Churches don’t close because they lose their vision (or fulfill it), and they don’t close when they get too small. Churches close their doors when they run out of money. Often the demise of a congregation is dressed up in other language, but the cold hard fact is that churches close when they run out of cold hard cash. With churches experiencing a crisis of decline—an experience that has half of all churches in the United States seeing sixty-five or fewer members in attendance on a Sunday—there will be many more budgets that bottom out and church doors that close forever.[1]
The fact that churches close when they cease to be financially solvent should come as no surprise. Despite the fact we say we worship the King of kings, in our contemporary church culture, it is resources that are king. The success of churches is most often judged by the holy trinity of resource indicators: budgets, buildings, and butts in pews. Sit down in nearly any group of pastors that don’t know each other well, and it doesn’t take long for the question “How many members do you have?” to get asked. Another question, a close second, would be about where a congregation’s building is located and its size. And in my experience, these three Bs of church resource measurement are also used by church members when talking to friends and coworkers about their congregations.
It would be very easy to lay the blame for this at the feet of our consumeristic culture, yet I think there is more to it. The German sociologist Hartmut Rosa explains that Western culture “requires constant economic growth, technological acceleration, and cultural innovation.”As a result everything feels as if it is speeding up, and in reality, it is speeding up. On a personal level we feel this acceleration as our lives increasingly “revolve around and amount to nothing more than tackling an ever-growing to-do list.” Rosa furthermore notes that “the basic institutional structure of modern society can be maintained only through constant escalation,” something he calls dynamic stabilization.[2] A consequence of dynamic stabilization for congregations is that budgets must always grow, congregations must always grow, and buildings should be growing—or at least be bursting at the seams. In our culture, sustaining feels like a failure, even at church. Constant growth is the only way to feel stable in our contemporary Western worldview.
Adding to this acceleration is the promise made by technology that each new gadget will offer a way to free up more time. In the postwar era, we were told the dishwashers, automatic laundry machines, and programmable ovens would give us more leisure time. We’ve been told that the home computer and smartphone will give us more time. And in our current moment, we are being told about the time savings that artificial intelligence will deliver to us. However, in a diabolical twist, the increased free time never materializes; instead, we are able to do more in a shorter time, which winds up meaning that we give ourselves ever more to do.[3]
The church’s addiction to technology is obvious. In response to church growth theory and the practice of mimicking large, highly visible (and highly marketed) churches, many churches added projectors and screens to their worship spaces. In some cases, this desire for tech marred architecture that was designed and purpose-built for worship—crosses were covered up and stained-glass windows obscured in order to broadcast the words to praise and worship songs.
The church’s addiction to technology was further demonstrated in recent years via the buying spree many congregations went on during the COVID pandemic. Thrust into an unprecedented situation, many worshipping communities sought a high-tech solution; they bought cameras, microphones, and all manner of digital paraphernalia to produce online services that would rival local television in their production values. For more and more of us, when we are faced with a dilemma or problem, we go looking for technology to solve it.
This tech addiction is connected to a cultural value in the West that sees innovation and creativity as the solution to every problem. In light of that, one of the highest compliments you can pay a person (or a church) is to say they are creative. Once upon a time, you could walk into a church of a certain denomination and expect the service to be largely the same from town to town—value was placed on stability and loyalty rather than reinvention. Andrew Root has written about how this drive for innovation places pressure on clergy and congregations to be perpetually creative and innovative in a way that both fosters burnout and a desire for more money because “money buys the opportunity to be creative and seek innovation.”[4] This drive for the new and novel—and the resources to facilitate that creativity—produces a sense of failure that can be paralyzing for churches that are unable to keep up. When I took over as pastor in my church, I was convinced that my own creativity, particularly in the area of preaching, would save our church. I firmly believed that my gifts would set us apart from other churches and spark growth. In the end, it was nothing more than misguided hubris.
Root offers another perspective. He asserts, “It’s clear: resources create life, or so it is assumed. This is its own late-modern dogma, bound in the immanent frame. Many in leadership accept the dogma that a church full of life is a church full of resources, and vice versa.”[5] He’s not wrong. We tend to confuse resources with life. If we have money in the bank, we always have an opportunity to produce something new, or so we think. This is why churches wait to fold until they run out of cash. In our contemporary moment, many churches are running out of resources, and this leaves them feeling lifeless. We far too often confuse money for vitality and resources with life.
