How To Stop Church Decline
I wrote a book about charcoal, Jesus, and ashen churches
The church in America is in decline. Every denomination is seeing it. Even my own fellowship, the Assemblies of God, is reporting that 4/5 churches—that’s 80%—are either plateaued or in decline.
Not only that, but my fellowship is an emphatically small church fellowship. Half of the churches in the Assemblies of God are 60 people or less. The Assemblies of God has just around 13,000 churches, so that means 6,500 have to ask for daily bread just to stay open. Keep in mind that the average attendance of a church is 135 people (remember the difference between “mean,” “median,” and “mode” from middle school?). That figure puts over 80% of churches in the A/G below 200 people, as I’ve detailed elsewhere. You can hear all of this firsthand in George Paul Wood’s conversation with A/G statistician Mike Clarensau on the Influence Podcast.
What this means is that in strictly economic terms, most churches are either struggling to survive financially, or they’re one financially-supporting family away from struggling to survive financially. The Assemblies of God is heavily congregational in its governance, which means that a pastor’s salary comes directly from the tithes and offerings of the church he or she is pastoring. Anyone who’s done pastoral ministry knows that 60 people might support a living wage for a single pastor, but that’s probably about it. On top of a salary, every church needs to consider building repair, utilities, basic equipment, and insurance—to name a just a handful things. And all of that has to be taken care of before you consider an outreach budget, or a dedicated fund to throw a couple of pizza parties per year for the teenagers.
Fortunately, the Assemblies of God (along with every Christian church) doesn’t worship Mammon, so we don’t need to think about things in strictly economic terms.
Church decline is real, but I’m not persuaded that the Kingdom of God is experiencing a similar trend, even in an increasingly secular West. Pentecostals have long been trying to remind the church at large that God is still going about doing good and healing all who are oppressed by the devil (cf. Acts 10:38). Jesus healed the lame, he cooled fevers, he cleansed lepers. And he let himself be killed so he could come back from the dead.
What I’m suggesting is that Pentecostals need to take what they have proclaimed in faith to the individual and proclaim it to the church.
The church is called the body of Christ. The Scriptures say she is one with Christ. So much so that whatever is true for Christ is promised in him for the church. And if Jesus could come back from the dead, can’t his church? Indeed, doesn’t his church?
I believe with all of my heart that God can miraculously heal the church body from her ailments and diseases. The birth of the church was a miracle. Its continued existence has always been a miracle. Shouldn’t we expect more of the same, even if it means that churches die first before they are raised?
I talk about this in a new book I’ve written. It’s under contract with the title Resurrecting Worship: A Pentecostal Liturgy for Slow Burn Revival. I’ll be announcing it more fully soon. But let me reference just one thing in this post from the introduction of my book.
If the Assemblies of God (or any church) in the US wants to be faithful in the years and decades to come, then we have to both reckon with the reality of plateau and decline and continue to refuse to worship Mammon. No amount of funds, management styles, innovations, personalities, or LED walls are going to revitalize the church at large.
What will revitalize the church is faithful, biblically-grounded, carefully thought out, elaborate worship over the long haul. You can start a blazing fire with some dried sticks with relative ease. But what we need are the coals under the ashes. Ashes can be deceptive, making it look like the fire’s gone out. But those coals will burn you if you reach into the apparent death, sometimes even days later.
The churches of 60 people or less are those coals.
I always write this Substack with the small, ashen churches in mind. I teach classes at Evangel University attempting to equip future ministers to go fan the coals into flame. And I’ve written a book that testifies to the slow burn revival God has kindled in a small brick building at the corner of Keokuk St. and Highland Ave. on the old farm land of the first governor of Iowa.
You can keep an eye out for more on my book. But even more so, keep an eye out for the slow burning coals that the Spirit keeps lit in all of the most unsuspected places. The Holy Spirit is in the coals, and our risen Lord loves to hang around charcoal fires ( see John 21:9).
If this post strike you as something true and good, I ask you to share it.
Chesterton said of Western Civilization that it had not only died many times but died of old age. The same is surely even more true of the church. The outer man, the institution of the church, is definitely on hospice. It reminds me of an old joke though.
