By Ken Howard
Founder and President
How do you want your congregation to die?
No. I’m serious.
The way humans think about dying sometime in the future makes a huge difference in the way they think about living. To the extent that you live your life afraid of dying, you cannot fully live. There is a movie in which the protagonist is so afraid of what people will say about him when he’s gone that he fakes his own death to find out. And doing so helps him to live more fully.
It’s the same thing with congregations. To the extent that a congregation is concerned with not dying, it cannot be fully vital. Every congregation must come to terms and be at peace with the fact that it has a finite life span.
Trust me. Your church is going to die someday. Maybe not today, or this week, or this month, or this year, or this decade, or even this century. But it will die someday.
God never promised any church that it would live forever.
Every church has a life cycle: it is conceived, born, grows, reaches stability, and eventually starts to decline and die. For some congregations, that cycle may take 300 years; for others, 30; for a few, as little as 3.
Sometimes churches decline and die because they lose their purpose. Others decline and die because they fall out of love with their neighborhoods. Still others decline and die because the communities in which they live and move and have their being are also declining and dying.
I once had the opportunity to speak with Dan Edwards, the Episcopal bishop of Nevada. He was the first person to tell me about the life cycles of congregations. The issue was front and center for Bishop Dan. Most of the towns in Nevada got their start as mining towns, so most of the congregations in his diocese sprang up alongside them. The thing about mining towns is that most of them end up as ghost towns, usually after about 100 years, meaning most of the congregations in those towns died alongside their communities.
And well they should have, Bishop Dan’s opinion was. He believed that congregations should be a mirror image of the communities they serve, and that their lifecycles should mirror those communities.
But some continue to hang on by their proverbial fingernails, waiting for a savior.
But Jesus is about saving people, not about rescuing congregations. As Dan once put it, “The problem with ‘The Church’ is that all too often it shows up 20 years too late and stays 20 years too long.”
He’s right, when you think about it. It is a great spiritual irony that Christians, whose faith is built on resurrection, of all people, should harbor such great fear of the death of their congregations.
The fact is, your congregation is gonna die someday. Maybe sooner than you think. Maybe it’s already in decline.
The question is, “When the time comes, how will you want your congregation to die? Faithfully? Or fearfully?”
Fearful dying comes when a congregation denies its mortality, fearing and fighting death tooth and nail all the way into the grave. And the tragedy is that when a congregation dies in fear, it dies into oblivion, unlikely to be reborn in any form, because it has not laid the groundwork for rebirth.
Faithful dying occurs when a congregation recognizes that its time is at hand and prepares for its death. It may see its time coming when the body of believers that comprises it realizes it has faithfully finished the work God has called them to do. Such a congregation may see its time coming because its community is in decline, and know they must be its companion in dying.
Whatever the reason, if they recognize that fact, they can begin planning to die faithfully and courageously, in a way that they become the mulch for new growth.
A congregation situated in a community in decline might choose to die sooner rather than later, and take their remaining endowment (if they have one) and the proceeds from the sale of their assets and invest them in a new missional work elsewhere.
Or, such a congregation might decide to close its current location and relocate to BE that new missional work somewhere else.
An aging Anglo congregation situated in a community that is rapidly growing younger and increasingly Latino might choose to die in its current form, while cultivating a relationship with a startup Spanish-speaking congregation, to whom it can bequeath its legacy.
These are just a few examples of faithful congregational dying. A congregation declining in a different context may decide to do something completely different.
And when you think about it, new life always requires letting go of aspects of the old life. Roses need aggressive pruning to grow more healthily. Healthy interpersonal relationships are continuously letting old ways of being die. Looking back on my marriage, I can see that it is not one single marriage but many renewed marriages to the same person over time.
The point is… When you ask a faithful question, you may find there are many, many answers.
We can help you ask the right questions, so that you can answer them faithfully. Reach out to us at info@faithx.net.
