Total Mileage: 6,560
Song of the Day: “Don’t Fear the Reaper” (Blue Oyster Cult)
Maybe this is one of those things where I just haven’t had the class on it yet, but I feel like a major gap in my education so far revolves around the growth and development of churches, and fleshing out my knowledge on this topic has been a major goal of this journey. I’m not the first person to say this, and there’s actually a lot of research on the subject: just like people, churches have life cycles. They are born, grow to maturity, and pass away just as people do. Every church begins with an idea that is executed through the acquisition of funds, a pastor, and members. Some build buildings. Some rent spaces. Some meet in homes. Regardless, the church begins when people gather together. Churches implement programs, learn to respond to the needs of their communities, and reach adulthood. Eventually, churches age, cease to grow, and, over a period of several decades, decline. Barring certain historic churches that have been around for centuries, pretty much every church undergoes some variation of this life cycle and must eventually close its doors. There are a few exceptions. Some have revivals and begin their glory years anew, while some still decline and retire gracefully, closing the book on long and glorious histories.
A Very Personal Case Study
This was a very salient issue at the church where I grew up, Union Avenue Baptist Church (UABC) of Memphis, TN. By the time I had reached middle school, UABC was nearing 100 years of age, and many in the congregation were wondering if its glory days were long behind it. With the ever-present competition of suburban megachurches, many now-adult children of lifelong members had departed from the church, and without a specific vision for ministry in mind, many were questioning the direction that UABC should take. Would it be able to continue living out its mission to the Midtown neighborhood? Would new programs or facilities be able to revive UABC? Would the church be best served by merging with another congregation to boost attendance and financial giving to further missions? Would UABC eventually have to close its doors as the church’s significant senior adult population began passing away? Did the church need a new vision? I remember countless meetings, programs, committees, and revivals, all designed to redirect the course of the church and boost our membership. Everyone was reading Rick Warren, and the biggest buzz word was “vision.” That word was thrown around constantly as the church struggled with the issue of its own mortality. How could UABC grow and thrive again? Were those productive years really behind the church? Was it time to plan for the end?
As I talked about in an earlier blog post while I was still in Michigan, I wound up leaving UABC when it was actually in mid-turnaround. There was a transition in leadership that started bringing in younger couples, while a handful of lifelong members also left the church for various reasons involving that transition. (That’s my nice way of saying that the new guy wasn’t popular with everyone and actually made a few folks angry enough to leave, but he’s not there anymore either, so I guess we’ll call it a draw.) Still, the church had its new vision and managed to get a bit of a second wind.
Of course, what’s really remarkable about UABC was the massive revival that took place in the youth group, and frankly, I think people should be studying this church for that reason. You could easily teach a class on this place. When I was in middle school, we would have maybe a dozen youth on a good night, and all of them were the children of church members who attended on Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings largely because their parents made them. When I was entering into high school, my friend Rev. Jeff Williamson became the youth director, and something about the group’s dynamics changed. Jeff is too humble a guy to take credit for being such a useful instrument in God’s arsenal. He would cite the Spirit as the source of the growth, but I think it also had a lot to do with the sincerity and commitment that Jeff brought as a youth director. Having worked that gig before, Jeff brought with him a certain amount of experience and maturity and made it clear that he was in it for the long haul. He was no summer intern. He wasn’t one of these guys who would make a few parents mad and quit within a year. He was a competent and committed youth director who was going to be dedicated to helping us grow (spiritually at first, numerically later on). He did something gutsy by bringing in an X-Box and a copy of Halo and allowing us to run wild on it on Wednesday nights, but Jeff could also command our respect, and when it was time to shut off the game for Bible Study, he always had our full attentions. Jeff has been working with that youth group for nearly a decade now, and in that time, the makeup of the group has changed radically. Many of the members’ kids (the ones who formed the core of my age group) have graduated, and they’ve been replaced by kids from the neighborhood, many of whom are learning the basics of the Christian lifestyle for the very first time. Whereas my youth group was almost totally white, the kids in there on Wednesday evenings now are more racially integrated (a more accurate representation of the Midtown neighborhood). Also, their numbers have shot up, regularly exceeding 50 and often pushing into the 70s-- most of whom are kids meeting Jesus for the first time. In short, the church has proved that it’s not quite at the end of its life yet, and their youth ministry is leading the way.
