Help! My Church Is Old, Dying, or Stuck. What Do I Do?

We're tackling the challenges faced by churches, big or small, young or long-standing. Join us for pragmatic tips on reviving your congregation, focusing on church health over numbers. Learn how to define health, uncover key elements, and embrace change to reenergize your church's mission!

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Transcript

Used to travel down to Charlotte to see our daughter. We passed by a town called Bland. I'd say to Anita, we got to plant a church in Bland. So be the bland community church. That's it. We do bland outreaches. I mean, it would be fantastic. Thank you for coming. I guess we're happy that you're here. That's awesome. Welcome to the Elemental Leaders podcast, designed to help you grow more effective in your leadership.

Visit us at Elemental Group dot org for more resources and free downloads. Welcome to the Elemental Leaders Podcast. My name is Paul. I'm your host. I'm joined with Dave Workman and Mike Steele. And for this episode, we thought we would go a different direction and this may not apply to everyone, although it may. The title of this episode is My Church Is Old.

Dying or Stuck. What Do I Do? I want to suggest today that we're going to go and be pretty highly pragmatic, loaded with helpful tips and techniques towards growing your church again. Before we go there, I think it's important to just simply encourage pastors out there, regardless of what size church you are in, how much experience you have, what gifts you think you bring or you don't bring.

We will all experience some kind of decline, some kind of setback, some kind of hiccup, some kind of getting stuck. We believe that this will be highly pragmatic at some level, if you will listen with us all the way through to the end. And we promise to only keep this podcast down to about seven or 8 hours and just kidding.

Let me call my wife and let her know this is who we're talking to. And we came up with just a few notes that maybe connects with you. Maybe you've experienced declining attendance, and if you've led a church during the COVID season, you certainly have experienced that. Maybe you have an aging demographic. Mike I think that your church, you guys have been around for 70 years.

The church that I pastored, we've been around for 35 years. Some churches out there had actually were planted in covered season. How old was a Cincinnati vendor, Dave? Well, we had our first official Sunday morning service in 1985. Okay. So it's a grand total grand total of 37 people. Okay. So it's not it's not young, but it's not old either.

Comparatively, this is another one. If you have experienced financial struggles in your church and to this date, I'm 52 years old, I've never met a pastor who has not experienced financial struggles at one point in their lives. So this podcast could be for you. Maybe you're lacking new people. You've got some limited community impact. Maybe the demographic of your church doesn't necessarily look like the demographic of your community.

Maybe you got neglected facilities, maybe outdated practices. Or so you think. Or so others think. Outdated traditions or rhythms, or just maybe just a general lack of enthusiasm or energy. Mike Dave, I tried to include just about everyone here so that this podcast was highly relevant to all of us, but that's where we're going to go. The title again is My Church is Old, Dying and or Stuck.

What do I do? I like your list of problems there. The other thing with that list, there are contextual factors to consider with all those problems. For instance, you know, what's the size of the church that you're in, in whatever mode of being stagnant that you are? There are large churches that are facing financial struggles in diminishing attendance, and there could have been a mega levels at one point.

Then there are small rural churches or, you know, churches in Rust Belt communities like we have here in Ohio that are that are shrinking. There are mainline traditional churches that are struggling there, charismatic, non liturgical churches that haven't grown in years. So there are contextual considerations in looking for solutions to that big list of problems that you that you made.

Churches have personalities. They're like people. And just like people who are struggling, the problems can be complex. So it may be a diminishing attendance level, but what's behind that can be very complicated. It's like people who would come in for marriage counseling. And if we just tell them, hey, you know what, you just need to communicate better. Well, yeah, but there is probably a lot more to dig into, like histories and patterns of dysfunction or family of origin issues and so on and so on.

So while they're general principles that we can talk about and try to help pastors with, it's not always simple. So maybe that's a little bit of a disclaimer for today, if that's okay. No, it's totally okay. In fact, I mean, right off the bat, I mean, we're only into this a few minutes, but I just want to encourage those of you who are out there, you are not alone.

And a big reason why we do this podcast is so that you know that you're not alone. Mike What are some of the first things we can offer? I want to ask, how do you define health as a church, as an organization? Okay. I think that kind of can get at the heart of where you're stuck. Right. Because there's there's a lot of churches that I've worked with and been a part of that define health based on financial health.