In De-Sizing the Church, Karl Vaters makes similar observations through the lens of church growth theory. He notes, “The idea of a church constantly getting bigger began as an outlier. Then it became a goal. Now it is the standard by which the performance of all churches is measured. Our obsession with numerical success is overwhelming pastors, stifling churches, and ruining our witness. Size comes at a price. There’s a price to get to it, a price to maintain it, and a huge price when it doesn’t work out as expected.” Vaters also observes that “church growth is not the problem. Big churches are not the problem. Bigness is the problem. Bigness is an obsessive mindset. Bigness convinces us that more is always better. Bigness hides character flaws beneath numerical success. Bigness is a disease that creates dis-ease in everything it touches and everyone within its orbit.”[6]
In each of these church mindsets, the underlying drive is for more—more members, resources, innovation, staff—in a way that can only be dynamically stabilized. In this world, a congregation that is shrinking is seen as a failure, and a sense of depression sets in.[7] Rosa is quick to point out what our drive for more is not about: “To argue that modernity is riven by an increasing demand—higher, faster, farther—is to misunderstand its structural reality. This game of escalation is perpetuated not by a lust for more, but the fear of having less and less.”[8] We have collective fear of missing out, of not having, of being left behind. In light of that, the solution for most church problems is seen as more, and when that fails new.
But I wonder whether our fixation on acquiring more resources or the new thing is really the answer. Perhaps the way forward might be less and a return to the past. What if our churches already have everything they need?
At the end of the Gospels Jesus dies, is resurrected, and then ascends to heaven. He prepares his disciples for these events by telling them about the coming of the Holy Spirit, emphasizing that they are to serve as his messengers, and praying for their unity together and with him (see John 13–17). When Jesus ascends to heaven, there are a rather small number of “members” in the church, and those followers of Jesus had exactly no church buildings (remember they borrowed a room for the Last Supper). They had no budget. They didn’t have a single Bible (I know they had the Old Testament, so relax, biblical scholars). In our contemporary culture, Jesus’s ministry would be seen as a failure—three years of ministry and few budgets, buildings, and bodies. However, the church then, as now, had all it needed to be the church.
Shane Claiborne writes in Irresistible Revolution that “God’s Kingdom grows smaller and smaller as it takes over the world.” That statement might make your chest tighten or your pulse race. As Westerners in our current climate, saying that the way forward is smaller is likely to get you laughed at, or worse. However, we are taught by the words and example of Christ that to follow the way of Jesus means to empty oneself (see Phil. 2:1–18; Luke 9:1–9 and 23–26; Luke 10:1–12; and Matt. 16:24). Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it this way, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”[9] We are invited into a downward journey. None of this sparks joy for us in the Western world—in fact it freaks us out to consider following Jesus into less and less, into emptying ourselves and our ministries, into being last rather than first.
Here’s a story to illustrate what I am getting at. Shortly after I became the pastor of my current church, a member told me, “You have everything a pastor could want.” She was referring to the fact that our church had a large facility (over twenty thousand square feet); a bunch of extremely talented musicians, passionate worship leaders, and artists; robust programing; and a history of effective ministry. In some ways, she wasn’t wrong—we had the equipment, space, and personnel to run an attractional model of church. Yet, as she made this statement I felt pressure. I felt pressure to perform, to make something happen (innovate), to save the church so it could save the world. I felt pressure, but I didn’t feel empowered in the way she likely intended. Instead, I felt deeply unsettled.
Although we had space for programs and worshipcentric resources like musicians and equipment, it felt to me like there was something missing. For starters, the church had experienced a 66 percent drop in attendance over the previous decade, and that drop in attendance gutted the budget. Although we had a building, it came with a hefty price tag—driven by the need to survive as a church and pay our rent, we had sublet and shared our space to such an extent that one elder quit the board because he was “tired of running a real estate company.” We had done anything and everything we could to stay in our building (a prized resource), including moving our service to Sunday evening so another church could have the culturally conditioned morning slot. The thinking, as I remember it, was that we had to have a building (a resource), so we could have the type of service we wanted (always couched in language about seekers) and programs. Yet week after week we asked for help with those programs as we tried to staff the things we thought that all churches must have (a children’s program, a youth group, a summer camp, and more). As attendance fell, the flow of cash and volunteers dwindled, until all that was left was a trickle. Soon, we had no full-time staff—that’s right I had “everything I needed,” but I was working part-time for a below-market salary with no real benefits. But more than the obvious lack of people, volunteers, and funds, there was something larger missing.
The church member made this comment in regard to a weekly event and the equipment needed to produce that event. Her implication was that we had lights, sound, projectors, musicians, instruments, and a fog machine (OK, I made that last one up, but the rest is true), and all we needed was for me to be the missing ingredient—a charismatic, innovative pastor. That’s the formula, right? I’ve seen it a million times, and so have you. The way to build a church is to have a magnetic preacher—to foster a cult of personality—and a great worship band, one that covers today’s Christian music hits from K-Love. That is how it’s done. And that is what we did for two decades. Our church took that model and ran with it. It worked—like it really worked great—for about ten years, and then it stopped working.
