A young pastor friend of mine is about to attempt one of the hardest things in ministry: taking a dying church and bringing it back to life.
He’s not naïve about what he’s walking into. He’s been interviewing seminary professors, veteran pastors, and young ministers who’ve done this successfully. He’s asking the right questions before he walks through the door.
I’ve been in ministry long enough to have watched this succeed and fail. Here’s what I told him.
7 Things Nobody Tells You Before You Try to Revitalize a Dying Church
1. The Congregation Must Actually Want to Change — Not Just Say They Do.
Anyone who does not like change is going to have trouble with Jesus.
He said, “Who said that?” I said, “I did,” with a smile.
The Christian life is all about change, i.e., growth. See 2 Corinthians 3:18.
I can take you to several dwindling congregations that say they want to revitalize, and clearly they need an infusion of new members. However, get beneath the surface and you quickly see they want to grow so long as this will not result in any kind of disruption of their patterns. They like things the way they are and resist anything new or different. Such churches are headed to the graveyard just as fast as the hearse can get them there.
In a defining word, the Lord Jesus’ last message in the New Testament includes this line: “Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5). He is indeed. He is always at work making things new. His people should beware of being wedded to yesterday’s methods and successes.
2. Old People Can Handle Change — Just Not All at Once.
Here’s something nobody says out loud: there are no 1948 Packards in the church parking lot. The seniors all drive late-model cars, many own wide-screen televisions and use computers daily. They got from the ’48 Packard to the late-model Buick through a series of gradual steps — a 1957 Ford, a 1968 Chevy, and so on. They can handle change. They’ve been doing it their whole lives.
What they can’t handle is change that is sudden, forced, and dismissive of everything they’ve built.
In my last church, members complained loudly when we brought a drum set into the sanctuary. Today that same congregation worships with guitars, keyboards, digital drums, violins, and brass instruments.
They learned to love it. Because we gave them time.
3. The People Who Voted for Change Must Keep Owning It
One pastor of a dying congregation told me that two members of the very committee that hired him left the church within months. One said:
“Pastor, I know we said the church needed to make changes, and we meant that. But I didn’t know the changes would affect me personally.”
That one sentence explains why so many revitalization efforts fail.
A single vote to change is not enough. The congregation must continually own the disruption happening around them — even when it’s painful, even when their Sunday School class looks different, even when the newcomers don’t feel like “their people” yet.
This is especially true for older members. I’ll turn 74 at my next birthday, so I’m talking about my own group. We get comfortable. We have our friends, our routines, our rhythms. Newcomers don’t automatically fit into that — and if we’re not intentional, we’ll freeze them out without even realizing it.