But they ignore a lot of the other issues. And then they're they're declining or they're staying status quo for years and years and years. And then they look around and there's no one in the pews. They're not reaching people outside their walls. So I would start there. How do you define health as an organization that sounds like a plant to me.

Okay. And I know it's not because I don't know you, Mike, but it's one of the things that we struggled with initially in the Elemental Group. We want it to be about more than just church growth. And so what we really tried to do is to identify what causes church health and what do healthy churches look like and so forth.

And just in a nutshell, for us, that boil down to four intangible factors that we look at or what we call elements. Hence the name elemental. And those were integrity, passion, servant to ID and imagination. Our research showed that if those four things were balanced in a church, they tend to be pretty healthy. And just by way of explanation, very quickly, the integrity piece that had to do with systems and processes and clarity around mission and vision and so forth, it's just being who you say you are.

Passion had to do with the commitment level of the congregants, of the people in the church toward the mission of the church. Seven had had to do with how outward focused the church was. And churches that are inwardly focused, they have a short shelf life. They're not they're not going to survive very long. And then the last thing was imagination, which for us typically meant change capacity.

What was the willingness of the church leadership or the session or the board or the trustees of the elders to look into changes that needed to happen in order to be effective in their mission? Was there a reluctance toward that or was there an openness towards innovation? Yeah. And by the way, and if you're just joining us or maybe you skipped a couple of episodes, we actually get a bit more comprehensive and dedicate an entire episode to each one of those elements.

I think if that's scratching an edge, go back and listen to those. Mike is right because he's asking a question about health, which is more important than we want to be 500 people in the next year. You know, anything like that. The health piece is way more important. I have a desire to see my grandkids graduate from high school and begin to move.

And so here recently, and I think I mentioned this in a previous podcast, I had some heart issues, had two stents put in, and now blood's flowing well, apparently. And apparently you have to move around. You have to exercise as well, which is a whole. Yeah, that's crazy. Same here. That's a whole new concept for me. Well, you know, it's really interesting, Dave, as you were talking, it just it dawned on me, if I'm honest, I naturally gravitate towards how can I grow the church in numbers?

And I wonder how many people were listening to say, how can I grow the church in numbers? But it's really not the question. I mean, the question is, how can I get my church healthy? We know that healthy things will grow, but I think that our mind is just programed, especially in the Western culture. Our mind is just program for up and to the right.

If we are growing in our numbers, if we are growing in our finances, then we are healthy and it's actually not that way. Those are indicators of health, but that doesn't always mean that you're healthy. If you focus on getting healthy, those things will probably inevitably happen. But health comes first. Health is the foundation for growth, not the other way around.

Dave, let me go to you, because I think that we took a lot of our cues from Cincinnati Vineyard, and you guys really worked on studying who it was that you were ministering to. Who who was that you were serving, like looking at your community. Can you tell us a little bit about why that's important and how that can be transferable principle to maybe any church?

Yeah, and I think what you're getting at first, Paul, is just the idea that the church has clarity around its mission totally. And so if there's not clarity about that, then nothing really makes any sense. I didn't plant the church when I came in. There were about 20 people. It was meeting in a house and it was Steve SHOGREN and a 12 string guitar, and that was about it.

But the guy that I met who said, Hey, you should come to this noodle of church, it started asking him, So what's it about? And he says, I think we're just going to worship Jesus and take care of the poor. I thought, Wow, first of all, is that possible? Could it be that simple? And secondly, I don't know if I'd met anyone that was so clear on here.

The two things that we're going to do. And at the very beginning, when when we were just a handful of people, I remember we would just buy groceries on our own. We'd all meet together, put the grocery bags in the trunks of our cars and drive up to the projects in a little town north of Cincinnati called Hamilton, and go to the projects there and knock on doors and just see if anybody needed anything.

I kid you not. We were so unsophisticated and so dumb. We knock on doors and say, Are there any poor people here? And it was so. So we were pathetic in our approach. But what was happening was our hearts were being broken. Number one, to see the world very differently than how we'd seen it. Most of us lived in the suburbs and so forth, and it clarified that the church, this church was going to be about outreach specifically.

