Ten Reasons Churches Die
Churches Get Lots of Help Along the Road to Failure
I am adapting 10 observations drawn from David DiSalvo’s post published in Forbes Magazine.
He describes ten reasons businesses die. They apply to churches, too.
1. As Yoda said, you just don’t believe it.
Luke Skywalker says, “I just don’t believe it.” Yoda answers, “That is why you fail.”
For all the talk about faith and belief, the Church often acts as if we do not believe our own message. We don’t believe small churches can survive, so we do nothing to help. Our leaders see no economic incentive in helping small churches. Regional bodies see themselves as better managers of money. They often are not. When the assets of one closed church dry up, they look for another small church to loot. The altruistic promises made to justify the seizures, are quickly forgotten. No one really analyzes where the money goes.
Bishop Almquist told us our assets were being put into a Mission Fund. It was later revealed that the Mission Fund fills the synod’s own spending deficits (which were frequently in the healthy six-figures). A few weeks ago we learned that Holy Spirit’s assets would go to The Bishop’s Emergency Fund. Does anyone know what that means?
Belief in the purposes of church—as in life—is foundational to success. More, when we believe in an all-powerful, merciful and gracious God. If we in the pew don’t believe and the regional body has self-interest in our failure — we have a problem.
2. Other people have convinced you of your “station.”
This brings to mind the school principal who fired a teacher when she learned that the teacher had told students from poor urban neighborhoods that they would never amount to anything.
We need this principal’s kind of leadership in the Church.
Any church leader who goes to a small congregation, accepting a salary, with the message that the congregation will never amount to much should be history.
Redeemer was lucky. Bishop Almquist had left us to die. “You’ll die a natural death in ten years,” he told us. He refused to provide even a caretaker pastor. But we found a part-time pastor who served us for three years. He told us we could be a flagship church. We believed. While SEPA was waiting out the ten years, we began to grow.
DiSalvo quotes Tennessee Williams. “A high station in life is earned by the gallantry with which appalling experiences are survived with grace.”
DiSalvo writes:
Disruption means that consistency, stability and certainty might get jettisoned for a time, and that puts our hard-wired internal defense system on high alert. Sometimes, though, you have to override the alarms and move ahead anyway. If you never do, you’ll never know what could happen.
Disruptive innovation is discouraged in the Church. We talk about innovation and change, but are ill-prepared for it.
Redeemer had put aside old expectations as we forged new ministry and began to experience success. SEPA allowed alarms to go off without ever sharing our successes.
4. You think “what if I die tomorrow?”
We stop trying because we foresee our own demise. The Church feeds into this with its “caretaker ministries” concepts. They use language like palliative care and putting the congregation on hospice. They use these terms and act appalled when people suggest they orchestrating the closing of churches. Meanwhile, we may be transforming into something the experts don’t yet recognize.
5. You wonder how you will be remembered.
We all want to leave a legacy. The Church feeds into this idea, too.
Our pastor in 2008 met with the bishop and never returned to our church. He sent word that rumors were being spread that he was leading a rebellion and he feared his reputation being ruined. A rebellion? A church defends its ministry and it is seen as rebellion! Bishop Burkat shamelessly used the fear of tarnished legacy to fuel her cause. She wrote in a letter to all pastors.
In the case of Redeemer, leaders did not cooperate with us and instead resisted tenaciously in an adversarial manner that publicly tarnishes the wonderful memory of ministry that has taken place in the East Falls community since 1891.
Small churches must learn to live in today’s world and guard against any appearance that protecting the past is mission.
6. You think there must be a pre-established role for your life.
This is part of the church model. We are who others tell us we are. Don’t dare step beyond your role — even if the role you played historically no longer has a need in today’s world. Instead of using our assets to explore new ways of meeting needs, the Church attempts to find new places where the old ways might still work. They call this mission and celebrate it as innovative. It is not; it is replication. Chances are such replicated ministries will fail soon after the publicity value wears off.
SEPA’s vision of Redeemer was that of a small family church. Redeemer started to transform from a small white congregation in a working class neighborhood to an international church in a growing collegiate neighborhood. SEPA was unprepared to serve us. They had been counting on our failure for 10 years!
DiSalvo writes that these pre-defined roles (agency) “is a figment our brains rely on to manage difficulty with as little trauma as possible. The first thing to do is recognize that….”
7. Your career appears to be well-established and that’s good, right?
We all know the role of the small church. Serve the immediate neighborhood with the message of God’s love. Support a pastor to the best of our ability. Maintain the property. (Not necessarily in that order.) But what if you stepped out of that role and began to serve in new and innovative ways? How would the church react? (It isn’t always pretty.)
8. You are afraid of losing what you have built.
DiSalvo ponts out that this is beyond our control. There is always a danger of losing what we have built. It should not determine your ministry. Unfortunately, in the Church, there are people ready to help us lose what we have built. This fear of being a victim of hierarchical greed is actually crippling the potential of the church. Lutheran congregations used to be fairly independent. It’s written into our founding documents as “interdependent.” But lately, congregations are looking to the bishop’s office for approval of decisions that are constitutionally theirs to make independently. This is what happens when you start forcing church closures. Congregations start to live in fear.
9. You think “maybe I’ve hit my ceiling.”
Many small churches stop trying. Pastors often stop trying. Synods encourage this when they use terms like caretaker and hospice ministries. Small churches must fight this mindset. But that, we learned, can be dangerous!
10. Confusion about where to go.
This is a huge problem in the church because the Church really has no vision for where it is going. Frequently, the people we look to in the Church as visionaries are people who have found a way to preserve the concept of Church as we understood it in the past. They are few. These pastors write books about their successes, hoping they will help others. Some of them are pretty good books! These successes are, however, often the result of a serendipitous combination of personalities and circumstances that is hard to replicate.