Your Church is Going to Die
Go on...
Aw. Poor guy. I always feel bad for people with partially-reduplicated names like this, like my dad's best friend who named his son Tony even though his last name was very similar and very Italian already. The poor kid sounds like an entree at the Olive Garden.
People rarely consider how churches begin and almost never consider how they end. Churches, just like people, have lifecycles. They are born and they die. Where is your church in its lifecycle?
Have you ever considered how close your church is to death?
*Looks around at the hundreds of churches and monasteries we have all over the world, noting that the vast majority of which that are outside of North Africa did not exist prior to 1960*
I mean, I think we're doing pretty good, all told.
In his book, “The Unstuck Church: Equipping Churches to Experience Sustained Health” Tony Morgan describes seven stages of a church’s life.
- Launch
- Momentum Growth
- Strategic Growth
- Sustained health
- Maintenance
- Preservation
- Life Support
Where is your church in this lifecycle?
I'm not sure that this applies to churches outside of whatever type of church caused Mr. Clifton to come up with this idea. Are we on Life Support because Egypt is only about 10% Christian as opposed to nearly 100% as it was by the 5th century AD, or are we in Maintenance mode because that 10% figure hasn't appreciably changed in decades, or are we in one of the growth stages because (admittedly anti-Coptic Orthodox) English-language sources from outside of the Church that wrote about us in the first half of the 20th century (e.g., Attwater, 1945) put our numbers in the hundreds of thousands in Egypt, whereas today they range from about 5 million (government census figure; certainly an undercount) to around 12 million (Coptic NGO figure; certainly an overcount -- most contemporary non-sectarian non-Egyptian sources like the CIA World Factbook put us at around 8-10 million)? Or are we in... (You get the point.)
People rarely consider how churches begin and almost never consider how they end. Churches, just like people, have lifecycles. They are born and they die.
Parishes may die like this, but Churches? Maybe in the case of some specific post-Reformation denominations, but the Church is the body of Christ, and He will not undergo death twice.
They close their doors, they sell their buildings, they liquidate their assets, and they stop gathering.
Yes, we've purchased or been given many shuttered RC buildings and the like over the years. I've seen some amazing ones with my own eyes, when I was in the Diocese of NY and New England in upstate NY, a decade ago. I can only pray that those kindly and brotherly fellow Christians who saw fit to help our community in those circumstances can feel comforted that they will continue to be dedicated to the worship of the Triune God, as opposed to turning into a concert hall, a dance club, or something else like that. (A lot of former church buildings end up going that way because of the very impressive acoustics that are the result of traditional church architecture.)
If you don’t believe me, get on a plane to Jerusalem and look for the church first pastored by James.
Thank you for the invitation! I would love to visit the Monastery of St. Mark in Jerusalem, as it would be a blessing to worship with the newly-elevated Abp. Anthimos and the other local Christians at that location in such a holy space, to say nothing of also visiting the local Armenian Patriarchate, the small holdings of the Coptic Orthodox and the Ethiopians (fight over Deir El Sultan notwithstanding), and even the Greeks, assuming that they would not attack me with a broom upon learning that I am not one of them. (Which I don't think they would; I've been hugged by enough random Chalcedonians at the local Glendi festival when I used to still go to there, so I think I must blend in quite nicely. Or maybe I just seem very huggable, for some reason.)
Then skip over to Turkey and see if you can find the church at Antioch still meeting.
You have a few choices in modern Antakya, depending on who think is keeping the original church there alive. There's the Greek Orthodox Church near the archeological museum of Hatay, at least two churches calling themselves "Antakya Mesihçiler Kilisesi" (which I'm pretty sure is just Turkish for "Antiochian Christian Church"), something called "Yeni Apostolik Havari Kilisesi", the very uncreatively-named "Antakya Protestan Kilisesi" (no prizes for guessing what that means), and so on. It doesn't seem like there'd be anything for me, but that's okay. My church's stronghold is in the southeast of the country (about 400 miles to the east of Antakya), in Midyat and especially at Tur Abdin (the "Hill of Worshippers"), in addition to the Armenian sites like the Cathedral of the Holy Cross on Aghtamar Island in Lake Van, which is one of those places I hope I can visit at least once before I depart from this life.
Those churches are closed, disbanded and scattered.
The Cathedral at Aghtamar has in recent years been the site of historic baptisms after being shuttered for about a century following the genocides committed against the Armenians and others by the Ottomans in the early 20th century, which resulted in the deliberate destruction many sacred sites (in the case of the Aghtamar Cathedral in particular, it had stood for 1,000 years by the time it was destroyed and then forcibly closed by the Ottoman government in 1916).
