I Refuse to Lead a Dying Church

By Paul Nixon

The COVID-19 pandemic renewed speculation of the Church's demise, and the wake of global catastrophe heightened clergy burnout. Still, Paul Nixon holds onto fierce hope that life and resurrection are choices the Church and its leaders can still make. 

 

With new material for the post-quarantine era and an and an included discussion guide, the second edition of I Refuse to Lead a Dying Church! provides excellent stimulation for faith leaders to commit to six critical choices: 

• choosing life over death; 

• choosing community over isolation; 

• choosing fun over drudgery; 

• choosing bold over mild; 

• choosing frontier over fortress; 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pilgrim Press
• Release date: May 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9780829801057

Paul Nixon

Paul Nixon is leader of Epicenter Group, a church leadership coaching organization, and Readiness 360, an organization devoted to assessing church readiness for multiplying ministry. He is the author of Fling Open the Doors, published by Abingdon Press.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Is it still possible to be a faithful servant of the resurrected Christ and serve as a leader within one of the mainline denominations?

I asked this question in 2006—and I am asking it again eighteen years later, after a pandemic and unprecedented social change.

Since the first edition of this book was published, most worship gatherings of mainline Christian denominations have lost half of the people they had then—and this comes on top of a half century of precipitous decline. The church that was holding onto fifty hearty souls in worship in 2019 now may have twenty in the sanctuary most Sundays, with another twenty online. And the money is running out … in so many places. We are rapidly downshifting toward oblivion and extinction.¹

If you are part of a congregation that identifies as United Methodist, Evangelical Lutheran, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Disciples of Christ, American Baptist, or United Church of Christ, your congregation may be moving into the last chapters of its life on earth—unless there is a significant game changer—and soon!

Even if you are fortunate to have younger people, your church is still at risk. You have likely lost many of the older folks who were your church’s financial lifeline for decades. If the stars have aligned for the moment and your church is growing, you are also at risk, because the current alignment of stars (or conditions that are contributing to the current resurgence) will change. Much of what you are doing today simply will not be effective ten years from now. It is easy for success to lull us into complacency.

Most of our future pastors currently in divinity schools will soon graduate full of zest for ministry, only to find themselves deployed to a deathbed vigil somewhere—tending to a fragile and aging congregation with little energy left to do what’s necessary to thrive. A few of these churches will recall fondly the good old days of 2015, when they may have felt they were still on their game.

The annual stockholders’ report of the largest of the mainline denominations, the United Methodist Church (UMC), recently recorded a net membership loss for the fifty-fourth consecutive year, compounded now by the disaffiliation of several thousand congregations because of their objection to the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ persons and leaders. It’s a similar story of decline in most groups. I highlight the UMC story because they are the biggest ship sinking—and it happens to be the one I’m on!²

Since the first edition of this book, most conservative denominations and movements have joined their more liberal counterparts in this decline. A rising generation of Americans no longer trusts any one religious institution or community to meet all their spiritual needs or to justify the full range of their spiritual commitments. The United States is rapidly becoming a nation of spiritual free agents.

A majority of Americans have been beholden to no church since 2020. As of this writing, forty-seven percent of Americans claim church membership. By the time you read these words, it will likely be fewer still.³ Many of the unchurched continue to identify themselves as theists and Christians, and even to practice Christian faith with some intentionality.⁴ Those who remain active in American churches are disproportionately non-denominational, recent immigrants, and/or persons of color. Majority white, old denominations seem most at risk.

No person or organization wants to believe they are really dying. It is natural for us to respond initially to a bad prognosis with denial, lifting up any statistic that helps us to maintain our denial. For example, for the latter third of the twentieth century, even as church membership numbers plummeted, United Methodist average worship attendance held relatively stable. This latter fact offered hope to church leaders that what they were seeing was simply a downturn in joining for joining’s sake. But then came 2002 and 2003, and then 2004, when suddenly, after thirty-four years of an attendance plateau, the denominational Titanic lurched and keeled over. Then twenty years later, COVID-19 erased one third of the remaining worship attendance in just two years.⁵

For some of us enjoying our church potluck dinner on the gently sloping deck of our denominational ship, the 2020 pandemic caused our iced tea to tip over. The jazz ensemble slipped a note or two. Looks of concern darted from one eye to another. Then many of us suddenly acknowledged: This ship is really going down, all the way down, down to the bottom of the sea.

