Editorial: How are we going to save our churches?

How are we going to save our churches?

Pastors, deacons, finance committee chairs and other leaders in the church are asking this question—verbatim or in essence—with increasing frequency. They started asking before COVID.

Leaders of Christian institutions and parachurch ministries are asking this question, too.

We’re not asking how we’re going to get our churches or institutions into heaven. We’re asking how we’re going to keep from closing the doors and disbanding. We’re probably also asking how we’re going to keep our jobs.

The answer most likely every time is some version of “more”—more people, more baptisms, more money.

We need more visitors, more people attending worship services, more people joining the church. We need more people involved in Sunday school and Bible study groups. We need more people to give more money—which we spiritualize as “tithes” and “offerings.”

If “more” in this sense is the measure of our success, we will never succeed. Something else must be the measure of our success.

To that effect, I asked a group of pastors this week, “How much do we have to accomplish to know we’ve been effective in our ministry?”

Is there a certain number we need to reach in one or more categories to be able to say we did good? And is that number lower than we think is OK to say out loud? Either way, we’re measuring our ministry by the numbers.

Secularism challenging the church

This whole line of thinking was spurred by Andrew Root’s synopsis of Catholic Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s thinking on secularism.

Root, professor of youth and family ministry at Luther Seminary, was the keynote speaker during Truett Theological Seminary’s Pastors Conference, March 20–21. He sees implications for religious belief and ministry within Taylor’s thinking about secularism.

The focal question of the conference was, “Why are people leaving the church?”—a similar question to “How are we going to save our churches?”

In answer, Root offered Taylor’s description of increasing secularism. According to Taylor, secularism in the Western world—Europe and North America—has reached the point that “all belief [is] contested [and] fragilized.” No religious claims are taken for granted anymore; all are open to doubt.

One effect of belief becoming “fragilized” in this way is we aren’t certain about anything but what is right in front of us—what we can touch, see, hear, taste and smell.

One expression of this effect is seen in how churches have redirected funds away from intangible things like Cooperative Programs to more concrete, local and direct connections with people whose faces they’ve seen and voices they’ve heard.

Taylor’s description of our current state rings true, and it leaves us with more questions than answers. It also doesn’t alleviate the concern about how we’re going to save our churches.

The path forward for the church

Root wasn’t ringing the death knell for the church, nor was he advocating hospice care. Instead, he suggested we should lean into the expectation for more direct connection. He encouraged building one-on-one relationships; telling and listening to honest faith stories that include the highs and the lows of our faith journeys; and living in the way of Christ by walking alongside searching doubt.

This way is slow and out of our control. There’s no guarantee it will ever work. If it does work, it may be too little and too late to keep our institutions alive. We may be left wondering which it’s going to be—the institutions or the relationships that get our attention, and does one have to be prioritized over the other?

I asked Root if we’re supposed to give up our concern about saving our churches and instead give our time and energy to building relationships. He said we do have a responsibility to maintain our institutions. People sacrificed to build them, and places like church buildings are necessary sacred spaces. He said we also need to build relationships. For him, it’s not an either/or, but both/and.

I understand responsibility, but I don’t believe the responsibility to maintain institutions is primary to the responsibility to be faithful to God.

Asking the right question

More important than upholding our responsibility to a thing—albeit a thing made of people—is our faithfulness to God.

I don’t state this lightly. Holding up faithfulness to God as primary is a fearful thing that can be misappropriated and abused. In fact, the misuse of the concept has contributed to skepticism about religious claims.

Despite misuse of the idea, actual faithfulness to God still ought to be of more concern to us than more people, more baptisms and more money.

Consider, for example: If God calls one person to bring more people into a church and God calls another person to close a church, who’s the success and who’s the failure? The success is the one who was faithful and followed God’s call.

But in our words and behavior, too many of us don’t define ministry success that way. In our words and reactions, there is one clear success—the church that got bigger. Something was wrong with the church that closed; something was wrong with the pastor credited with closing it. And so, the last thing most pastors want is to be the one who presided over a church’s closing.

How are we going to save our churches? This isn’t the right question. Will we be faithful to God? That is the right question.

A last thought

At this point in writing, I received an email from a friend who is a pastor. He was writing to let me know his church recently voted to dissolve. I know the church, and I know some of their struggle, but I had no idea his email would arrive when it did.

I believe this church and its leadership wanted to be faithful to God—from their beginning to their dissolution. Faithfulness to God didn’t pack their pews. We’re not even sure at this point what their faithfulness to God resulted in or yet will bring to pass. All we know is they sought to be faithful to God.

So, I sit with this fresh news. I quietly hold their grief with them along with their hopeful wondering about the future. And I ask myself, “How will I be faithful to God—even if God calls me to look like a failure in the world’s eyes?”

Eric Black is the executive director, publisher and editor of the Baptist Standard. He can be reached at eric.black@baptiststandard.com. The views expressed are those solely of the author.