The unsettled feeling I had was two pronged. First, an attractional model of church is always concerned with the person who is not there—think of Willow Creek’s empty chair or Saddleback’s Sam and Sally. And although that model can be highly evangelistic, the focus on the new person coming through the door makes discipleship and congregational care difficult. The resources that remained at our church in the fall of 2018, after everything had been whittled away, revealed our priorities. We were concerned with the perpetuation of a certain type of worship service that had as its focus people who were not in the congregation. This focus had left those who were part of the church on a weekly basis tired—or even burned out—from maintaining the Sunday event and the programs of the church while receiving little in the way of life-giving care and community. Second, as we were running out of money, I was beginning to recognize a hard question looming in our future, a question that many churches across North America have faced, or are currently facing—do we need to close? For so many congregations this really feels like a twisted multiple choice: (A) close the church or (B) continue and slowly die.
When the cash ran out, our choice was between closing or reimagining ourselves with those who wanted to continue in a new way. We sold off the majority of the church’s possessions. We left our building and laid off our salaried staff.[10] We switched out the onstage band performances for a single guitarist who is also the only singer and who now sits with the rest of the congregation in a circle of co-learners and co-participants. We read lyrics on a smartphone app rather than a hulking projection screen, and we began discussing the biblical text together rather than listening to a sermon.
As a church, we attempted to lean deeply into what it means to be a community of believers and friends following God together. Our new format is rooted in a living expression of the priesthood of all believers and the original meaning of the word liturgy—it is the work of the people. In short, we moved from a format focused on those who were not present to a format focused on the people who attend in the circle. We stopped believing that the answer was more and began to lean into what we already had: God’s people and the Holy Spirit, the exact resources that the early church had in the days and years after Jesus’s death, resurrection, and ascension.
Three years into our experiment, church members refer to our community gatherings on Sunday as a “therapeutic,” “non-judgmental” space “to grow.” We have learned to be vulnerable and courageous as we share the struggles in our lives. Regular attenders express a strong connection to each other and appreciation for a space in which we can both care for one another and receive care. There is a universal preference for discussing the text as opposed to being preached at, and we value how questions and doubts are welcomed in this environment, how it feels like a safe place to tell the truth about our soul.[11] One member reported that this “is the first time I’ve been excited to go to church on Sunday,” and another said that our church has “destroyed me for other churches, and I couldn’t go back to the old way.” By eliminating programs, and the constant need to staff them, our church has been freed up to pour all its energy into each other. By removing the division between the leaders on the stage and the congregation, an environment of mutual concern, care, and learning has blossomed. By putting the focus on formation rather than innovation, we have been able to incubate community that isn’t anxious about what we don’t have, community that lives into the richness of what we do have.
The Apostle Paul once wrote to the church meeting in Rome, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom. 12:2 NIV). If the pattern of this world is one in which we are expected to seek more and more resources; to judge our churches on their budgets, buildings, and bodies; and to seek innovation, how can we be in the world but not of it (see John 17:11 and 14–15)? Can we move away from money and wealth-based indicators as the test for gauging church success and move toward indicators that seek growth of individuals and communities toward the God that loves them and the people in the places where they live? What if rather than the biggest budget and building winning, we remember that “foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head” (Matt. 8:20)? What if rather than total numbers we move to remembering that “for where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.” (Matt. 18:20)? What if the people of God and the Holy Spirit is all that is needed? That was the formula for the early church, and I’d say it worked rather well.
[1] Aaron Earls, “Small Churches Continue Growing—But in Number, not Size: US Congregations Are Increasingly Small, while US Churchgoers Are Increasingly Headed toward Larger Churches,” Lifeway Research, October 20, 2021, https://research.lifeway.com/2021/10/20/small-churches-continue-growing-but-in-number-not-size/.
[2] Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World (Polity Books, 2020), 9, 7, and 9.
[3] See Andrew Root, The Congregation in a Secular Age: Keeping Sacred Time against the Speed of Modern Life (Baker Academic, 2021), 123–38; and Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-modern Temporality (NSU Press, 2010), 20–29.
[4] Root, The Church After Innovation (Baker Academic, 2022), 9 and 8.
[5] Root, Churches and the Crisis of Decline: A Hopeful, Practical Ecclesiology for a Secular Age (Baker Academic, 2022), 15.
[6] Vaters, De-Sizing the Church: How Church Growth Became a Science, Then an Obsession, and What’s Next (Moody, 2024), 13 and 12.
[7] Root, The Congregation, 3–18.
[8] Rosa, The Uncontrollability, 9–10.
[9] Claiborne, Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical (Zondervan, 2006), 319; and Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, trans. R. H. Fuller, rev. Irmgard Booth (Simon and Schuster, 1995), 89.
[10] We have two members that co-pastor our group, earning a combined stiped per month of $750.
[11] Parker Palmer has been quoted as saying, “One of the things this society is most deficient in is safe spaces for truth-telling about the condition of our souls” (Palmer, “The Inner Life of Rebellion,” On Being, May 8, 2015, https://www.dailygood.org/story/1022/the-inner-life-of-rebellion-on-being/). The telling of truth about the condition of your soul has become my working definition of confession.