Growing With God

Curtis Gordon

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Why Your Church Will Die Within Five Years

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📷 by Thom S. Rainer Founder & CEO I became fascinated with dead and dying churches about thirty years ago. I know. It’s morbid on my part. My fascination turned into somewhat of an obsession that I wrote a bestselling book on the topic, Autopsy of a Deceased Church, several years ago. It still has robust sales today. It obviously hit a nerve. One of our team members at Church Answers got the domain, churchmortician.com, as a joke a few years ago. We still have it, and it is forwarded to churchanswers.com. The Church Consultation Requests Deluge We are receiving more consultation requests at Church Answers than at any point in our organization’s history. Consequently, we are doing more on-site and virtual consultations than ever. But here is the difference. About half of the requests are from churches that will likely die within five years. The congregations are on a death march. For the first time, the leaders of these churches, pastors and laity alike, are no longer in denial. They know their churches must change or die. We pray each time that our intervention is not too late. The pandemic accelerated and exacerbated the gradual declines of churches where they became obvious paths toward death. There have also been dramatic culture shifts to a less favorable, even antagonistic, posture toward churches. Why the Churches Will Die I really don’t think I have an obsession with dying churches. My primary focus is living, not dying. It has always been my prayer that I can learn from the deceased churches to help living churches thrive. We see a very clear pattern in place with dying churches. I hope these five observations can help you and your church move toward thriving instead of dying. Dying churches have abandoned evangelism. Your church will not have sustained growth without evangelism. You are no longer in a Christian-friendly culture where non-Christians desire to be identified with a local congregation. According to our consultation work in the post-COVID world, your church should be reaching one person (usually measured by baptisms, conversions, or professions of faith) for every twenty in average worship attendance. Thus, if your church averages 100 in attendance, you need to see God reach five non-Christians every year who will become followers of Christ and a part of your church. And the five per 100 number is just to stay even. That can be daunting for many churches. We began offering The Hope Initiative to help churches jumpstart prayer and evangelism. We know beyond a shadow of doubt that the need is great.Dying churches major on minutiae. As a favor to a local pastor, I met with the few remaining members of his church. For some odd reason, the pastor was convinced they would listen to me and get serious about doing whatever it takes to survive. After I made an impassioned plea for the church to become a Great Commission force in the community, the pastor asked if there were any questions. One woman asked with a bit of an edge, “Will we have to read the hymns on a screen?” The church closed its doors seven months later.Dying churches have high levels of gossip and conflict. Church members will expend their energies in one direction or the other. If the church is not reaching beyond its walls, the members will become inwardly focused. They will gossip about the pastor and other members. They will have silly arguments over inconsequential issues.Dying churches do not comprehend the urgency exacerbated by the pandemic. The majority of American churches were in decline prior to the pandemic. COVID accelerated and exacerbated the decline. Dying churches are in denial. Their leaders and members simply do not realize how little time is left before they must close their church.Dying churches see the pastor as the silver bullet. Consequently, the pastor is consistently the perceived person to blame for the decline in the church. It is also common for dying churches to fire pastors frequently. They think that the silver bullet pastor is out there somewhere.I have been doing church consultations since 1988. I have never seen so many churches just a few figurative breaths away from death. Church Answers created The Hope Initiative (hopeinitiative.com) as a 30-day jumpstart in prayer and evangelism. We pray that churches of all sizes and levels of health will engage in this ministry. We specifically pray for the dying churches. We pray they will do something before it’s too late.

https://churchanswers.com/blog/why-your-church-will-die-within-five-years/

Church Is Like a Duck-billed Platypus

Without a doubt, my all-time favorite animal is the duck-billed platypus. It appeals to my nonconformist instincts because it breaks so many rules of biology. Consider: The platypus has a flat, rubbery bill, no teeth, and webbed feet, like a duck. Yet it has a furry body and beaver-like tail, and nurses its young like a mammal.

But wait—it walks with a lizard gait and lays leathery eggs like a reptile! And the male can use venomous hind-leg spurs to strike like a snake.