Now, I’m not just bringing all this up so that I can reminisce fondly about the church where I grew up, and I’m not just talking about it to brag on Jeff. I feel like UABC is a good case study to keep in mind when talking about the life cycle of a church. UABC was born as the vision of a small number of people (three women living in Lenox, the suburb that would eventually become Midtown as the city expanded). As the church grew, it developed programs and attracted more people, hitting its prime a little before I came along. While I was a member there, the church was very much in a mature state and entering decline. At that point, UABC existed primarily as a set of programs and relationships without one clear vision driving it, but there were plenty of people looking to establish what that vision should be (if we could only all agree on it, which we couldn’t). Had UABC continued in that direction, those programs probably would’ve eventually started to fade away, leaving only the basics of building management and assisting with funeral arrangements, but that’s not what wound up happening. With the arrival of a new group of youth and young adults, the church started to affirm a slightly modified vision and began building new relationships, thus rebooting its life cycle to an earlier phase and ensuring the church’s continued presence in Midtown for a while longer.
The Life Cycle of the Church: Small and Mega
As remarkable as that turnaround might be, the life cycle of Union Avenue Baptist Church is not at all atypical. About a month ago when we first started exploring this subject, Erin found a pretty handy article on church life cycles, and while the article is a little repetitive, it offers some pretty interesting insights that can be best summarized using this graph:
A typical church begins with a vision, and the baby steps of church growth are all about building relationships in the nascent church community. As those relationships evolve into more organized programs and ministries, a church enters its infancy, and as those programs attract more people (who then strengthen the relationships), a church enters adolescence. At its prime, a church has a clear vision, strong relationships, effective and meaningful programs, and all basic management tasks are well maintained. With time (usually over multiple decades), a church will lose sight of that original vision, which begins the decline of the church, leading to an increasingly management-focused organizational style. Eventually, the church’s pastor has duties that are more akin to a chaplain, focusing less on programs and evangelism and tending more to the internal managerial needs of the church. As the remaining church members pass away or move on to other congregations, the church nears its death and eventually closes. Of course, as demonstrated by UABC, a church can reboot itself at any point in this cycle, but it certainly grows more difficult with the passage of time, and sometimes, starting over might require a pretty radical change.
I also want to make it clear that, just like with people, the knowledge that the church will eventually die shouldn’t inhibit our appreciation of it now. We shouldn’t start churches with the thought of their deaths hanging constantly over our heads, but we can still take precautions to make sure that our churches lead long and full lives, and I believe that more needs to be done in terms of helping us cope with church mortality. I would love to see coursework at Duke on helping churches to retire gracefully, but as so much of our curriculum is focused on rural churches that serve niche populations, I’m not sure if that’s a lesson I’ll get to learn while still in seminary-- may have to come by that knowledge later through hard knocks. Again, I still have another year of classes, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I’ll receive information on this topic. With such a large number of small churches out there (many of them nearing the end of their productive years), this seems like information that future pastors need to know. I believe that there really is a call out there for pastors who know how to administer the last rites to a church and help it go out peacefully. Personally, I still feel more called to the other end of the life cycle and see myself as more a church obstetrician, but even in the field of church planting, the mortality of the local church is something that we have to keep in mind as we cast a vision and begin building relationships and programs.
Of course, the megachurch presents a new wrinkle in this concept of the church life cycle. Mark Chaves’s work --which is sitting on my desk in Durham, but thankfully, I remember much of it-- has shown that megachurches tend to move through this cycle at a far faster pace than the smaller denominationally-affiliated churches, moving from birth to death in as little as three decades sometimes. I feel like a lot of this has to do with the cult of personality surrounding the churches’ celebrity pastors. If the church is structured too much around these individuals, then the church is limiting itself to a single generation of effectiveness, ensuring its own decline after the pastor retires or passes away. That’s why I was a little rough on Mark Driscoll two weeks ago-- he’s a big part of Mars Hill, and I really don’t want that music ministry fall by the wayside just because he moves on or retires a few decades from now. While the megachurches seem to burn brighter, they are also burning quicker, and this is something to keep in mind when considering membership in one. Because all of this research is pretty new, I’m still trying to see if much thought has been given to sustaining the megachurch. Since we know it burns out more quickly, what approaches have people tried in keeping it afloat following a transition in leadership? This is one reason that Bellevue Baptist is such an important part of my study since they have endured such a transition. Of course, for me right now, the biggest question is:
With such large and influential churches dominating the media coverage and influencing people’s perceptions of the state of the church in America, what message will it send when the current generation of megas pass away within a few decades?
I’m nowhere near done addressing this issue, but I feel like this was a decent start. I need to rest up though. Heading to LA in the morning-- Saddleback on Saturday and Mosaic on Sunday. Should be a pretty busy weekend.
Peace and Blessings,
Tom
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