Have you ever seen a church fall?
We’ve seen leaders fall, but what about churches? Once, they were growing, healthy, seeing people come to faith and grow in maturity, and then, seemingly overnight, that wasn’t happening. At first, the people in the church are completely unaware of it. Giving or attendance may dip a little bit, but leaders explain it away. But slowly, if you look closer, you see that the church has lost hundreds of people in a few years.
But why?
Because a church loses its way, they didn’t do it on purpose, but slowly, they did.
Years ago, I read a fantastic book by Jim Collins called How the Mighty Fall. In it, he lays out how companies fall, and often, they fall, and they are completely unaware of it. While the book has a lot of insights for pastors and churches, there are some clear reasons a church falls.
But how does a church fall?
You could say it’s when they lose their purpose, take their eyes off Jesus, and focus on man, buildings, money, etc. But the reality is that a church can do that and not fall. They can keep growing, reaching people, and doing things. It is often, in looking back, that we see a church has fallen.
We could say it is through metrics. When attendance or giving drops, salvation, and baptisms drop, a church has fallen. But that can also be a seasonal thing, a situation or crisis the church is going through that needs to be weathered.
The other day, I found myself in 2 Kings 17 in my daily reading. At the top of my building is a heading that reads “Why Israel Fell.” As I read it, the comparisons for churches were striking. The writer of 2 Kings lays out 3 reasons why Israel fell, and I think have profound implications for pastors and churches.
Here they are:
Doing what is right in their own eyes. This is a common refrain in the Old Testament, specifically the book of Judges. The people fall away when they do what is right in their own eyes. When this line appears in Scripture, you know that sin is a major part of people’s lives: idol worship, forgetting the work of God, and moving away from God’s commandments.
Churches do this when they start doing things to gain a crowd instead of forming people in the likeness of Jesus. This happens within church communities when sin abounds, people are in conflict, and it isn’t resolved, gossip runs rampant, and people are divisive around things they shouldn’t be about.
Repeating the past and not learning from it. One of the biggest struggles for a church in decline is to try to recapture the glory days or when things were working in a church. The thinking goes if we can get back to what we were doing, then everything will be okay, or we will return to what it was. Or, if we can do the ministries we used to do, we will be where we used to be. And while that can be true, it rarely is. Those ministries and how they were being done can often be what led to the decline.
To move forward and keep a church from decline, it must move into the new season that God has for it. We must celebrate and remember what God did in the past but not cling to it.
The other trap the church falls into is not learning from the past. Often, when a church goes through a difficult season, it is easy to pin that season on one person or a group of people without looking under the hood of the church to ask how that happened or what is in the DNA of the church that might need to be dealt with. Churches have origin stories, like families, and there are things within the emotional system of a church that will continue to be passed down if they aren’t dealt with.
Not doing the will of God. The last thing a church that falls does, and this will be obvious, but not doing the will of God. The Bible is clear on what the church should be about and focused on. Yet, many churches find themselves not doing those things because of what they think or want churches to do or because the church down the road does it or has this ministry or that one. Also, churches overlook the season God has their church in and want to fight against it. When that happens, it only leads to hurt feelings and frustrations.