I don’t remember where I was or what I was doing when I got the news, or even who it was who shared it with me. But when I heard that the church that I’d helped to start in the 1970’s had closed its doors it saddened me greatly.
At only twenty-two years old, I was in on the ground floor of that project, making some of the first door-to-door visits and teaching some of the first classes. I wasn’t the main church planter; I was the sidekick. But I put my heart and soul and thousands of hours of work into that church plant over the next six years.
After my wife and I moved away, sent out as church planters by that congregation, we eventually lost track of it, but we never stopped caring about it, and the town in which it was located, which, we felt, needed it so badly.
So when I heard that it had folded, I felt a lot of sadness as well as a sense of betrayal. I was kind of mad, actually. “How could they do that?” I thought. “How could they let it fail?” “Why did this happen?”
The sleuthing that I’ve done to find the answers to those questions has come up empty. I don’t know why it folded. I only know that it’s gone, and that the building they remodeled so well is now deteriorating.
Today I’m working with multiple shrinking, dying congregations, of many different evangelical persuasions, trying to see their dying turned to thriving. Some of them are responding well, and I’m so grateful to God, the only one who makes things grow (I Corinthians 3:7).
The Problem
They are warned and exhorted by pastors, denominational leaders, church consultants, authors and others, that if they don’t push hard against the spring-loaded selfishness switch that caused them to turn inward – for an inward focus means a downward trajectory every time – they will certainly die.
The Promise
That’s not so awful, actually, for what it implies is that IF they choose to once again turn outward, to once again make their congregations about the lost – the people OUTSIDE the church instead of the people INSIDE the church – their churches can live again.
They can flourish. They can thrive. Why? Because the one who said “Behold! I stand at the door and knock!” (Jesus in Revelation 3:20) is ready to re-enter their congregations in sweet, life-giving resurrection power, making them sing and zing and sting (the enemy) like never before.
“Revival is Jesus Christ, obviously present and actively in charge of a church.”
Revivalist Oliver Price
The Purpose
Think with me about why we start churches. I remember the zeal I had, as a very young Christian, for the church plant I described above. I was living in a town of about 4,000 souls which had no clear, gospel witness whatsoever. I was driving to a church in a city which was about fifteen miles away. I was sharing my faith with people in “my” town, but knew it was a long-shot to ask them to visit my congregation.
That’s why most churches are organized – thank God! – to get the message of Christ to unreached people. That’s what churches are for. They were never supposed to be support groups for Christians, fellowship farms for “us four and no more.” They are mission stations on the mission field known as “the world” (Matthew 13:38).
They are like social service clubs, like the Lions Club I was once a member of: they exist to serve the community, not themselves.
They are like Coast Guard lifesaving crews, ambulance crews, or fire departments or police departments: they exist to rescue and to serve others, not themselves.
They are like hospitals and clinics which exist, not to help their staff members, but to help the sick. Jesus said it clearly in Luke 5:31,32:
“Jesus answered them, ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.
I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.’”
The Underlying Problem
But human beings being the selfish creatures that we are – “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way;” (Isaiah 53:6,a,b) – churches turn inward, as predictably as day turns to night. They become my church and our church with my preferences and our preferences and my comfort and our comfort in mind.
Many churches are clearly counseled as to what they need to do to see their ministries thrive again: they must – essentially – repent of their self-centeredness and make their congregations missions to the lost, putting the needs and preferences of those who are not yet members ahead of their own.
Think about it: only the most hardhearted of churches refuses to get little chairs and little tables to accommodate the little barbarians (children) in their Sunday Schools. Can we not do the same with grown-up, lost people?
And this is where some church choose to die: The members would rather disband the church – which in many cases, for many years – has been all about them, than to have to work a little harder, give a little more generously, pray a little less selfishly, change the music or the décor, get out and rub shoulders with actual lost people, love people who look awful, and actually share their faith with sinners, in order to keep their church from folding. They would rather kill it than change it.
And like the jilted lover who says, “If I can’t have her, nobody can,” these folks decide that if the church is no longer going to be all about them, it may as well die.
That’s why some churches choose to die.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION:
- Why was our church started? Who knows the story?
- What evidence is there that our congregation is on the way up or on the way down on the church lifecycle?
- What evidence is there that our church is outward focused or inward focused?
- Are we more like the father in the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32) or are most of us more like the older brother in this story? Don’t miss what verse two says about Jesus Himself.
- What evidence is there that we actually believe in heaven, hell and the necessity of faith in Christ?
- Do we need to repent of our selfishness as a congregation?
