Most churches in North America are plateaued or in decline. Many of those churches have been in that state for years, if not decades—sometimes under the same leadership. Why do churches wait so long to address decline? Here are twelve reasons I’ve seen in my church consulting work.
- Nobody’s counting the numbers. If no one is keeping a record of growth and attendance patterns, few leaders recognize the first signs of decline. No one is monitoring health, and disease sets in.
- Leaders in “growing” churches don’t always recognize decline. This situation especially occurs when a church is experiencing additions, but the back door is even more wide open. The decline may be slow, but it’s still real.
- Members live in their own relational bubble. That is, most members have only few persons with whom they build strong relationships. As long as their friends are still present, they don’t get too concerned about others leaving.
- Leaders have given up. It might be the leaders are just tired after unsuccessfully striving for growth for years. The need for rest trumps the call to reach others.
- Members love their pastor. Sure, they realize the church is declining – but their pastor’s been good to them. Consequently, they remain loyal to him even as the church dies around him.
- The leaders don’t know what steps to take. They are captains who don’t know how to steer the ship into the right channels. Efforts end in failure, and failures become discouragement.
- The church still has a sufficient number to survive. For example, the church that averaged 300 five years ago may still appear to be comfortably full at 200 now. The crowds are large enough to ignore the decline, at least for now.
- Leaders over-spiritualize the situation. “We’re just praying right now” can be a copout for leaders who fail to strategize. “God’s just reducing us to His remnant” may be theological jargon to avoid taking responsibility for poor leadership.
- The church has money in the bank. As long as bills are being paid, lower attendance numbers don’t matter as much. If the church has a strong reserve account, that’s even better.
- The congregation equates activity with life. Programs continue. The weekly bulletin or website is filled with events. If all these activities are going on, surely the church cannot be in decline.
- Ministries are siloed in the church. Individual ministries may be doing well. Members cocoon themselves in a few successful ministries, and few people see the overall church decline.
- Even Christian leaders are filled with pride. That’s a primary reason leaders won’t seek guidance when the churches they lead are declining. They don’t want to admit the struggle, or they think they can figure it out on their own.
What other reasons would you add to this list?
Why do churches wait so long to address decline? Inertia is one explanation—the tendency to do nothing, often connected to the belief that the church’s present state of decline is temporary, and the church will rebound from it without the church making any changes necessary to reversing its decline. It is a form of denial and wishful thinking. It is something to which we all are prone, “Maybe things will get better on their own.” You will hear parents whose teenager is engaging in acting out that is harmful to himself and others saying things like “It is just a phase. He’ll grow out of it.” Of course, things seldom get better on their own. But by the time the church or parents realize that that is not going to happen, it may be too late to do anything. There is the tendency to blame the community for the church’s decline rather than recognizing the church’s own contribution to its decline. One church leader of my acquaintance put it this way. “If we were a Baptist church, we would have a full church on Sunday.” He may not have been aware that a number of the community’s Baptist churches had only a handful of cars parked outside on Sunday mornings. Doing things differently might have arrested the church’s decline, but that observation was also applicable to these Baptist churches. His church was a poor fit with the community, but it was not the fault of the community. It was the church’s own fault. The members of its congregation put their preferences and tastes in worship before engaging and reaching the community’s unchurched population. The leaders of the church had not taken the trouble to exegete the community and to modify the church’s worship so that it might hold more appeal to the community’s unchurched population. In the case of this particular church, it had located in a particular community because the founding pastor and some members of the congregation lived in that community and there was a church building for sale that it could purchase. A large part of the congregation, however, did not live in the community and had no connections to the community. They lived in other communities. The pastor would move on not long after the purchase of the building and the members of the congregation who lived in the community for one reason or another stopped attending the church. One part of the congregation broke away to form its own church. The church would eventually replace the pastor who had left. An elderly pastor would come out of retirement to pastor the church. This pastor lived in a community roughly an hour’s drive from the church and had no connections with the community in which the church was located. This pastor’s ideas as to how a church should worship exacerbated the church’s existing poor fit with the community. He was not the right pastor to offer the church the kind of leadership that it needed to thrive and grow in the community in which the church was located. The church, however, was desperate for a new pastor and did not give thought to these considerations in calling a new pastor. The ecclesiastical tradition to which the church belonged required an ordained minister to administer the ordinance or sacrament of the Lord’s Supper and the worship of the church was centered on a weekly celebration or observance of the Lord’s Supper. The church put meeting that need before everything else. The two other factors that I have identified in the failure of this church to take prompt action to arrest its decline were a constricted view of what being a church entails and its particular choice of ministry target group. It saw itself as a chapel for a particular group of like-minded individuals and its ministry target group unchurched individuals of the same mind. These individuals form a very tiny segment of the population in the region, a population segment that has shrunk overtime and eventually will disappear. The latest pastor to whom it looks for leadership, a former member of the congregation now pastoring his own church, has similar if not identical mindset. This points to what may be two additional factors—giving more consideration to meeting short-term needs than long-term ones and failing to seek leadership outside the mindset of the existing congregation—a mindset that has not served the church well.
The pastor never followed-up with those that left to see why they left. Was it spiritual? In which case the pastor needs to stay involved if allowed. Was it the pastor? Maybe this will be painful but maybe a learning moment also. Was it the administration of the church- if so is it a valid concern? Have you heard it before? Can it be remedied? If not, why? Are they going to another church? If no why not? If yes what was the attraction?
To just have people leave and not follow-up, especially if there was no history of open discussion prior to their leaving, or even if there was, is being a very poor shepherd. The best run companies hold exit interviews as a way to improve and retain valued staff- you would think a church would do the same to protect a soul.