It was not going to be about us and what we wanted. It was going to be about the needs of others. So that begin right away, setting the culture for the church and the mission of the church. So we've got an island right close to our our place about 20 minutes or so. And the cheapest house I've seen on this island is about $1.5 million.

And it's just it's just a very expensive place to live. And there are a couple of churches, small churches that are on this island. One in particular, I know it's really kind of struggling, their aging population, not a lot of young life in this church. You're a consultant and you go in and you're you're trying to I'm putting you on the spot here.

And so how do you address what you just said? How do you how do you take that conversation to them? What would you say right away and begin to look at that intangible that we call integrity? So who do they think they are and what do they think they're called to do? Yeah. So, you know, once you begin to dig into that, they may need a real God intervention.

In other words, they need to do a God analysis like we talk about gap analysis, still got analysis and really get serious about praying and asking the father, What do you want us to be in this community? What do you want us to do in our city or town or wherever? We would tell young pastors, just drive around, or if it's a small town, walk around the town, get a cup of coffee and just look and listen for God, look to see what are obvious felt needs, what are things that we could do?

Just get a feel for the place you're in. Because I believe in a in a spiritual geography. I think we are called for a specific place to do a specific things. So today, for instance, I was invited to this place that we opened up in 2008 at the church called the Healing Center. And the Healing Center was really it's just an evolutionary step in who we were in the very beginning when we were taking bags of groceries.

The only difference was that it turned out to be a $13 million project with a desire to take a holistic approach to meeting people's needs in our city. And at one time, Cincinnati, in one of the census a few years back, was the third poorest large city in the country. So the needs were huge here. You know, after I'd seen an NPR show about there were more people living below the poverty line in the suburbs than in the urban cores in American cities.

It was all right. Our church is in the suburbs. It's a rapidly shifting demographic in the suburb that we were in. There was a lot of white flight. There was a lot of Latino, Hispanic influx. There were a lot of needs. We could do this in the suburbs and make something happen. So today, I would say, has just come down, do a little video about how that whole thing got started.

And it was so much fun. Now to see 15 years later, this thing is still functioning, serving 3 to 4000 people a month with a wide variety of needs, offering up to 40 different free services for under-resourced and marginalized people. When we were in a living room with 20 people and a 12 string guitar, that would have seemed unfathomable.

But you can see when people have a clarified mission, it's not going to be about them, it's going to be about others. And they begin to dream about what that could look like from a tactical point or from a strategic point. Then you see exciting things beginning to happen in a church. Yeah, that's that's fantastic. And it's been fun to watch that church just continue to serve and grow.

Mike, tell us what you're doing as a church to kind of stay focused, to stay aligned in the tune of what we've just been talking about. Yeah, I heard someone say one time, your mission statement is it's not a bumper sticker. It's not a T-shirt, it's a tool. So your mission statement is, is there to help you make decisions.

It's there to help you say no more than you say yes. It's there to bring that alignment to your whole entire organization, your whole church. So if you do not find that clarity, you can't make decisions that are mission based or vision based decisions. So then your organization starts to splinter slowly over time, and then you're left to start to pick up the pieces.

And that's where a lot of churches are today. Some call it mission drift, right? So interdenominational setting. We have committees and all that stuff. So we have a committee that stair just to make sure we're we're sticking to our vision. Every decision that we make, the vision committee is looking at to say, this is where we're going. This is a great decision.

But in our church's history, there is a lot of times where we do two year studies and have all these we want to do these 25 things. But then as soon as the study was done, there was no execution of those strategic priorities and things like that. So we found hyper focus, but we're trying to execute on those things by keeping that mission statement at the core of everything we do.

Yeah. I want to ask you about that, Mike, because I saw a graph that you guys put up once that showed the decline of this. This is a historic church that you're a part of that had a decline in from I think it was from 1975. The church was in a continual state of decline. Is that correct? Yeah, we were on a 40 year decline.

The graph was absolutely depressing to me and I thought, Wow, these guys have their hands full. What I hear you saying is that clarity around what you are really going to be and do was important. What I'd like to ask is, did that mission change or was it did you just go back into your historical context and say, no, it's always been this.