The strange animal stymied scientists for years, and in fact the first platypuses shipped back to England in 1800 were judged frauds. Europeans were still reeling from an expensive and popular fad item: imported "genuine mermaids," which turned out to consist of monkeys' heads stitched to the bodies of fish from the China Sea. They were not about to fall for a bizarre concoction of duck's bill, webbed feet, and beaver's body.

The platypus holds a certain charm precisely because it does break all the rules. Somehow or other, it still works as an animal. I like to believe that, in designing the platypus, God had fun stretching the limits of natural law… .

I like the platypus for another reason: its combination of so many incompatible features in one humble animal gives me hope that we humans, too, can break some of the rules that govern the "organisms" in which we are involved. I am thinking particularly of the local church.

The New Testament's favorite metaphor for the church, "the body of Christ," describes an organism, and pastors use organism-type words in speaking of their congregation: the flock, the body, the family of God. But churches also function as organizations; most have a formal governing structure and involve themselves in personnel management and supervision. Even churches with single-person staffs must supervise volunteer programs. Like it or not, every church becomes a Christian organization. Those two words thrown together set up an immediate tension. …

All [my] exposure to Christian organizations [through the years] has convinced me that the church, like the platypus, is a whole made up of contradictory parts.

Organizations, such as the army, government, and big business, follow one set of rules. Organisms, such as living things, families, and closely-knit small groups, follow another. The church falls somewhere between the two and attracts criticism from both sides. Organization people accuse it of poor management, sloppy personnel procedures, and general inefficiency. Organism people complain when the church begins to function as just another institution and thus loses its personal, "family" feel.

I have concluded the tension between organism and organization is unavoidable and even healthy. I would feel uncomfortable within a church that tilted too far toward either model. A healthy church combines forces normally found in polar opposition. We must strive to be efficient and yet compassionate, unified and yet diverse, structured and yet flexible. We must live like a platypus in a world of mammals, reptiles, and fowl.

Philip Yancey, "The Church as Platypus" Christianity Today magazine (July 1, 1986)

1. The Ex-Bible Church.

These churches have abandoned the truths of Scripture. A few are explicit in their denials. But many just give lip service to the Bible. The congregation does not study Scripture. The pastor does not deal with the biblical texts and the whole counsel of God. The Bible is just another book that rarely gets read, studied or proclaimed. The Word of God has no power in these churches.

2. The Country Club Church.

Members in these churches see their membership as perks and privileges. They want their styles of music, their worship service times, their types of architecture and their preferred lengths of sermons. They pay their dues, so they should get their benefits. Or so the thinking of the members goes. Don’t ask them to evangelize, to put others first or to make sacrifices. After all, it is their church.

3. The Bad Words Church.

If you want to see a “good” fight, go to these churches. Their business meetings are more contentious than a presidential election. You can count on many of these church members to speak to or email the pastor regularly. And those words of communication are not nice words. These are the churches where bullies go unchecked, where personnel committees and boards work in darkness, and where gossip and backstabbing are common. These churches expend most of their energy on bad words. They thus don’t have the time or energy to share the good news.

4. The Ex-Community Church.

Go into these churches and look at the members. Go into the community and look at the residents. They don’t look alike. They don’t dress alike. They don’t go to the same places. The community has changed, but the church has not. “Those people” are on the outside. “Our kind of people” are on the inside. The idea of building bridges to the community is resisted if not repulsive.

How many churches in America today clearly fall into one or more of these categories? I have not done objective research, but I would not be surprised if the number is more than 50 percent.

Too many churches are dying.

So how do I remain an obnoxious optimist about churches in our nation?

The answer is simple. I am seeing how God is delivering a number of churches from these death throes. I will share more about that positive reality in the future.

In the meantime, let me hear from you.

This article originally appeared here.

The Church: A Safe Place to Hurt | The Pastor's Blog

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

11:22 AM

Clipped from: http://pastors.iflblog.com/2016/09/the-church-a-safe-place-to-hurt/

Everybody hurts. But not everybody lives such honest and vulnerable lives that they admit the pain. Why? Because, most often, there isn’t a safe place to do so. The church should be that place (second only to the home). Regrettably, it isn’t.

