First, there is often a link between the life cycle of the church and its apparent decline. The typical life cycle of the church involves five stages: birth, development, plateau, decline and death. Those churches that are finding it difficult to remain open are either in the latter stages of decline or at the death stage of the life cycle. Second, there are often sustainability factors that are not being addressed that contribute to the church’s decline. These factors may be problems with people, programs, finances, facilities or style of ministry which can have a cumulative effect on church health and lead to the church’s demise. Third, the church may have theological issues that have negatively influenced the ministry of the church and thus contributed to its overall decline. The theological issues may involve a lack of understanding of the role of lay people within the congregation, or the place of women in ministry, to the congregation misunderstanding what their mission as a church should be.
Salvation Army theologian Philip Needham clearly states what he believes to be the church’s reason for existence when he writes, “The reason is mission. The church exists primarily for the sake of its mission in the world.”[1] Needham is not alone in this assertion. Leslie Newbigin believes that the church exists for mission and that mission is expressed in three ways, “in the proclamation of the kingdom, the presence of the kingdom, and the provenience of the kingdom. This threefold way of understanding the church’s mission is rooted in the triune nature of God himself.”[2] Mission that proclaims the kingdom is ‘faith in action’ that announces God’s kingdom, which has been present over all of human history and over the whole cosmos, has come to a particular place and time in history. As Newbigin explains, it is the “acting out of the central prayer that Jesus taught his disciples to use: ‘Father, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as in heaven.’”[3]
However, it is inadequate to simply proclaim the kingdom with words because such proclamations only speak of a future event that we are hoping for. Jesus embodied the arrival of the kingdom of God so that the kingdom was no longer a distant expectation but it was wrapped up in this man from Nazareth. It is for this reason that the early church leaders used a different language than the language Jesus used. “(Jesus) spoke about the kingdom, they spoke about Jesus.”[4] Mission expressed through the provenience of the kingdom is something that is accomplished by the Holy Spirit. Newbigin states, “Mission is not just something that the church does; it is something that is done by the Spirit, who himself is the witness, who changes both the world and the church, who always goes before the church in its missionary journey.”[5]
As already stated, churches fail for any number of reasons but often the reason for the failure can be seen in what the church deems to be important and what it considers to be peripheral in regards to their local theology. Loren Mead sums this up well when he writes “...in congregation after congregation, person after person, agency after agency, the one clear paradigm of mission stopped being clear. Mission, which had once been both a central rallying cry and basic assumption, instead became a subject of disagreement.”[6]
The good news is that it is possible for the declining congregation to turn things around by refocusing on the mission of the church.
Blessings.
[1] Needham, Community in Mission, 52.
[2] Newbigin, The Open Secret, 64-5.
[3] Newbigin, The Open Secret, 39.
[4] Newbigin, The Open Secret, 40.
[5] Newbigin, The Open Secret, 56.
[6] Mead, The Once and Future Church, 4.
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