How did you come up with the current mission plan that you have? A lot of time was spent trying to figure it out. There's a number of different things we did. One was we had a lot of conversations with those in our community. We looked at what does this community need us to be COVID hit here on this decline still.

And we said if we don't change, we're dying. The first thing we had to do was to bring those facts forward, face the brutal facts. We had to show people that graph. For some reason, it just was not making sense to people or they'd see it and they just say, Oh yeah, it's okay. But you know, they could point out other things, but we're like, Let's play this out.

This means their church is not here in five years. That means your kids will not get married at this church. This means your grandkids will not grow up in a community church if this is where they were. So we had to first face those brutal facts as a church. I mean, that was the first step in this whole thing.

And that is a painful process because people hear those things and then they think that their work that they did when they were on your session board or your board of deacons, whatever your church calls it, they take it personally. So we had to walk through a lot of hard feelings about the past and things like that. That was the first piece.

And then we kind of did a study of our church and we saw a demographic whole. It was families with young kids. We had I think we at the time, we were averaging seven kids on a Sunday morning. Your mind can go to a lot of places with that, but it's we won't be here in a number of years if we don't have young kids and young families in this church.

So we put a lot of time, energy resources into a vision of welcoming young families into our church. So that's really where it started. That's awesome. The truth will set you free. So you guys laid out the true facts. Yep. Yep. I use the brutal facts. It's change management. The amount of times we had to go in front of people and share the same thing over and over and over and over again.

And then you'd still people would walk away not hearing the same thing you said because of the history that they have and things like that. I find the process kind of fun personally. I think that's why I know I'm in the right place. But it's hard. It's hard for a church to change, especially when there's a lot of history behind everything and a proud history.

You know, they've they've been in a community for a long time. They've made a world of difference in people's lives, but they can't face that. We have to look different now than we did. Five years ago. 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago. That's awesome. You brought up Paul about the numbers thing and you kind of default to that, I think.

I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing either, though, because, for instance, I did a site visit this weekend for a church. It's actually here in Cincinnati on the west side of Cincinnati. And these guys, they're in a marginalized area, a low income, low resourced area of town. And what they're doing from an outreach perspective is phenomenal. They've got basketball courts.

They've built a playground area. They have a resource source center in the basement of this. And it's just a little tiny place. And here's the problem. This site visit, when I was there, there were maybe, maybe 15 to 16 people in the church, and they weren't all older. I mean, it was somewhat of a mix. But the problem is when we do their assessment, their scores on passion are super low.

As to their profile of their leadership team, their servant score is super high. So that's that's really clear. But the reason why the passion level is so low is because they're so few people doing so much work and they're just wearing out. They're just exhausted. And these guys cannot continue. They won't be able to continue unless they figure out a way to grow numerically.

And so if they don't get more people in there, they're going to run out of their volunteer capacity to do the things that they want to do, which is fantastic. My friends in Ireland say they're punching above their weight and that's exactly what's going on there. It's very, very cool. But here's a case where if they don't break that numbers barrier, they're going to be in trouble and they will be able to fulfill the dream that they think God's put in their heart.

Yeah, 100%. And I want to be clear, too, and and I always unapologetically said to our staff, I will never apologize for looking at the attendance numbers. Yeah, I will never apologize for looking at the offering numbers, because both of those are indicators of health, the challenges that we only look at those numbers sometimes and we get a skewed view of what healthy means goes back to Mike's original statement, and you have to define what the indicators of health really are.

It'd be like saying, Well, you know, you know, I've been working out, I've been doing some push ups and so I'm starting to get a little bit more defined. So he must be really, really healthy. Well, if you saw that diet and if I were eating pizza and soda all the time, you might say, well, maybe he's not healthy.

So you've got to look at other indicators other than just attendance and finances. Wait a minute. Are you saying pizza and coke is not good? Is they? Help me understand that. Please clarify that, Paul. We need an intervention. Over intervention. Let's start talking about Taco Bell again. Yeah. You know, this is a guy with two stents in. So am I missing something important just so I don't get sued by your wife or your family?