(Photo courtesy of Unsplash)

I heard of a research study where psychologists discovered the top three places where average people “fake it.”

We tend to put on airs when we visit the lobby of a fancy hotel.

We typically fake our true feelings alongside the salesperson at a new-car showroom.

Can you guess the third place we wear a mask? That’s right. In church!

Tragically, in church where authenticity should be modeled, we’ll paint on the phony smiles, slap backs, and shake hands, all the while masking what’s inside our hearts.

In reality . . . we’re hurting.

Everybody Hurts—Including Pastors

I’ve often said that if you could know the pain in the lives of those sitting in front and behind you in church, you’d be shocked. Everybody hurts. We’ve all been wounded . . . we’re all bleeding within.

Including the one behind the pulpit.

Part of what makes a church magnetic is when Christians aren’t afraid to live transparent lives with one another. Paul’s challenge to Timothy pushes past the façade and reminds us to live in reality: “Suffer hardship with me, as a good soldier of Christ Jesus” (2 Timothy 2:3

). I like the simplicity of Paul’s words . . . though they are not simple to live.

In the original language, the phrase, “Suffer hardship with me,” translates a single verb that means, “to endure the same kind of suffering as others.”

It’s not a command we can obey on our own.

It requires the application of a principle: When tested, the body pulls closer together.

How wonderful it is when this actually occurs! See the word with in the verse? That’s what makes a church so attractive. When one hurts, we all hurt.

Pain in the Church and in the World

It’s like what occurred in the early church. Who would have ever thought so many Christians would have been martyred in those days?

Because of the persecution, the church pressed right on.

Because they suffered together, their ranks grew.

You don’t find that in the world’s system. When testing comes, folks usually scatter like rats on a sinking ship; you’re on your own!

There’s competition.

There’s envy.

There’s hypocrisy.

But in the church? Grace pulls us together. It’s about considering others more important than ourselves. When someone is going through a tough time, a phone call is made. Somebody shows up at the door. Another brings a bag of groceries . . . sometimes a hot meal.

We cannot endure hardship with someone from a distance. In a contagious church, everybody hurts.

Because nobody hurts or heals alone.

What do you think? How have you seen your church pull together in painful times? You can tell me by clicking here.

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What Size Must a Church Be to Trigger the Need for Revitalization?

by Sam Rainer

President & Senior Consultant

The question came through Church Answers Central, our forum where pastors and church leaders seek feedback in a safe and private place with peers of like mind and subject matter experts. Almost 2,000 church leaders are part of this forum, interacting with each other nearly every hour of every day.

Does the size of a church determine the need for revitalization? Is revitalization based solely on numerical declines? Most would see the need for revitalization in a congregation that shrinks from 150 to 30 in attendance over five years. But what about the church in decline from 1,000 people to 750 people in attendance over ten years?

Several reasons exist as to why a church enters a period of decline.

Inward focus – Evangelism is absent, and the church no longer moves outward.

Doctrinal apathy – The fundamentals of the faith are not a priority.

Spiritual lethargy – People care more about their preferences than discipleship and holiness.

These problems are common in established churches. Most will recognize them as catalysts of decline. But the question in Church Answers Central dealt with the size of the church, and I believe it’s an excellent one to consider. Numerical attendance declines can be evidence of an inward focus, doctrinal apathy, and spiritual lethargy.

The size of the church determines the urgency of the revitalization, not necessarily the need. In the example above, the church of 750 people in attendance likely does not naturally feel any urgency for revitalization. However, the church of 30 is more apt to feel a sense of urgency. Churches usually feel urgency before recognizing what is needed to fix the problem.

Urgency is typically felt in one of two ways:

Facility: The room is too big.

Finances: The revenue is too small.

The facility urgency. Numerical declines will trigger urgency when so few people attend that the room feels vacuous. Of course, this feeling will depend on the size of the room. Three hundred people in a room seating five thousand is a problem. Thirty people in a room that seats one hundred may not feel like a problem.

