Today, many former grand church properties sit half empty, deferred maintenance has taken most of the operating budget, and the population of age-goers is aging faster than the rate of new younger converts. Regardless of the denomination, the story of the legacy church is the same: fighting to stay alive.
The period of inaction has long passed, and the local church is challenged now more than ever to fight for its spiritual life. If the church rebounds from decline, it will take the leadership and members getting back to the fundamentals of Christianity, which is the calling to serve others, share the gospel and spend time investing in others and the community.
As a pastor who is leading a legacy church back from the brink of death, I have found that through a five-year cycle of revitalization, the church is slowly rebounding from the onset of sudden death back to life. These steps could help your church refocus on the mission that God has called your local church to.
Year 1: Stabilization
As you approach the first year of reviving the church, the focus should not be on winning new guests but on slowing the decline of existing members by loving the people you have and not dreaming of the people you wish you had. The first year of any revitalization effort is one of the most challenging because you have to help the church shift its focus from an inward posture to preparing for future guests while still holding on to the members you currently have. Your actions in Year 1 will hinder or help the process as you move forward. Do not skip this step or think you can breeze through because if you fail to build a strong foundation in year one, it will all come crashing down around you before you end the revitalization cycle.
As you begin to invest in loving the people you have, you must start to evaluate where the church finds itself. The evaluation period is about connecting the vision of the church with the infrastructure of the church. For instance, does your parking lot look more like a sandlot? Are the carpets in the children’s room so stained that it makes it look like an impressionist painting?
Begin to see the church with guests’ eyes, or ask someone who does not go to the church to review the church. Do not dismiss this view of the church; write down the needs and concerns, and envision a new way forward. By reviewing the church’s infrastructure, you can develop a plan of action to repair, replace, and renew what could harm the future growth prospects of the church. Keep the focus on something other than cost: future guests who will visit.
Year 2: Strategize
Year 2 is about building the structure to strengthen the church as you rebound from years of neglect and decline. This stage is about moving the church from an inward posture to an outward ministry-minded focus that enables the church to see past the current realities well into the future.
As the church begins to dream again, leaders will start to see the current needs and things that will have to be addressed in the future to reach the community like never before. A word of caution: People might wonder why more people are not attending during this stage. Leaders must be open to explaining that with years of decline, people will not come back overnight or because of one event. It will take prayer, consistent community-mindedness, and dedicated focus on keeping the vision in front of the members. In this stage, there will be push-back from some who try to hold on to how things have always been. As a leader, you are called to help navigate these shifting times by focusing on the long-term health and well-being of the church as a whole.
As you focus more on outside the church, the leaders will have to evaluate the church budget, staffing needs, and programmatic offerings. During this challenging step, tough conversations are had through the evaluation of data-driven decision-making. By reviewing the future-forward budgeting (sometimes called zero-based budgeting), reviewing all staffing positions for current and future needs, and focusing on programs that fit the new vision to reach the community, the church leadership begins to see where God is taking the church.
By reviewing programs, people, and positions inside the church, hard choices will have to be made. In this stage, the proverbial stop-kicking the spiritual can down the road will take place as the leaders begin to address the real needs the church is facing. Year two is a hard but foundational year that will either propel the church forward or leave it behind.
Year 3: Strategic
Leaders will spend more time preparing the church for future guests than receiving guests in the first two years of the revitalization effort. In Year 3, the work begins to pay off as the church seeks to assist partners in the community through service opportunities with nonprofits. Developing partners outside the church’s walls allows the church to turn members’ faith into action as they move to bless the community.
The role of the leadership during this stage is to identify partnerships that could benefit both parties. As the church moved through the strategizing phase, they would have identified areas of the church campus that were underutilized and could be used by an outside agency or other opportunities to use redirected budgeted resources to leverage toward beneficially connecting each side. The redirection cannot be done haphazardly but through open meetings where all stakeholders within the church can dream with the leadership about where they would like to see the church go. In these ‘dream sessions,’ the church begins to see the opportunity to bless the community creatively. The old mantra of build it and they will come will be turned on its head with go and serve. The church’s role will move from serving self to serving others.
As the church develops a strategic plan for reaching the community, it must review its current programs. Many legacy churches offered programmatic cafeteria-style selection, but with limited people and resources, those programs must be cut back to fit current needs. After the review, the enhancement of the leftover programs should be forward-looking and bent towards reaching new people with the gospel of Christ. If the church is going to rebound, it must reinvest in reaching new people and then provide programs that sustain its spiritual development and interest.
Year 4: Sustain
This year marks one of rest and renewal. For the last three years, the church has been moving fast to turn around the slump of decline, and believe me, the church will want to slow down and sustain what they have accomplished. In this stage, the leadership begins to evaluate all areas (programs, positions, people, partnerships, and infrastructure) and adapt for mission creep. Mission creep is when the church leadership gets comfortable with where they are, and some will want to pull the church back to where it had moved forward from because everyone is tired of change.
Do not fall into a comfortable mindset that could erase what the church has already accomplished. The goal in this stage is consistent progress toward reaching the community by doing the current things with excellence with no significant projects or initiatives, but maintaining what has been done in the previous years and dreaming for what could be in the future.
By sustaining the progress, the church has accomplished in previous years, it has laid a new foundation to embrace the new season in ministry it finds itself in. This is an exciting time because progress can be seen, and new opportunities await if the church is willing to embrace what is to come by preparing to do its part today. Through prayer, vision recasting, and a willingness to see the needs of the church’s neighbors as gospel opportunities, the church begins to capture the call to bless the community as the hands and feet of Jesus and not just the community to bless the church.
Year 5: Success
As the revitalization cycle comes to completion, keep yourself from thinking the process is over. The cycle is just beginning again. It is time to start to dream again for the next five-year cycle. Restarting allows new ideas to percolate and partnerships to be developed to enhance what has already been developed in the last five-year process. By using the previous experiences and the data connected to the change accomplished in the last five years, the church begins to derive new future outcomes that will strengthen what is currently a part of the church and see the opportunities that the church has yet fulfilled.
In Year 5, the church celebrates the success of the changes that have come about. The community of believers has changed, and new converts have been won through gospel-centered partnerships that have shown the church cares for its neighbors. The church is willing to adapt to the culture around it while holding to the foundational teachings of Christ. A Christ-centered church has been resurrected where once a dying one lay dormant, waiting for closure. The ability of the church’s leadership to celebrate the past, review the present, and dream towards the future creates a God opportunity for him to bless the church. In return, the church blesses the community for decades to come and becomes a win-win for the church and community.