discipled living

The next time you enter church to worship with others, pause at the door and look at the people.  You may be looking at the most fertile mission field you will ever see.  How many of the people attending church are on the brink of leaving your fellowship?  We know that there are unsaved people in our midst, but equally important are the fragile Christians who dwell among us.

The issue is the revolving door of the church and more importantly, the Christian care ministry of the local church.  Why do so many people who come to church leave the church?  Certainly there are a myriad of responses that could be offered to this question. The responsibility for answering the question must be shared between the people and the church they attend.

One immutable truth that may help answer the question!

Change in a person’s behavior clearly signals a change in the person’s belief. 

Consider the family who once attended and contributed regularly to the finances of the church.  Should their attendance patterns change or their giving decrease or drop to nothing you are receiving a message that something significant has changed in their belief about your church.  Their absence may be created by a change in employment, illness or some other tangible cause.

Still the absence may signal a significant change in their perception of your fellowship. While this is not an open-ended indictment against the fellowship it certainly represents a concern as well as an opportunity.  It is an opportunity for the church to function as an intelligent and agile organism.  

Intelligence and agility empowers the church to proactively respond to the challenges it encounters at the one member or one family level.  At the lowest level of church is the individual. He or she expresses the circumstances of life in church through attendance, giving, ministry engagement and study participation which can be viewed as patterns.  Stepping back from the grind of day to day church life and looking at the patterns that emerge from collected data can empower the leadership to proactively support positive trajectories or address negative trajectories in the church. 

Consider the Scripture’s instruction found in the Proverbs 27:23 “Be thou diligent to know the state of thy flocks, and look well to thy herds.” Knowing the condition of the people we are given to care for is the chief responsibility of the shepherd.  In fact it is the first work of mission for the church shepherds which includes the pastor, deacons and ministry leaders.  We can not afford to “damn” the sheep when we have not been diligent to know their state.

Endeavoring to know the state of our flocks may stem the tide of the growing “Dechurched” trend.  If the church is shrinking in attendance, we must ask the question, “What has changed in the members mind’s that is expressing itself through declining engagement in the life of your church? “

There are many who are sounding the alarm in the American Church!  The “Crisis” confronting the church is for many the “drift” of the “Dechurched”.  David Olson, the creator of theAmericanChurch.org is one of them.  According to Olson, his research suggests that only 17% of American Adults attended church on any given Sunday in 2007.

Olson’s conclusions suggest that the research reported by George Barna, author of “The Revolution” is inflated based upon inaccurate self-reported data.  Barna found that 47% of adults attended church on a given Sunday in 2005.  Is it possible that attendance dropped by 30% points in two years?  Was Barna’s data inflated by what Olson says may be, exaggeration of church attendance behaviors and over estimation of attendance figures when polled?

Ask Not For Whom The Bell Tolls…

Another interesting statistic cited by Olson is that Church attendance between 1990 and 2006 remained relatively static at approximately 51 Million attendees.   What makes the attendance figures telling is that the U.S. population exploded 17% or 50,688,611 during the same 16 year period while churches experience 0% growth.  It would be reasonable to assume a comparable growth in church attendance. 

Coinciding with zero growth in the church is the rise of the “Dechurched”.  According to research from both, Barna and many others these are people who once faithfully served in the church as deeply committed members and leaders.  One must ask the question, “what impact has this disconnecting from church had on the individuals, their families and ultimately the local church.

According to Olson approximately 3,700 churches closed their doors each year between 2000 and 2009.  He further suggests that at the current rate of decline in attendance the church will shrink from 20.4% of the population in 1990 to 10.5% of the population by 2050 if nothing changes. 

A Crisis For Who?!?

Who is concerned about the so-called, “crisis”?  Is this a crisis at all?  If it is, who is it a crisis for?  What has yet to be answered is why is this considered a crisis?  Does the decline in church attendance signal a decline in the number of people who are committed to Christ; is the invisible Church dying or is it being transformed?

The assertion behind the research is that the “established” Church is the only authentic expression of the discipled life.  Therefore, a decline in attendance must herald a decline in the number of authentic Christians.  While this may be true, it has not been proved true, nor asserted in any way aside from the tacit implication made by the use of the word, “Crisis”. 

Crisis Real or Imagined

The temptation of many in the church is to demonize the swelling ranks of the disconnected disciples.  It is easy to label them as apostate, backsliders and worse.  Yet Rob McAlpine offers an interesting analysis of the “dechurched” “movement”, “phenomenon” or “crisis” in his article Detoxing from Church.  He says,

“People are in detox because they love Jesus and have a vision for being His Body in an advancing Kingdom on this earth.”

He suggests that the reasons people disconnect are the same they used when they chose to connect with a particular fellowship.  The challenge is clearly an issue of perception and interpretation on both sides of the discussion.  The churched must not succumb to the temptation of believing that the dechurched have relapsed into a sinful lifestyle or fallen off the redeemed “wagon”. 

The reverse is also true, the “Dechurched” have a tendency to deride the “institutional” Church.  It is inaccurate to dismiss the Church as archaic, out of touch and off the mark in its expression of the work of Christ.

It is in the interest of both the “Churched” and the “Dechurched” to pursue their courses and fulfill their appointed work in the Kingdom as led by the Holy Spirit.  To maintain the integrity of their fellowship as believers and disciples of Jesus Christ; each group should rejoice that others are expressing Christ in ways that resonate with people that they can not reach.

Paul reminds us that how Christ is preached is far less important than the fact that Christ be preached, he says in Philippians 1:18 (NAS)

What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed; and in this I rejoice.

Failing that, we might benefit from the words of Gamaliel found in Acts 5:38 & 39

38 “And now I say unto you, Refrain from these men, and let them alone: for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will be overthrown: 39 but if it is of God, ye will not be able to overthrow them; lest haply ye be found even to be fighting against God.”

God is Sovereign and Christ is Lord over the “Churched” and the “Dechurched” and it is precisely because of that fact alone that both camps would benefit from a healthy dose of honest introspection regarding their motives for leaving and wanting to reclaim those who have left.