Pizza and soda are not good for your health in moderation. You haven't you haven't had low Rosa's Pizza from Cincinnati, Ohio, now. Apparently not. Apparently. Okay. So the first question we really need to ask, why are you in your neighborhood? If you planted the church, why did you plant in the first place? If you've taken over a church, you've got to get your team together and say, why does God have us in this neighborhood?

What's our purpose? And you've got to get crystal clear on that. And then out of that, you're going to define some priorities and some things. But some of the things I just heard are say, I don't know, we kind of took some tangent here, but I heard that prayer was super important. We didn't go out and say it, but that was just an assumption where you get together with God and you say, God help us have a collective imagination for why we are in this neighborhood.

You know, I come from an evangelical, charismatic background. Our primary purpose was to reach people who were far away from God. Mm hmm. So we would regularly do surveys in our church to see how we were doing on that. At one point, we did a survey where we found out that 40% of the people attending the church had never been to a church before or went twice a year.

And so that kind of information helped us to. Oh yeah, we're still clear on our target. Now we're benchmarking and seen how we're doing against that. Just to get super practical here. I think one of the things a lot of stuck churches need to do is to invest in digital. There's some buzzwords there. Everyone thinks if you just put an iPhone up and live stream your services, that you're investing in digital, but it goes so much further than that.

And I could go off for about 35 minutes right now and the importance, but that has really helped us to to turn the ship around at the church I work at now, we ask everyone who comes through our doors for the first time, how did you hear about us? 99% of the people looked us up on Google. They go to your website and does your website have accurate information.

Do you have a hyper attention to detail digitally? Can they find you? Do they know where your address is? Do they know your worship time? So I always tell the story. There's a church down the road from us that had a worship time that was wrong. They showed us the church and people were leaving. They then came to our church because they saw that we had an 11:00 service and they were like, Oh, we can make that.

I talked to them after the service and they were so frustrated. They said, We will never go back to that church. They lost our trust. I would start there, you know, audit your online in because we're in America. There is still enough of a culture that if you're going to check out a church or maybe you start having kids and that's when people start thinking, well, you know, maybe my kids no need to know something or whatever.

And you begin to think about maybe checking out a church. It's going to be on a Sunday morning. That's just the way it is right now until we become so post-Christian, that does not enter your adult life. But for now, that's what it is. So then the question I think that needs to be asked is what's the purpose of our Sunday morning service?

What's the reason that we gather on the weekend? Why do we do this? When the church was starting to get a little bit of traction, we now said on a regular basis, who is this for? Who is this church service for? And because we were so outward focus and so interested in reaching people who are far away from God that affected the way we created a culture on Sunday mornings and actually on Saturday nights as well, because we started doing services on Saturday night.

And so a big factor for us, we introduced a lot of fun in our church service. We made fun of ourselves, we were self-effacing, we took the Kingdom of God very seriously and ourselves, not so seriously. As a matter of fact, back in the early nineties we were creating videos that poked fun at the pastors and because one of our values was the priesthood of all believers, that meant that everybody should be doing ministry in one of the ways you do that is by taking the pastors off the pedestals.

And so you hope that people are looking at anything you're doing, thinking we could do that, and so doing silly videos had an amazing effect on our church. Once a person who is far away from God is laughing about something that's just ridiculous, and they see other people laughing around them. Oh, well, these people are so different from me.

You laugh at the same things I do. Humor became a really important part of how we presented the good news of Jesus. And you don't even need someone on your staff who can pull that off. There are so many resources that you can purchase. I mean, we had a guy on our staff who he literally his job title was the pastor of fun and his name was Nick Corbett.

He's super fun guy, but we were a church with that size in that budget where we could afford it. I go back to my church planning days where I was literally the only part time person on staff. I didn't have that luxury. We had a couple of people who could do that as volunteers, but there were so many resources online that I could rip off and or purchase to create that engaging experience.

Because again, the goal in all of that is to bring people they're coming in, they've got kids, they've got jobs, they got all sorts of things on their mind to bring them to one place so that they could hear one message of hope and love and grace that would change their life. And so this is why we do it.