Churches are notorious for living in a state of tension between fragility and resiliency. They hang on by their fingernails, but those nails are quite strong. A church can decline in a vacuous room and still not act if the finances support what is left. This support can come from deep cash reserves or a key donor who keeps giving.

The financial urgency. Not every church has deep reserves or a key donor. Financial urgency occurs when the revenue declines to the point where the church lacks cash flow. In other words, when what is coming in through giving no longer supports the bare minimum expenses. A church can go from complete complacency to an all-out emergency in one month when the bills are not paid.

The attendance trigger point of revitalization is more art than science—more feeling than fact. I’ve seen churches with ten or twenty people attending in a room that seats hundreds and still not exhibit any urgency. Some churches will live off cash reserves for years. Urgency is more often about how people feel than the raw numbers.

Blog : What Size Must a Church Be to Trigger the Need for Revitalization?

The Breathing Church

SLICE

My sons' elementary school is just a block from our house; it appears to inhale students every morning, hold its breath for several hours, and then cough them back out in the afternoon. On spring mornings, when the windows in my office on the third floor of our house are open, I can hear the bustling as kids chat and squeal with their friends. When I look out the window, I can see the minivans lined up in the carpool lane, waiting to be waved forward by students on safety patrol.

When the weather is nice, I often take a walk around the block at midday, to clear my mind or pray. When I pass the school, all is quiet outside the building; there's not a sound or person in sight. And then, at 3:40 every afternoon, kids begin trickling out a few at a time. This builds to a crescendo, as the building spews out one large, chaotic rush of students with noise, laughter, excitement, and relief. Some kids rush to hug their parents or jump in their parents' cars, while others sprint to throw the football on the playground. Similar scenes of inhaling and exhaling probably play out at most schools around the world.

I often think of church as a pulsating heart, which expands and constricts to push blood through the veins and arteries of the body. Or, better yet, a living, breathing entity that inhales her people, holds her breath, and then exhales them out, scattering them as missionaries disguised in various vocations, roles, and responsibilities throughout the world. Of the 40 miracles found in the book of Acts, all but one of them occurred outside the walls of a religious building.

This idea of a breathing church is quite theological, actually. The Hebrew word for spirit is ruach. (To say it properly you have to say the end of the word—the ch—as if you are clearing your throat.) Ruach means "spirit, breath, or wind." In Greek, the word is pneuma (said with a silent p ), which means "spirit, mind, or breath." It's where we get our word pneumonia, the condition where you have trouble breathing. To be a faithful church, we take our cues from this holy wind-breath. We read in the Gospels that the first apostles were told by Jesus himself they could not begin his ministry until—and only until—they had received the gift of the Holy Spirit (Luke 24:49). Don't do anything until the Spirit comes. Stay put. Maybe we should take note, too. In the Book of Acts we see that the Spirit is the chief player in the mission of Jesus' church, the director of this entire venture which points the world toward Jesus.

As members of Jesus' church, we are both blessed and also sent. We are called to gather in Jesus' name and also scatter in it. If all we do is gather, singing our songs and saying our prayers and listening politely to sermons without any intent to live all of it outside the church, it would be like taking a deep breath and never exhaling. It's exhausting, unhealthy, and eventually we'd turn blue and die. If all we do is scatter, busying ourselves with service projects, community events, and other meaningful endeavors, it would be like we're exhaling and exhaling until there is nothing left in the tank. Eventually, we'd turn blue and die. Gathering for worship is vital because it's where we center around the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and respond to his great love for us. But 90 minutes spent in worship every Sunday only equates on average to a mere 1.3 percent of our waking hours in a given week. If we believe this space will be sufficient to mold us into fully formed, fully matured Christ-likeness, who are we kidding? We need to gather together in worship, but we also need to learn to engage with God and others in various forms of worship, formation, and mission during the other 98.7 percent of our time.

