Autopsy of a Deceased Church

12 Ways to Keep Yours Alive

Thom S. Rainer

• Publisher: B&H Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781433683930
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Chiesa cristiana

No one wants to see a church die. And yet, far too many churches are dying. For more than twenty-five years, Dr. Thom Rainer has helped churches grow, reverse the trends of decline, and has autopsied those that have died. From this experience, he has discovered twelve consistent themes among those churches that have died. Yet, it’s not gloom and doom because from those twelve themes, lessons on how to keep your church alive have emerged.Whether your church is vibrant or dying, whether you are a pastor or a church member, Autopsy of a Deceased Church will walk you through the radical paths necessary to keep your church alive to the glory of God and advancement of Christ’s Kingdom!

Part 1

The Autopsy

Chapter 1

Introduction

I knew the patient before she died.

It was ten years ago. She was very sick at the time, but she did not want to admit it.

There was only a glimmer of hope at best. But that hope could become a reality only with radical change. She wasn’t nearly ready for that change. Indeed, she was highly resistant to any change. Even though she was very sick.

Even though she was dying.

I told her the bad news bluntly: You are dying. I hope I said those words with some compassion. I did feel badly sharing the news. But it was the only way I could see to get her attention.

I even told her that, at best, she had five years to live. At the time I said those words, I don’t really think I was that optimistic. I would not have been surprised if she died within the year.

But she was not only in denial; she was in angry denial.

“I’ll show you,” she said. “I’ll prove you are wrong. I am not dying.”

Her words were fierce. Defiant. Angry.

It was time for me to leave. I had done all I could.

I left.

I was not angry. I was sad. Very sad.

Now to her credit, she was right up to a point. She did not die in five years. She proved resilient and survived another ten years. But her last decade, though she was technically alive, was filled with pain, sickness, and despair.

I’m not so sure her longer-term survival was a good thing.

She never got better. She slowly and painfully deteriorated.

And then she died.

The Autopsy

She, of course, is a church. A real church. A church in the Midwest.

A church that was probably born out of vision.

A church that died because she no longer had a vision.

I was the church’s consultant over a decade ago. The church had reached its peak attendance many years earlier. The worship attendance of 750 in 1975 took place during “the good old days.” We’ll talk about those days shortly.

By the time I arrived, the attendance had fallen to an average of eighty-three. The large sanctuary seemed to swallow the small crowd on Sunday morning.

The reality was that most of the members did not want me there. They were not about to pay a consultant to tell them what they refused to hear. Only when a benevolent member offered to foot my entire bill did the congregation grudgingly agree to retain me.

I worked with the church for three weeks. The problems were obvious. The solutions were difficult.

On my last day the benefactor walked me to my rental car. “What do you think, Thom?” he asked. He could see the uncertainty in my expression, so he clarified. “How long can our church survive?” That was the moment I gave my foreboding declaration of five years at most.

Of course, I was wrong on the exact number of years. The church has only recently closed. Like many dying churches, it held on to life tenaciously. The church lasted ten years after my declaration of a terminal diagnosis.

My friend from that church called me a week after the church officially closed its doors. We talked for over an hour. I took no pleasure in discovering that my diagnosis was correct. Together, my friend and I reviewed the past ten or more years. We were able to piece together a fairly accurate autopsy.

We learned with even more clarity why the church died. We performed an autopsy.

It was not fun, but we thought it was necessary.

Why Go Through the Pain?

My sister died before I was born. I only recently learned that my father convinced the attending doctor to perform an autopsy, and that he convinced the doctor to let him be in the room while the autopsy was performed. My grieving father had to know why his beloved Amy died. He had to know why her little heart had failed.

He had to know. He just had to know.

Why should I take you through the pain of discovering why churches die?

Because we need to know.

Autopsies are performed on humans to find out why they died. The discoveries might give surviving family members information they need to avoid the same path as their loved one.

Sometimes a forensic pathologist performs an autopsy to discover how a murder was committed, or how an accident happened. The information is always useful. It sometimes brings people to justice.

But that does not mean autopsies are pleasant.

I plan to take you through the results of fourteen church autopsies. I won’t bore you with a church-by-church report because there is much redundancy. I will instead summarize my findings of all the deceased churches.

I owe much gratitude to those who talked with me freely and openly, those who performed the autopsies with me. Each of them was a member of a church that was once alive, but now is dead. Each of them went through the pain of an autopsy with me.

The churches are diverse in their denominational or non-denominational backgrounds. They are diverse in their locations. They are diverse in their local and regional demographics.

But they are all similar in one significant way: they followed paths that caused them to die.

Jesus told Peter that the Church will never die: “And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build My church, and the forces of Hades will not overpower it” (Matt. 16:18). Indeed the Church will never die. But churches have and are dying.

It is my prayer that these autopsies, though painful to watch, will prove helpful to leaders and laity of churches today. As many as 100,0001 churches in America are showing signs of decline toward death.

May God give us the courage to make the changes necessary to give new life to our churches.

The Prayerful Commitment

In every chapter, you will be asked a simple question: “Will you make a prayerful commitment?”

The commitment is really between you and God. Perhaps God will raise up an army of church members who are no longer satisfied with business as usual.

The trauma of observing an autopsy is only beneficial if it is received as a warning to the living. This book is not about dwelling on the past, but bearing fruit in the future. The prayer commitment in each chapter is a positive challenge to take the hill, so to speak, where others may have failed. The commitments are vital in this book. Because if we heed the warnings of the autopsy, we stand to benefit far greater than we could otherwise imagine.

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Prayerful Commitment 1

God, open my eyes that I might see my church as You see it. Let me see where change needs to take place, even if it is painful to me. And use me, I pray, to be an instrument of that change whatever the cost.

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Questions for Further Thought

1. If your church was given a “physical exam” today, what do you think the doctor’s diagnosis would be: healthy, slightly sick, very sick, or dying? Why?

2. Why do many church members in dying churches refuse to see the decline in the health of the church?

3. Explain how churches can die in the context of Matthew 16:18, which says Hades will not prevail.

Note

1. This number is based on the foundational research for my book Breakout Churches.

Chapter 2

Slow Erosion

I had not been home in years. My mom died in 1997, and she was the last surviving member of our family to live in our hometown. Because I had no immediate family there, I really had no reason to return.

But I did return more than a decade later. I was stunned. The level of deterioration surpassed my worst imagination.

From my perspective, my small hometown was looking more like a ghost town. Several businesses on the main street were closed and vacant. You could see the faint outline of paint on the glass that once told the name of the store. I walked store by store. My childhood memories came alive.

Now to be sure, the town was never a bustle of activity. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, most people called the town “quaint.” It was kind of Mayberry-like, for all you Andy Griffith fans. It seemed to be a good place to grow up, though the amenities were few.

I looked in the display windows of the closed stores. Dust and more dust were all I could see on the floor and the bare display shelves. Each store brought back a vivid memory. Each step took me back to another time, a better time for this town.

But the overall state of the town was sad, very sad. I knew the place was not what it was in my childhood years, but it was much worse than I expected. I decided to go to one of two fast-food places of my childhood. It too was closed. It looked like it had not been occupied in a decade.

Later that day, I spoke with an acquaintance who had lived there all his life. He was in his mid-sixties. I tend to be straightforward in my conversations, so I bluntly asked him what happened to our hometown. His perplexed look and simple question said it all: “W...