The church was dying and didn’t know it. Attendance was down, the building was mostly empty and the glory days had long since passed.
As a last resort, a church member asked LifeWay Christian Resources’ president, Thom S. Rainer, for advice. Rainer spent a few weeks studying the church, then recommended a number of changes.
But church leaders rejected them.
As he walked out the door, Rainer knew it was a matter of time before the church died. Later he and a friend performed a kind of autopsy on the church — reviewing its last few years. Lessons from that church autopsy — along with about a dozen others — are included in Rainer’s latest book, “Autopsy of a Deceased Church.”
The book is meant for struggling and vibrant churches alike, Rainer said. “Even healthy churches need to learn from autopsies,” he noted, “because they can tell us paths of prevention.”
Rainer found 10 factors — from slow erosion of the congregation and too many short-term pastors to a lack of prayer and neglected facilities — that cause churches to decline and die.
Most of the deceased churches Rainer studied had once been thriving and then went through a period of decline. In some cases, demographics played a role. About a third of the dead churches had been in urban areas where the ethnic mix of the community changed but the church did not.
“Though it’s difficult to isolate any one factor as the most dangerous,” Rainer said, “the steep numerical decline of these churches was most noticeable as the congregation started focusing on their own needs. They became preference-driven instead of Great Commission-driven.”
(BP)
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