In researching for this issue of the Religious Herald, I was impressed again with Virginia Baptists. Pastor Gregory Loewer was willing to sacrifice his career, if necessary, to lead his church to face a glorious end and to live again in a different form. In the next issue, you will hear more about the former Glencarlyn Road Baptist Church, now a part of the ministries of Columbia Baptist in Falls Church. It is now called crossroads@columbia and it deserves more space than we could give it in this issue.
Jim White
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We have an impressive lot of missional entrepreneurs who have started new churches. Future Virginia Baptists and other Christ-followers will owe much to their determination to apply the best mission principles learned on the international field to our own culture.
The staff of the Virginia Mission Board, and Glenn Akins in particular, continue to expand Kingdom expectations displaying a vision beyond the BGAV. They recognize that it is God’s work they are doing; and God’s work is always bigger than the organizations we use to do it. I salute their perspective.
Even so, my research also revealed some frightening aspects. Of the 896 Virginia Baptist churches that provided annual reports for both 2004 and 2009, 64.2 percent (558) of them showed no growth or decline in average worship attendance in that five-year span. A number of these churches are in no-growth or declining-population areas and are reflecting the patterns of their communities. Even so, many are surrounded by people who need the good news.
One needs to be neither a prophet nor a rocket scientist to realize a harsh truth: Nearly 2/3 of our churches will continue to be stagnant or decline unless drastic changes are made.
An even starker reality is that many of our churches no longer have any hope of turning things around. They are too old, too tired and too discouraged to change.
Chris Backert, emerging church strategist with the Virginia Baptist Mission Board, has a perspective I think we need to hear. He says, “I think declining congregations need to consider themselves similar to grandparents. When grandparents become grandparents they start thinking about things differently … they downsize typically. They start thinking about setting up funds for their grand-children for college or a down payment for a house. I think churches in declining congregations need to think about things similar to this.”
“They should think about sharing space,” he continues. “They should think about giving away their buildings before it’s too late to maintain them. They could think about starting a parallel congregation along with theirs and providing some funding. They should consider morphing into a new church and serving as grandparents to that congregation. Grandparents love and typically don't control. In general, declining congregations should look at how they can pass along their resources, wisdom, love, etc. to the next generation.”
Nobody said it would be easy. But it may be the Kingdom thing to do.
Jim White is editor of the Religious Herald.