by Nigel Boys
One sure way to see if your church is likely to die within the next 20 years is to take a close look at the attendance over the last ten years and determine if it has declined for at least seven of those years…
According to Dr. Thom Rainer, president and CEO of Lifeway Christian Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention, he has found many ways to tell if your church will still be around in 20 years time. The research Rainer conducted was for his latest book titled “Autopsy of a Deceased Church.”
Some of the things to be taken into account when deciding if your church will die out in the next 20 years, according to Rainer, is the age of the members of your congregation; how many people are falling out at the current time; and how much your members are contributing to the financial support of your church.
Rainer’s conclusions come from a recent study of 1,007 pastors by LifeWay Research, who asked the participants via telephone interviews if they thought their church was a dying church.
According to the results, 7 percent of the pastors who contributed in the study said that they “strongly agreed” that they were in a dying church, 15 percent said that they “somewhat agreed” they were, 19 percent said they “somewhat disagreed” and those who “strongly disagreed” amounted to 58 percent of the respondents.
Rainer then looked at the possible ways that members of a church could prevent their church fading out and came up with five possible questions that they could ask themselves to discover if their church is at risk:
- One sure way to see if your church is likely to die within the next 20 years is to take a close look at the attendance over the last ten years and determine if it has declined for at least seven of those years, according to Rainer. If it has, then it could be in danger.
- Another way to tell if your church is dying is to examine the member’s contributions over the last ten years. If there has been a decline in giving for at least seven of those years, then your church may be on its way to dying off.
- Take a good look at your church and see if it looks more like the community surrounding it than it did ten years ago or less than. If it’s less, then the community is likely to be growing away from your church.
- Do you have more arguments and differences of opinion in your church today than you did ten years ago? If so, your members could be growing apart from one another and not retaining the same vision for your church’s future.
- Has your church decreased the amount of money they spend encouraging others to be a part of your church than they did ten years ago? If they have then your members are probably losing interest in ministering to others.
In conclusion, although Rainer admits that asking yourself these questions may not always save your church if it is in danger of dying; however, it may help in determining if your church is at risk and give you the idea that you should be doing something about it to save it.
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No wonder some priests go on artificial spiritual power just to keep the church moving…..