Church revitalization is biblical, doable and real, said Chris Crain, senior pastor of South Roebuck Baptist Church, Birmingham.
Delivering the Wednesday morning theme interpretation — FutureFocus — to the Alabama Baptist State Convention, Crain said, “A church can die of atrophy — lack of exercising spiritual muscles and living on work of the past.”
While humans have a natural gravitation toward death, churches should work against that, he said. “We as pastors and leaders of our churches are called upon to wave the smelling salts of the Great Commission under the nose of the swooning church.”
Preaching from Revelation 3, Crain said the letter to the church at Sardis “is particularly timely” for churches today.
“Sardis was an archetype of the church that had stopped living out her purpose,” he explained. “Jesus didn’t notice any major theological problems in the church or persecution the church was facing, but He also didn’t see anything good the church was doing.
“The church had fallen into the pattern of existing in order to exist,” Crain said. “It was indicted by Jesus Christ as being a dead church.”
But the church was not the victim of a population bust, Crain said. “The city of Sardis was populated with all kinds of people. … It was a busy place. … The temple of Artemis was there. Many unbelieving Jews lived in the city. There were plenty of people who needed to hear about Jesus Christ.
“There were plenty of people who needed to be reached with the gospel and yet they were in this cycle,” he said.
The Sardis story is still true today, Crain said, noting the scenario of repeating the same routines over and over again.
“Think about each Sunday morning where you drive into the parking lot of [the] church, turn on the lights, do some variation of the same worship service, turn out the lights and drive away — Sunday after Sunday.”
Jesus described the church at Sardis as nekros in Greek, which means unable, ineffective, dead, unresponsive to life-giving influences, inoperative to the things of God. “Jesus chose to use the term ‘dead’ in this letter,” Crain said.
But in modern-day terminology, the term “zombies” may be the best analogy for some churches, he said. “They look alive but a zombie church is dead — dead in missions, dead in evangelism, dead in compassion.”
But just as Jesus called the church at Sardis to wake up, zombie churches of today should do the same, Crain said, noting he has looked a potential zombie church in the eye and shaken it back to life.
“My church and I were scared to death of death,” he said. “We knew that an unfavorable response to the changing demographics of our community could mean the death of our church. … Many of the churches in our community had relocated, transplanted.”
But Crain was committed to keeping the church where it was and helping it find vitality again. The words to the church at Sardis “kept ringing in my ear … your works are not complete.”
“I didn’t know what to do. … We called consultants. … They sent us demographics and some of the best information you could ever want,” he explained.In the end, South Roebuck Baptist learned to “respect an aging congregation, reach the next generation and respond to a changing community.”
“We decided to get back to our roots,” he said, noting the Birmingham community where the original church sits was thriving when the church was planted. South Roebuck Baptist also worked with Birmingham Association to plant a church where needs were identified in the nearby community of Margaret. South Roebuck Baptist now consists of four congregations on two campuses.
“We were semi-comatose,” Crain said. “We didn’t know what to do. But God took a Sardis church and shook it back to life. … All of our trying and our struggling — there is no consultant, no resources that can help us like the Lord Jesus can.”
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