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
As person who is going into the ministry in the near future I’m wondering what a newcomers priorities should be considering I will most likely be starting in a smaller church. Part of the reasons these dying churches last as long as they do is there is always someone else willing to come in and preach but do little else. I don’t want to be a part of prolonging the problem but if there is an opportunity to get a church off the deathbed and onto the road to recovery where do you start? What have you got on immediate care treatment?
Ryan,
Great question. I wondered the same things myself, for almost the exact same reasons. I hope you get a response from someone with a lot more experience than we have.
DK
Ryan –
See if my posts of April 27 and May 1 answer some of your questions. Thanks.
This breaks my heart. I see 8 of those 11 points going on in my church RIGHT NOW. The problem is, the leadership of the church, including the pastor, thinks everything is just fine…except for finances of course. That’s their only focus…having enough money to just keep doing what they’re doing. They’re not looking upward or outward, only inward. So discouraging…
I see two big problems in the church. The first one I see is that most Christians see the church as a place only for worship, and it is mostly for the sinners to come and get to know Christ and the new Christians to get to know Him better. I see so many older Christians that complain I did not get anything out of the service today. You should be there first and foremost to serve and worship God, and if you do that God will bless you. The second problem is that when we do what Christ called us to do and reach the lost and bring them to salvation that is all we do. What happened to discipleship. We lead them to Christ and then we leave them to get slaughtered by satan’s attacks because that is when he attacks the worse, when he knows he is losing a soul. Then we lose the new saved soul back to the world because they were not showed how to look to the Word and to God for strength and His fight.
Thom,
As a former Director of Music for several “dying” churches, I offer the following comments. The “mission” of the church is to build highways AWAY from the building and into the community. Christ set the example of traveling “to the people”. Having eyes focused outward on the needs of others gives one the opportunity to actually DO SOMETHING….to be the hands and feet of Christ! In my experience, parisioners wait at the door to greet newcomers to see what they can do for THEM. And, let’s be honest here, hasn’t the church like everything else, turned their focus towards MONEY! Not what they can give to others, after all, they meet their monthly apportionment to missions, but what they can GET from others to maintain the rising costs of their church building and staff. I truly believe that the message of Christ had nothing whatsoever to do with buildings, pastors, choirs, etc. The message of Christ was to love one another and to do unto the least of these! People who aren’t coming to the doors of a church are not LOST. Rather, those within many churches have built walls of brick and mortar and familiar rituals of childhood that they can hide behind so they don’t have to see! A hymn says it best; “Open my eyes that I might see!”
Sister Margaret,
I want to partially disagree with you. People outside of the church are lost and there is no other hope for them than the Church who makes much of Jesus Christ. The fact that congregations worship Jesus inside of buildings made of brick walls is not the problem, even if the building is expensive. The problem with the building is that congregations often times make idols out of their buildings. The church is not a social service agency, though it can and should serve the needs of people. The problem seems to be when we make idols of people, namely ourselves who are already within the church. This causes us, I think, to focus only on what we want. Often times when recognize this hideous error we recoil at it and instead of refocusing our gaze upon the One who truly deserves worship, we can overcompensate and begin to idolize those outside. Make no mistake, the lost are lost and the church is the only hope they have, but the church is no hope at all when it does not worship its Lord exclusively. One final thought that I think is helpful for us as we try to wade through this difficult issue. Galatians 6:10 says, “Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.” What does this mean for us when we think about utilizing a congregations financial resources? What does this mean for us when we think about evangelizing? What does this mean for us as we think about worship? I think at this time my answers to these questions is too simple.
DK
The truth of the matter is that almost every church that can afford to pay a full time pastor is looking for a Bible teaching yes man.
I would suggest that “every church” that has the resources to pay a full time pastor is just looking for a “Bible teaching yes man” is too broad a statement, and not truly accurate. I served a church for ten years in the Midwest that had quite the ability to pay the pastor well, and never was there an expectation that I should be a “yes man.” What I have found after almost four decades of ministry is the lay leadership of the church is critical to the overall perception the church may have of itself. In the church I pastor now, and there I am full time, the leadership expects me to exercise leadership, be visionary and work as a catalyst to see the leadership idea carried forward. The church is still trying to recover from what happened before I came, and there are signs of new life sprouting here and there; it is very encouraging to see what God is doing amongst His people there. I realize this is subjective and experiential, but in those churches where I’ve been part time (bivo, usually), there was more of an expectation of the yes man thing than in the full time churches.
I recently resigned my position as a church musician because I was serving a church like you describe above. It was too frustrating to be so out of step with the church leadership. We even tried the New Beginnings Program. The congregation leaders could not grasp the concept of a church that ministered to their community and could be a positive influence there. And the support that the program promised never arrived. In my opinion, churches like you describe are not churches at all but are clubs. As long as they can keep their clubhouses open, they can’t see that there is a problem. The fact that they are not fulfilling “the greats” (commandments, commission, golden rule, fundamentals of following Jesus), is just not a problem for them. I finally just had to step away.
I pastored a church like this for 2 years. Down from 600 in worship in the ’60’s to about 40 when I came. I call churches like this “zombie churches” because for all of the purposes for which a church exists, they are already dead. Yet they continue to walk as if they aren’t. The elderly group who had held on didn’t even like being there. They were just still there because they didn’t want the stress of changing churches and because the fact that they endured meant they were winning all those old battles they remembered. By the time I came there, they had invented a micro culture of insanity that ensured that no visitor ever came more than once. The church is still there in this big dilapidated building, barely paying the bills and cursing my name the same as they do all the other former pastors from the last 30 years. This group has actually become a negative witness- their faith (in whatever it is they believe) actually pushes people away from Christ.
Thank you for this truth telling. Reading this brought me back to a small congregation that I was asked to serve and determine if it was time for “church hospice.” When I started they had dwindled to about 15 in worship after my first year with them we had grown to over 40 in worship, a children’s Sunday school and an adult Bible study before church. However, the underlying disease process remained firmly rooted. I lead the session and congregation through a very painful time of discernment and ultimately through the process of closing its doors. However, the leadership was determined that they were not going out with a whimper, but with a bang.
Early in our discussions we read the passage where Jesus says that every seed must fall and give up its life in order to bear fruit. The leadership realized that this was the invitation that they were being given; to give up their life in order for fruit to be borne. With the money in the bank they could have clung to life-support for a few more years or they could use what resources remained – including the building – and plant seeds of faith in several important mission projects. Painfully and joyfully they chose the later option. They realized that one of the key principals of our faith is to not fear death, even the death of a beloved church.
I write about this experience in my book, Grieving Hearts in Worship: A Ministry Resource, AuthorHouse 2012. Since this congregation’s closing amazing things have occurred through the seeds they planted and spread. One of the most amazing is that the church building was bought by a woman who had a vision of meeting the needs of the homeless. The church building is now a shelter where worship is an integral offering, they have rehab classes, life skills classes and so much more. All the things that the former congregation wanted to do, but lacked the energy to act upon it, is now happening; but it would not have happened if they had clung to life-support.
Death of a church is not necessarily a bad thing, it is an invitation to do ministry and live our faith in a new way.