5 Ways to Kill a Church

Today I'm going to tell you how to kill a church in five simple steps.  But first, a preface.

For the past seven months I have been immersing myself in the study of the history of American Methodism.  It's a remarkable story in and of itself, filled with plenty of drama, but it also offers some interesting lessons for the church today.  Those familiar with Methodism at all know that the movement took off like a rocket in the beginning.  In fact, its rapid growth between 1776 and 1850 is almost unparalleled in the history of Christianity.  Just take a look at this chart from The Churching of America, 1776-2005 by Roger Finke and Rodney Stark:

No matter how you slice it, this feat was nothing short of miraculous.  In 1770, American Methodists numbered around one thousand.  By 1820, they were the largest denomination in the nation with over a quarter million members -- all this in fifty years!  To put this another way, in 1775 less than 1 in 800 Americans were Methodist, but by 1812 the ratio was 1:36 (Wigger 3).

But the story of Methodism is also a tragic one.  Methodism's rapid growth entered a prolonged plateau phase between roughly 1870-1950 and then, once the tumultuous 1960's hit, Methodism started rapidly declining in numbers, a trend that continues to this day.  Since that time, the United Methodist Church has lost a whopping 56% of its membership.  

Now books and books have been written about this stuff:  Why did Methodism fly out of the gate at first and then sputter out?  What factors lead to its growth and decline?  And on and on it goes.  

But here I'm just going to offer a few very practical observations from my own study of the history of American Methodism about how to kill a church.  And, by the way, these will likely offend LOTS of people on both the so-called "right" and the "left."  I am an equal opportunity offender.

Here goes.  Five ways to kill a church:

1.  Let the pastors be the professional Christians.  In churches that thrive, there is a strong sense of "ownership" among all of the people, especially among the laity.  In fact, the lines between the clergy and the laity are somewhat muddied.  For example, in early Methodism when it was spreading like wildfire, plain uneducated folk were allowed to become "exhorters," meaning that they could share their testimonies in public when a pastor wasn't around, basically acting like a "substitute" pastor (Wigger 29-31).  Much of the genius of the movement was in its ability to empower regular people -- including women, African-American slaves, uneducated farmers, and so on -- to lead and to disciple others from their rich spiritual experiences.  But over time, as pastors grew more educated and took on more responsibilities in the church, the lay people took a more hands-off, passive role.  Soon, instead of being participants, the hoi polloi were observers as pastors-priests acted out their thing up on a stage to be seen.  The pastors became the "professional Christians" -- as in: "We pay you to reach out to the community, preach, disciple, and do all that spiritual stuff so that we don't have to."  It became a division of labor, reflecting the rest of our capitalist free market.  Soon the men (and women, sometimes) with the vestments on made all the key decisions, leaving the lay people feeling like they had nothing invested in the church at all.  In their minds, the church -- and its mission -- belonged to the pastor.

2.  Try to make your church "respectable."  When the Methodists were growing like gangbusters, they couldn't care less what those wealthy, highfalutin gentlemen and ladies in the cities thought of them.  While the "respectable" Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City looked down their noses at uncultured ruffians like Lorenzo Dow or Peter Cartwright, the circuit-riding Methodists were converting hard-working salt-of-the-earth American farmers, artisans, and pioneers by the thousands.  These simple folk were so enthused by the plain, vernacular message they were hearing that they didn't need something as fancy as a church building.  Instead, they met in homes, town halls, barns, school houses, and outdoors.  In 1785, the Methodists had 60 simple chapels that they had purchased or built, but they had over 800 recognized preaching places! (Wigger 36).  But, alas, people who are taught to work hard and live frugally eventually move up in the world.  And, as the generations passed, Methodists went from lower/middle class to solidly upper class.  By the 1850's they were building fine, large gothic-style stone churches and seminaries like the one I attend now.  The allure of social respectability proved too strong. They ignored the advice of their movement's founder, John Wesley, who said, "Gain all you can, save all you can (as in "live as frugally as you can," not as in "amass a huge 401(k)"), and give all you can." By failing to practice this third principle and turning inward, the church's pursuit of upward mobility would contribute to its eventual decline.  (As a Free Methodist, my own denomination has followed this exact same pattern.  I would refer my Free Methodist readers to Robert Wall's brilliant article The Embourgeoisement of the Free Methodist Ethos, if you haven't already read it).  