This is why we try to engage people in that way. We actually had a team of volunteers that would meet every week just to think up goofy ideas that we could do. And it was fun. I mean, that was the one place where they found their kind of headspace that they lived in. Could actually be used in a church.

So they were thrilled. They were thrilled to volunteer. And I would tell these guys on a regular basis, I'd say, Hey, you know what? Theology is easy. Comedy is hard. So let's figure out something this weekend that'll cause people to be disarmed in the way they think churches are, what their preconceived ideas of Christianity are. We're going to disarm them.

We're going to laugh. We're going to have fun and watch what happens to these guys. I think every church does stuff that just turns people away before they even sit down in a chair. What is the vibe that you're going for as a church? So does your coffee suck? I mean, does it? If it does, that's the name of our podcast.

Does Your Coffee Suck? You're not going to reach a lot of younger families and younger people who like nice coffee, not saying have to spend $1,000,000, but that little attention to detail goes a long way with people. You need fresh eyes. So get someone who's never been in your church and ask them, you know, can they even find the bathroom?

Is your signage welcoming? Does it make sense? What is it like for someone new to come in your building? You have to audit those kind of things and ask questions and slowly start to change those things. You don't have to do it all at once. When someone pulls into our parking lot or find us online, can they find our church?

Where do they go? Where do their kids go? Is it a simple process? It's all needs to be designed. So I would just say in order to create that community, that connection, you have to be highly intentional. With the small details of how our chairs laid out, is it easy for people to get into a chair to find a seat?

You just have to look at it from the perspective of someone new. For heaven's sakes. I'd tell pastors, hire a pagan to come to church. As someone who is has no interest in Christianity. Ask them to come to your church and you'll take them out to lunch. You'll pay them 25 bucks, take them to lunch, and just ask a whole lot of questions.

What did you experience? What was it like? What did you feel? What was the feel factor? I remember early on in our history we had a guy just with this in the days of video cameras before iPhones just took a video camera and video, everything from driving into the parking lot to sitting in a chair. And when we watched it as a leadership team, we were just embarrassed.

There were all sorts of little things, like two of the things that Mike was talking about, gosh, how could we miss that? And for instance, one of them was something simple. So we had this coffee bar with lots of free coffee. It's just one of the things you have. You have free coffee, and he's videotaping this and he's talking during it, you know, as if he's talking to himself.

The camera is moving around looking at different things and he says, Oh, where do I pay for this? Do I put money in a cup or something? What do I do? And there was no signage anywhere that said free coffee. And so it's all those little things. Why would we not want to lower as many cultural barriers as possible in order that people can hear the extremely dangerous message of Jesus, which is basically come and die and you'll find life?

So why would we not want to make it as simple as possible to get into the door to hear that dangerous message? That's awesome. I was talking to a good friend of mine who runs all the campuses for a large church here in Charleston. I think they've got like 16 campuses now. And he was talking about his number one coaching tip to his campus pastors.

And the campus pastors that are doing this are Experian seeing a healthy growth at an exponential rate. These campus pastors are just out there in the community. They're taking their office to Starbucks and they're having as many appointments as they can with their own people. And what's happening is their own people are introducing them to friends because it's a third space.

I mean, they're out there and they're just normal people. There's something weird about going into the church and seeing the pastor. We just automatically elevate them. But if you see the pastor at Starbucks or at Target or some sort of third space, and now you've just met my friends and you're engaging and yes, you do smile and you're interested rather than always trying to be interesting, he said.

That's the number one thing that's contributing to their growth. Isn't that funny? It's outside of any systems. It's outside of any strategies, tips and techniques. It's just be a friend in the community and get out there. So that's one encouragement that I would give to any of us, regardless of the size of your church. Are you out there?

Are you participate hating? Are you reffing games? Are you sit and, you know, drinking coffee? Are you involved with your community? It's an old school technique, but it works. Boy, this is a this is a big, big, big topic. And if you're still listening right now, we've been all over the place. But if there's if there's anything you need from us, go to Elemental Group Board.

But we're going to wrap this one up for all of us at the Elemental Group. To all of you who are listening, we love you. We appreciate you. And we will see you next time. Take care. You've been listening to the Elemental Leaders Podcast. Visit us at Elemental Group DOT org for more great resources.