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? “