This approach of only inhaling (or only exhaling) is never the vision or intention of the church. If we have either one without the other, we cannot faithfully express God's purposes in and for the world. It's spiritual pneumonia. But when churches find the sweet spot in the midst of this healthy tension, they develop strategies for both gathering and also scattering in order to bless the world. Doing both means we value the activities of the church without neglecting those outside the church. Inhaling and exhaling with regularity and intention, we allow the Spirit to work in our communities of faith in naturally supernatural ways. Being present and committed to the local church is an important priority, but sometimes this also means you have to just skip the Wednesday service to hang out with your neighbors.

This is what pastors and authors Hugh Halter and Matt Smay describe in their book AND: The Gathered and Scattered Church as the power of the and. The right things are centralized and also decentralized. Both people and resources find a blessed blending of maintenance and also mission, survival and also sending, tradition and also innovation. Fans are turned into followers, disciples are made into apprentices, and consumers become missionaries. It reminds me of Jesus' words in Matthew 13, where the owner of a house brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old (v. 52). The kingdom is not always either/or; it's often both/and.

Jesus' intent is to create little pockets of heaven where people can be in God's presence, but he does it out here in the world, in the middle of sin and death. I'm certainly not saying this is easy. Admittedly, many Christians find church to be the most difficult aspect of being a Christian. As a pastor, I have found this tension to be tough work, like walking a tightrope; sometimes it feels like I'm about to throw up.

The church stands as an alternative and prophetic space, a colony of heaven in a country of death. We don't have to be seminary trained or overly religious to participate in this. As Eugene Peterson wrote, church is "a congregation of embarrassingly ordinary people in and through whom God chooses to be present to the world." We long for things to be made right and to be put back together in the shalom of God, yet we live in the midst of a world at war with itself.

When we started our church over a decade ago, I asked our core team why we existed, why we would go to the trouble of setting up chairs and singing songs and listening to sermons. I wasn't against these activities; I believed they were important. But if we didn't clarify why we were doing these things, we could also fall into the trap that perpetuates the unhealthy mentality that we're just in this for ourselves. Without focused and intentional conversation and communal discernment, we could run the risk of becoming a church that inhaled and held its breath for dear life.

During the weeks those conversations took place, trying to clarify exactly why we would gather each week as a community of Jesus followers, we eventually landed on the phrase formation for mission. We realized that we gathered to be formed in order to be sent. We realized that, in our own way, we were articulating the blessed-and-sent posture. The purpose of our singing and prayers and Communion and storytelling and sermons was to form us in order to allow the Spirit to exhale us into our various contexts, not as just somebodies but as God's deeply loved children sent to represent Christ well in the world by living the with God life.

Inhaling and also exhaling, blessed and also sent, studying God's Word and also following God's Spirit. It's messy and costly and time intensive. But it's worth it.

The Sacred Overlap: Learning to Live Faithfully in the Space Between

J. R. BRIGGS Zondervan

Christianity Today Oct. 2020

A Church without Evangelism

https://churchanswers.com/blog/a-church-without-evangelism/?utm_source=convertkit&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=A+Church+without+Evangelism%20-%208456267

by Thom S. Rainer

Founder & CEO

A church without evangelism becomes a church that does not make disciples,

Because there are no new Christians to disciple.

A church without evangelism becomes a church where members fight over their preferences,

Because the members do not focus on reaching those who are not followers of Christ.

A church without evangelism becomes a church without true fellowship.

Because true fellowship not only cares for its own, but it looks beyond its own.

A church without evangelism gets mad at the pastor,

Because the members think they pay the pastor to do evangelism for them.

A church without evangelism becomes a church that does not do ministry.

Because there are fewer and fewer members to do ministry.

A church without evangelism becomes a church that strays from the Bible,

Because the Bible clearly teaches to evangelize people with the gospel.

A church without evangelism becomes a church giving less to missions,

Because there are fewer people to give to missions.

A church without evangelism becomes a church without prayer,

Because churches that truly pray are concerned for the lost in their communities.

A church without evangelism becomes a church that cannot worship together,

Because there are fewer people to attend worship services.

A church without evangelism will soon close its doors.

And that’s probably best.

Because that church stopped being a church long ago when it decided to no longer be obedient to the Great Commission of Jesus Christ.

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