American churches are closing too, and not just one or two at a time – they are closing by the thousands. This Sunday morning when you go to church, about 135 fewer American churches will be gathering than gathered the same time last week. That’s 600 churches disbanding every month – and 7,000 churches vanishing every year.
Well, when you largely offer nothing to people that they can't get elsewhere without the added hassle of having to gather in a particular building on one of their few days off to hear shallow platitudes with people that they probably don't even like, can you really be surprised? Sorry if that's harsh, but it's not difficult to see why this is happening. Secularism has a strong pull by itself, but when you consider what is being offered as an alternative, it's almost entirely predictable that things would be going this way.
Western Europe experienced drastic changes over the course of the 20th century. During the 1960s, it experienced terminal decline of virtually all its large, organized churches and the pervasive Christian culture, which influenced Western Europe for centuries, virtually disappeared. Today the streets of major cities throughout Western Europe are peppered with church buildings that lasted longer than the congregations that erected them. Hundreds of church buildings are now being used as restaurants, nightclubs, concert venues, cafés, modern condominiums, museums and mosques. They stand as stark proof that western culture is spitting Christianity out of its mouth.
I would think "has spat" is more apt, but yeah. That sounds largely accurate.
The change is not really that shocking if you think about it. Churches are made up of sinners, and sin kills everything it touches. If sinners are going to church, churches will be dying. If churches are dying, new churches are necessary.
Here's where Mr. Clifton loses me: "If sinners are going to church, churches will be dying" -- as opposed to what, exactly? Where is this mythical church where everyone who goes there is already free from sin? Is it right next to the doctor's office where somehow only healthy people go? Will I burst into flames if I accidentally set foot in it? As the saying goes, the Church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints. (And that's not because we don't have plenty of the latter category.)
Every year in America about 4,000 evangelical churches begin. Of those started, 35% close before their 5th anniversary, leaving about 2,600 new churches planted annually.
How many of these are essentially like vaguely Jesus-themed shopping malls or arena-style concert venues, I wonder?
How is the American church responding to the crisis?
By writing think pieces designed to scare everyone?
Please keep in mind that the mission of the church was to scatter, not to gather.
So then what was all the stuff earlier about how the churches in Turkey et al. are scattered now? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? It seems like Mr. Clifton wants to have it both ways here.
Churches have a life cycle and eventually die, and one day yours will too.
I don't think it will, though. I mean, maybe the Church of St. Bishoy in Albuquerque, NM into which I was baptized a dozen years ago will eventually (though all signs point to the opposite happening, as they've received more converts since I moved away in 2015), but again, the whole Church itself? I would think that if that were to happen it would've surely happened at some point much earlier in history -- say, when the mad caliph Al-Muizz ordered that the tongues of any caught speaking the Coptic language be cut out, or when the Christian community narrowly averted annihilation on the order of the same caliph, through the miracle of the moving of Mt. Mokattam by the prayers of St. Simon the Tanner and HH St. Abraham the Syrian.
My prayer is that you would plant a church vigorously committed to planting other new churches. I pray you will stretch the faith of your people, not so they can have a larger building to worship in, but that Christ may have a larger kingdom of worshipers.
These are good things to pray for. May God grant them, according to His good will.
I know it's just a building,
Is it? I don't mean to pick on you (as I'm sure many people think the same), but I can't help but think that the idea that churches are "just buildings" may hasten their dissolution. If it's "just a building", then why not convert it into a Starbucks or whatever.
but it's sad. I've seen my former church torn down, or sold and become something else. It makes you wonder what became of the real church that congregated in that building: the body of Christ, as something that old probably did have memebres of the body of Christ in attendance. Today, there are lot's of churches where it's another body and another Spirit, but I'm not talking about that.
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That looks still useable to me. I mean, compared to some parts of the Middle East like present-day Iraq and Syria where Christians pray in bombed-out, ransacked husks of buildings, or at the site of long-decayed foundations of monasteries that were liquidated centuries ago under this or that dominant power, the building in that photo looks downright nice. Just get out the mower or get on your hands and knees and dig out the overgrowth with some friends, get someone who knows how to reinforce whatever internal parts of the building may need it, have a few people brave getting up high to paint the building, and just like that, you've got your church building. Heck, I'd use it. It's probably more fitting to be a dedicated church than the one corner/room of a multi-office building in an office park, which is all we could afford back in Albuquerque even after 15+ years of saving. (Not to diminish that; it is holy ground just the same, but my point is that I don't know that people who have always had dedicated church buildings to go to necessarily recognize how fortunate they have been.)