Baptist Church of Atlanta. Up until less than a decade ago, it was located on a beautiful block setting with the traditional white columned front of the church facing Peachtree Street. It was (and still is as far as I know) a very large congregation. They had owned much commercial property in the neighborhood known as Midtown. As with Moreland, the demographics began to change. This time it was racially, economically (upward and downward), age, sexual orientation, and the increasing category of “spiritual but not religious.” First Baptist never reached out to the neighborhood as it changed. Every Sunday it was clear that the place opened up for services and then closed back down for the rest of the week. For a while it appeared that Wednesday night programming was taking place, but that seemed to also end. Area churches worked together to create a homeless shelter for women and children. They contributed to the renovation of one of the First Baptist buildings and opened. The first ripple in the waters of service came when the church asked that those using the shelter enter from the rear of the property, thus keeping them out of the sight of most congregants. Then apparently out of the blue, they shut down the shelter, never reimbursing the congregations who helped start it.
They already owned a huge tract of land on the northern suburban side of the city, having purchased the old Avon Cosmetics property. Regular services were happening in both locations. Migration had already begun.
Eventually they left the Peachtree Street property altogether and sold it to what was then Bell South. The saddest part of this was that few even knew they had gone and fewer missed them. They had not been part of the neighborhood where they were located for years. Some might call this scenario a movement to further their mission. I see it as just another form of death due to most of the reasons Dr. Rainer mentions, except of course financial.
The death was not necessary. The Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian and Episcopal Churches that serve the same area are all thriving and seem to be growing. They also serve where they have been planted. I have to wonder when we will come to understand that The Great Commission directed us to all of God’s children, not just those most like us or even those we like. So sad and so unnecessary.
Bruce
The story of First Baptist Atlanta is told by Andy Stanley in the first and second chapter (I think) of his awesome book “Deep and Wide.” That book is the story of how the north campusof FBA became Northpoint, arguably one of the healthiest churches in North America. While I am not sure if FBA has died (they are certainly still classified as a megachurch), it is significant that people believe it is inactive in its community. I think this is a unique consequence of growth, which another church I have seen has also faced. As a church grows larger geographically, it becomes increasingly easy to just ignore the immediate community, to their long term peril.
That’s so sad to hear. But it made me to think …not even one faithful ? who could say here I am , for my sake don’t close the Church.
I can recall similar situation happened with me…frustrated and wanted to leave ..One old Sister in age not actually requested but with force told me to stay back….and challenged me with my own statement for I used to announce from the pulpit that ” I would stay back and not leave the congregation even if one faithful Soul is to be found….and I had to stay back and suffer hardship but I did not mind, just satisfaction for keeping my word, later it proved to be fruitful for her own family joined and later more were added and later the congregation grew and with leadership training could look after it’s own affairs. I think somebody even if it is only one should take a stand not towards closure…..it will work..for God is with the faithfuls…prayerfully
My church is being umbrella-ed by a more successful church. Since my church is dying, another church has agreed to take it over and run it for us, we just need to accept the changes they plan to make and that is hard for many members.
Mary
Mary,
That’s an interesting concept, and I’d love to know more.
How far are you into this process, and how did your congregation come to the decision to either ask for this help or to accept the other parish’s unsolicited offer? Did the congregation (or its leadership) understand how much change might be entailed by taking this action? Are members of the other church transplanting themselves into your congregation’s population, or is this mostly a “leadership” approach? What kind of denominational structures are you part of?
I’m really interested in the ways that thriving churches might be able to help the Spirit to spread into ones that have gotten discouraged or lost in a rapidly changing secular and religious world.
Thank you!
~Warren
I totally agree with your analysis! For 4 of the past 5 years I pastored a church that had all 11 of these characteristics. Before we came the last thing I asked the peple was, “Are you willing to Change to grow”, their comment was “Yes, we want to reach the younger generation” The first year we took it slow, the 2nd year we put our plan in to place , remodeled the outdated auditorium, repaired the huge gaps in the parking lot, replace a large portion of the roof, pulled pews out and added chairs, updated the sound system and added a projector…then the trouble started. “Things just arn’t the same as they have always been”. They were right we started growing their death grip was waining. I cancelled Sunday nights because the majority weren’t coming and it was dead. It hit the fan. They called a “roast the pastor meeting” and they did. We saw more people saved in the last year I was there, than they had ever seen. To shorten this, after fighting with them over every change we felt God was leading us to make, we were exhausted and resigned. God has since called me to plant a church and we have started with 1 lady and today we are averaging 30 in our home. We will launch in September 2013, and the Spirit is so sweet with our people. We drive by “that” church every day, and it’s business as usual. Their club is dying, and in 5-10 years I predict they will be gone too. My values were reaching the lost and disciplining them, there’s were meeting the needs of their family.
My denomination was determined to fill such a church, they lied to me, fresh out of seminary. I ran into opposition on every front. Call the denominational leadership, received zero support, only advise was to love the people. 28 months later, they called the same leadership voted to dismiss me. They lied about that too, they did not get the vote count they needed even with stacking the deck. The denominational leadership demanded anger management counseling. Was I angry, by that time, maybe. But I was more hurt that they were more concerned with filling an opening then maturing me in ministry.
Your last sentence really hit home. I think leadership didn’t expect much from struggling churches, and had no idea how to advise me, or use my particular abilities.
With an average age of 42, vastly lower than many mainline churches, this short video shows one church that answers the question, “Why men hate going to church?”, and the results, Awesome!!! http://vimeopro.com/churchformen/church-for-men