Monday, April 24, 2006

Dying Churches

I was in an IFB church this past week. A friend was preaching there. I was saddened. Of the 45 or so people that were there I could count on one hand (maybe a few fingers of a second) the number of people in the congregation under 55.

I don't want to minimize these folks and say that their days of serving the Lord are over, because I believe that is wrong also, but until there is a huge shake up in that church and some major pain that will come with it, it will continue to be a dying church.

This church has the "blessing/cursing" of being located near a large IFB college. The blessing portion is that the Pastor has all the young-on-fire-for-the-Lord-preacher-boys that he could ask for to help with his ministry. The curse is that he has all the young-on-fire-for-the-Lord-preacher-boys the he could ask for to help with his ministry. I am sure you could understand the benefits of this, but you are probably asking, why is it a bad thing or a cursing?

From my observations I saw:
  • Much desire from the IFB preacher boys for evangelism and doctrinal purity.
  • Much desire from the pastor to reach young people.
  • Much resentment of the IFB preacher boys from some of the people in the church.
  • A lack of "engagement" from the IFB preacher boys in the life of the people of the church. They were there to do a job, please don't get in the way with your problems, questions, or issues, thankyouverymuch!
  • "Restart" sydrome... from the preacher boys... sorry it's [summer/christmas/thanksgiving] your on your own try to maintain what "we've" put together.
  • "Hired-Guns" effect. Why should we go out on visitation? Isn't that why we have these "kids" here?
There were other things I observed too, but I just couldn't help but be sorrowful of the fact that unless things changed drastically that this church would be dead in 15 years. It brought about the reflection that change is painful much of the time, but that pain is necessary for growth. In my own spiritual life I see that pain is necessary for growth much of the time and that sometimes I have to lose that which seems important before I can move ahead.

posted by SeedSpreader @ 8:54 AM   1 comments

1 Comments:

At 8:34 AM, Blogger Z_Truth said...

My former church was a dying church. Trust me... Looking at it now, it's definitely God holding the thing together. My father-in-law pastored the church for 19 years before passing away. The church grew to capacity, then something happened that caused almost half of the members to leave. Then jobs started being transferred. Eventually the church went from 120 to 40. It was all mostly older folks. The teen group went down to 3 and they never really cared to invite their friends or go out looking for new teens. My father-in-law died and the church went down to a regular 20 people with 2 teens, one graduated and the other just didn't care to come. They got a pastor who was all about soul winning, but was too young and prideful and almost destroyed what was left of the church (he was there 2 months). The weird thing was, after he left, all the people who didn't do anything started picking up the slack. These people hadn't done anything in 10 years. They had a man in the church who was a lay preacher, his daughter played the piano, the 2-month pastor had established new deacons and trustees (which was about the only good thing he did) and they were on fire with making repairs and helping folks in the church, and the people were unified. I think they realized the state they were in. They started soul winning and recently got a godly new pastor. They've had their first baptism in a long time and people have come to join the church and souls are being saved. There are no teens anymore, but the junior church is building greatly because of the young families coming with their children. I guess sometimes we see the now, but God knows what's in the future. It could be that this dying church is being healed and God will restore it fully again.
The point of this comment? I have no idea. Just commenting.

 

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