Doctor to patient: I've got good news and bad news. The bad news is you're gonna die in 3 months. The good news is you can have bacon and eggs in the morning. All that healthy diet stuff you have been doing for 10 years you don't need anymore.
We have long said that a church should be like a hospital, a place where sick people get well. But I think that it is time to admit that the church is not a hospital. Sick people don't get well there. But the dead do rise, which is a very different thing. But so much of what we do is focused on fighting the sickness of sin or on building health. If the plan of treatment starts with: Die from the disease. then that should have a big impact on planning out the rest of the steps. I am curious and excited to see what you have to say about all of this in your book Joseph.
I will add here an excerpt (commenting on Rev 6) from my own Another Book: Jesus In John's Revelation that is coming out this fall and the link to the preview chapter as they are at least somewhat on topic:
When He invited us to resurrection, we saw only the death that is the door through which we must pass to that resurrection. When He invited us to enjoy Him, we saw only that we must lose ourselves. He offers us Heaven, and we are too busy grasping this world with a death grip to appreciate the offer. And don’t imagine that you and I aren’t in that number for, as it says, “the kings, the great, the rich, the mighty, every slave and every free man.” It is hard to find an exception to that set. This is the judgment: that we prefer our life, which is death, to the death of Christ, which is life, our darkness to His light.
There is a sort of understated irony that is very characteristic of the preaching of Jesus of Nazareth, which I find in the phrase “wrath of the Lamb.” Although sheep are much more common in the Old World than they are in the American South, the word used here is a little lamb, and the reference would have felt much the same to the first readers of this story as it does to us. There is a clear portrayal of passive helplessness, and of course Jewish readers would have felt the sacrificial tones of the word lamb quite as much as we do. What animal could be less inclined to show wrath than a little lamb? Of course, as John has already pointed out in chapter 5, this lamb is dead—dead to wrath and alive to grace. I don’t know much about Greek, but it seems to me that there is another bit of irony in the word translated throughout Revelation as “wrath.” When I was studying all of this, I became curious about this wrath and looked it up. It describes feelings so strong that they can’t be contained. An alternate translation is “passion.” Hide us from the Passion of Christ. When this was written, the end of Christ’s life hadn’t yet come to be called His Passion, as far as I can tell, but I think that that illustrates the problem we have with the apocalypse rather nicely. His way of salvation is a way that features a guilty verdict for us, suffering, death, and hell. It has all the external characteristics of wrath. It is only when you get inside that you can perceive it as passion, which, I think, is why, at the seventh seal, there is silence in Heaven. Christ has stooped down to open the knowledge of God to us, and we have made excuses not to take Him up on the offer. He set the scroll that is the Express Image of God right before us, and we were too attached to our own notions of who God is to take a look. It is the silence of shock and awe—not shock and awe, though, at our stubborn mistrust, but at the lengths which Christ is about to go to get guests at His party.
https://comfortwithtruth.substack.com/p/left-behind-just-dont-call-me-late-forhtml
You have brought up something that has been a flame in my heart the last few months. I grew up in church, I grew up on the mission field. Out of all that time what can I say about the church? Its shrinking. It's been doing the same old thing my whole life. Christmas Service, wonderful. But let's forget about the decoration, let's forget about everything that's not related to the birth of Jesus Christ and how God sent His Son so that we can have a relationship with God the Father. Easter, why on earth do we say happy easter when it has nothing to do with Resurrection Sunday!? So many churches tried to be a cool place to be. Skits, lights, coffee you name it. But it has nothing to do with the building. It has nothing to do with the cool events. It is about getting together as believers and worshipping our One True God. I will admit, when I was younger I kept asking God to help me do this and do that. And now I ask God to lead me in completing His will and what He has in store for me. It's not about what God can do for me, it's about what can I do for my Great God. I used to go to church to feel good knowing that I checked that box. But what good is that if I don't continually seek Him on a regular basis. How to stop church decline? We need everyone to have an awakening of truly how mighty our God is and how He truly longs for a daily relationship with us. Not just before we eat our burger or go to bed. I am very eager to read your book. I look forward to seeing more about this.