No Church Left Behind

Over the past couple decades we have devoted many resources to church planting and rightfully so. The fact that there are many people in our communities who don’t have a relationship with God through Christ and the church to population ratio is steadily and rapidly declining has been a clarion call to planting new works focused on reaching the ever-growing population. Just to illustrate, in 1900 there was one Southern Baptist church for every 3,800 people in North America and in 2015, that number is one for every 6,200.[1] The trend has continued and even though Southern Baptist have experienced great success in church planting (planting an average of 1200 churches a year[2]) we have still seen our reach diminish as our population continues to grow.

One of the reasons that we have not been as effective as we could be in reaching our communities with the transforming power of the gospel is that while we are planting an average of 1200 churches a year through out the Southern Baptist Convention, we are seeing an average of 900 churches a year close. [3] While that statistic alone is staggering, it is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg of plateaued or declining churches across North America. If we are closing 17 churches every Sunday, how many more that remain in operation have ceased to serve as an effective gospel outpost in their community?

The reality is that there are churches across North America, and in each one of our neighborhoods, that were started with an evangelistic zeal to reach the lost around them, but have somewhere gone astray. The question that we must ask ourselves is, “What about a dying church brings Glory to God?”[4]

Is There Hope?

I recently have a conversation with a pastor in the upstate of South Carolina who is considering a call to serve a church that has experienced significant decline over the past several years. The membership of this church has dwindled down to a faith few who are barely hanging on. The ministry of the church has been marked with conflict, church splits, marginal leadership, and general hardship. The question on this pastor’s mind and on the mind of the many church leaders facing similar circumstance across the country was, “Is there any hope for a church like this?”

My answer is that there is hope. After all, we serve a Master who was once dead and is now alive forevermore. Jesus promised in Matthew 16:18 that he would build his church and that not even all the powers of hell would stop it. The key here is that Jesus only promised to build his church. Churches close when they cease to be the church of Jesus Christ. We see this played out in the second chapter of Revelation with the church in Ephesus. A church gets off track and Jesus takes away its lampstand.

Redefining Success

One common thread runs through the stories of a vast number of the stories of shuttered church buildings and disbanded congregations, they shifted their focus off of the driving force of the church, the gospel. Most of these churches became fixated on defining success by measuring their ability maintain things like programs, attendance numbers, ledger balances, and the like. Don’t get me wrong, these are all valuable things to forwarding the work of the church, but they are not the work of the church.

In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus calls his followers to be both salt and light. Salt makes food more flavorful and light makes dark places brighter. In the same way, the church is called to make the community it serves a more flavorful and brighter place by its presence. In order to stem the tide of dying and declining churches we must move from evaluating the effectiveness of a church by measuring the means by which it accomplishes its calling (baptisms, budgets, and bodies) to measuring how effective the church is in impacting the community immediately surrounding it. A healthy church is one that demonstrates a pattern of making disciples who make disciples that positively impact their community in a noticeable way.

You’re Not Alone

If you are serving in a plateaued or dying church, you are not alone. There are resources available through the local association, state convention, and NAMB to help revitalize the ministry of your church and breathe new life into dry bones. The one thing you must do is reach out. No man is an island and no one can be expected to undertake this great and difficult work on alone.

[1] Kevin Ezell, “Breathing New Life into Dying Churches,” in A Guide to Church Revitalization: Guide Book №005, ed. R. Albert Mohler, Jr. (Louisville, KY: SBTS Press, 2015), 13.

[2] Mark Cliffton, Reclaiming Glory: Revitalizing Dying Churches (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2016), 5.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 11.