One more note on respectability:  today this same impulse is often masked in terms of the search to "be relevant."  I challenge one to show me in Christ's teachings where we are instructed, as Christians, to be relevant.  No, we must be far more concerned with being faithful than being relevant.  If you want to kill your church, do anything you can to make it acceptable to the cool, the wealthy, the successful, and the prosperous in our culture.  It's a sure-fire way to not only destroy your church's growth, but to also violate biblical principles at the same time.

3.  Pay your pastors lots of money.  Yep.  I said it.  I don't really think I need to elaborate on this point very much except to note that if you study the correlation between church growth and an average pastor's salary, you will find that they are in an inverse relationship to one another (Finke and Stark).  However, that's not really why I would argue that pastors shouldn't get paid tons of money.  Mine is based on something else:  the gospels.  "He told them, 'Take nothing for the journey--no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra shirt.'" (Luke 9:3).  Sure, a worker is worth his wages.  Paul defends the right of an apostle to be paid.  I'm not saying to stop paying your pastor.   Just don't pay her so much that it causes the average person in the pew to ask, "Is she doing this for the money?"  Remarkably, the church has thrived the most when pastors are bi-vocational.  Not only does this free the church financially and empower the laity (see point #1), but it enables the pastor to relate to people in their everyday lives.

4.  Focus on making church a comfortable experience.  If you want to kill your church, allow people to slip in and out anonymously.  Entertain them by putting on a performance up front.  When there is congregational singing, dim the lights on the people and shine all the lights on the song leaders or band or tattooed hipster or robed liturgist up front.  Doesn't matter really whether you're a high church or low church, just make sure that the people are nameless.  Pad their seats.  Give them lattes.  Use smoke, lights, and a laser show.  Use power points that have moving  If you're a preacher, give them what they want to hear. If you live on the liberal northshore of Chicago, preach a sermon praising universal healthcare.  If your church is in rural Georgia, then glory in the second ammendment.  If you church is in a small college town, then throw in a sanctimonious jab at those uneducated evangelicals who foolishly still don't believe in global warming.   However you can, seek popularity.  Put your finger to the cultural winds and, whatever it is telling you to say, say that.  Just make them happy.  Offer them "their best life now."  None of this "pick up your cross daily" stuff.

5.  Adapt the gospel message to the "modern mind."  To kill you church, you really need to stop talking about all this hocus-pocus that is found in the Bible.  That is soooo pre-Enlightenment.  You need to thoroughly commit yourself to the liberal project of demythologization so that rational, secular human beings will be able to swallow the message of the church.  Otherwise, after all, that church will become irrelevant, right!?!  So scuttle the whole narrative about Israel and Exodus, Incarnation, Virgin birth, Crucifixion and Atonement, Resurrection and Eschatology.  People don't want to hear that.  Instead, present Jesus as a nice guy who was a good moral teacher and then switch over to social justicey stuff.  Title your sermons things like "Be nice" and "Let's all get along."

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Here's a chart that shows the beliefs of differing groups of Christians according to denominational affiliation:

Combine the observations of that chart with the fact that the UCC, the United Methodists, the Episcopal Church, and other mainline denominations are rapidly in decline, while those churches that still affirm their belief in the "traditional" doctrines of Christianity are growing.  Pentecostal sects are the fastest growing group of Christians in the world today.

Now just because something is growing doesn't make it necessarily right.  After all, ISIS has grown quite rapidly too, I hear.  But what I have offered above has at least hopefully sparked some thought, if you've managed to read this far.

At the very least, I am sure I have accomplished one goal:  I have offended basically everyone.  I told you I was an equal opportunity offender.