Our church leadership has been trying to figure out why our little church is not growing as it should and what we can do to turn it around. We have an interesting and talented fulltime pastor, and once a month we bring in a nationally known speaker. We have an excellent music program for a church our size and we warmly welcome anyone and everyone and try to make them feel right at home. We have a beautiful worship center in a peaceful gorgeous setting and we even have a brunch across the street after church.
We don’t want or expect to grow to mega church caliber and even if we did we don’t have the demographics to support it in our area, but we do feel that more people should attend. I decided to look at how churches nationwide are faring and what I found was disturbing.
- Overall church attendance nationwide has recently dropped from where it remained stable for some 80 years at 40% to a woeful 17.7%
- 8-10 thousand churches close their doors each year
- Between the years 2010 and 2012, more than half of all churches in America did not add one new member.
- Each year, nearly 3 million more previous churchgoers enter the ranks of the “religiously unaffiliated.”
In Europe it is much worse. In England church participation has been reduced to just 3%. Over the weekend I read that the venerable Church of England was now in danger of becoming extinct. Many of their finest churches are being transformed into pubs which seem to draw huge crowds as do the churches that are being converted into mosques which are full.
Some say that there are scores of people who have left the church, not because they are now antichrist or possess some phony or inferior faith, but precisely because they do not want to be around the judgmental people that fill the pews. They claim that they have left, not to abandon their faith, but precisely because they wish to preserve it. I assume that leaves a small ray of hope that they might find a church of their liking at some point, hopefully one that is non-judgmental and return one day.
Others point to the churches that are successful. They have huge facilities and pay the best musicians for the best music performances. They have elaborate stages with light shows and graphics fit for a Budweiser commercial and have every amenity known to man including their very own Starbucks. Young people can text messages to the preacher during the service and he will address the best of them prior to the end of the service.
Is this the new worship protocol that churches must follow in order to attract their local communities and entice them to attend? What will be next nude go go girls? That ought to draw a crowd!
A few say that the drop off in church attendance is very much the church leadership’s own fault, because far too often we are not radiating a church with a compassionate embrace and we are not in fact addressing the real energies that are burning inside people.
Hmmm . . . I ask again: What does it takes for a church to be successful in this age? What did God mean when He instructed us “not to forsake the gathering together of each other” and to remember the Sabbath, (the day of rest) and keep it holy?
I met with some millennials and asked them what they would like to see happen in churches and I mentioned the light shows and bands. To my complete amazement they responded that light shows and bands are not at all what they desire in churches. One young gal told me told me that her generation had instant access to every band in the world and all of the flashing lights and big stage productions and devices that anyone could dream up, but what they desperately were trying to find was substance, something profound, stable, and meaningful in a world seemingly devoid of it. They wanted truth about tough problems without spin.
WOW! I wish I had been so thoughtful when I was her age. Call me crazy, but whether she knows it or not I think she just indicated that she wanted to hear the powerful Gospel that transcends every generation.
Some years ago, an Evangelical minister stated the problem this way: As Christian churches we have the living water, the water Christ promised would quench all fires and all thirsts. But, this is the problem: We aren’t getting the living water to where the fires are! Instead we are spraying water everywhere, except where it’s burning!
Selah!
John 4:14
“But those who drink the water I give will never be thirsty again. It becomes a fresh, bubbling spring within them, giving them eternal life.”
May 6, 2015 – Click here to listen