A 100 year-old plus-mainline-congregation closes its doors. The church dies. What’s left? An empty shell of a building and a disbanded group of church members. Many have predicted the death of mainline churches for the last 20 years. People have “headed to the hills” or more accurately, to less connectional churches or no churches at all.
I keep a pulse on my denomination, the American Baptist Churches USA, as it appears in the news. One “dead” congregation caught my attention. It is a New England American Baptist congregational and it died. After 163 years, the Massachusetts church closed its doors. Usually, that would be the end of the story, but it was not. The MetroWest Daily News tells the story:
Nine months after the small First Baptist Church held its final service, a new pastor has come to the Natick Center church, hoping to build a new, diverse congregation. The 163-year-old First Baptist congregation ended last September. With membership dwindling to about 20 people, most of whom were in their 70s, 80s and 90s, the congregation decided to disband in hopes a younger, vibrant community would develop in their place.
Rev. Ian Mevorach
After the death of this American Baptist congregation, a young 28-year-old church pastor will try to resurrect this dead church. The Rev. Ian Mevorach will engage in what we sometimes call a “church restart”, which means that the building exists but a church takes a completely new direction with new leadership. It’s not a church split. “Church restarts” happen because a church is not able to survive in its current form. The blessing in the above story is that the church willing handed over the building in hopes that a new church will take plant.
If living organisms have a life-cycle, then living churches have a life-cycle too. This means that congregations may fulfill their God-given purpose: to be a community of Christ for the people who embodied the community of faith for a specific time frame. To many this idea spells death of Christianity. Hogwash!
Why then, if we believe in a resurrected God, cannot people conceive of a world where churches need to be resurrected? What if many of our mainline churches need to die a death of institutionalism in order that it be resurrected into a Christ centered-faith community with a new calling? And that is the death — a dying of an institution — so that another can organically rebuild. Many Mainline churches (not all) are operating on models that worked 50 years ago. How many businesses work on a business model from 50 years ago? Almost none. Why must we insist that churches cannot change or be reborn into new life?
In the end, Mainline churches will always be around but not at the numbers we saw in the 1960s. Many Mainline churches will need to go through a life cycle that seeks to affirm the Easter message: Christ was born, Christ lived, Christ died and Christ resurrected. In many ways, the Mainline church will have to go through the same process of birth and resurrection.