So, given this sobering state of affairs, I repeat the opening question: Is it possible to be servants of a resurrected Christ while investing one’s leadership into such a church?

I know it to be possible because I coach growing churches and serve on the staff of one in southern California, which is gently growing even in the harsh weather conditions of post-Christendom. I help people start new churches constantly. Although the work is harder today, churches still take root when those leading them take seriously their cultural context and proceed to love their neighbors with all that is within them. But clearly, this is no time for business as usual!

In most of the older denominations, there remain two key realities: a sea of aging, shrinking congregations, and a much smaller network of creative, innovative, community-minded churches and faith communities (of varied ages) that are thriving, almost oblivious to the trends in their larger denominational family. These thriving churches have some important things in common. Chief among them is their pastor’s single-minded commitment to seeking out signs of life—finding any positive pulse in the church or community and then encouraging the innovators, partners, and volunteers who are associated with such initiatives.

I believe God invites every church to thrive. The fact that you’re reading this book presumably means that you want to believe that too.

If the point were simply to encourage the development of culturally conservative churches and slowly, gently, lay the more liberal churches to rest, we would be walking away from faith engagement with a significant segment of American society—those persons who are more likely to explore Christian faith in a less dogmatic manner. Or if the point were simply to focus on the places where numerical growth is most likely, we could just walk away from many of our small towns and central city neighborhoods and do church on the edges of heartland cities where new subdivisions are still being built. These ideas are not the point, nor do I recommend them. Instead, I believe that God invites every church to thrive in every sort of community!

SIX VITAL CHOICES

This book is a six-part manifesto about ministry in the mainline Protestant context in the twenty-first century. It is written for church leaders, both lay and clergy. The premise of the book is simple, and many will find it radical. Some may conclude it is hopelessly naïve. My premise is this: God intends every servant of the resurrected Christ to be a servant of life. God calls us to lead healthy, growing spiritual movements.

Churches are rooted in communities. When communities change and the root system atrophies, churches begin to fade. Any church can blossom and thrive anywhere if it will become healthy enough spiritually and pay attention to the needs, experiences, and sensibilities of those it seeks to serve—and then build positive relationships with this population.

For this reason, I refuse to lead a dying church. And I invite you to refuse, too. I suggest you draw a line in the sand with me. I encourage you to declare that, from this moment forward, you refuse to simply go through the motions and play church. You hereby refuse to help your church gracefully into the grave. And you will not channel your best ministry energy into efforts that are detached from your congregation’s life and ministry.

Even when a church may soon be closing its doors or merging with another church, leaders can pay attention to the possibilities of legacy, stewarding resources so that others may readily pick up the work of leading and loving in the same neighborhood. There is never a point where we have to take No for an answer. With God, there is always a Yes for us to embrace.

I invite you to join me in refusing, ever again, to lead a dying church. With regard to your church’s ministry and future, I invite you to seek and to embrace God’s Yes at every turn.

As we shall discover in the pages ahead, this commitment entails six critical choices:

Life over death

Community over isolation

Fun over drudgery

Bold over mild

Frontier over fortress

Now rather than later

It’s really that simple: six clear choices that will greatly amplify the impact of our lives and of the churches we lead.

Before we explore these choices, I want to take what may seem like a detour but is central to my understanding of spirited Christian leadership. I want to examine briefly what it means to be an apostle. In the first generation of Christian leaders, a group of characters we call the apostles carried the good news of Jesus into the streets and began to change the world. In our generation, it is still apostles who carry the flag of the Christian movement. Living churches have a higher proportion of leaders who are apostles than do dying churches.

Apostles refuse to preside over dying churches.

APOSTOLIC LEADERSHIP

Always dreamed that I’d be an apostle, knew that I would make it if I tried.

Those lyrics by Tim Rice from Jesus Christ Superstar first brought the term apostle to my young consciousness. When did you first hear this term? What does it mean to you? What kinds of baggage might it carry for you?

Christian groups understand the term in different ways. Some reserve the term apostle for the first-hand witnesses to the resurrected Christ. In these churches, the only apostles you may ever see are the flannel board variety in children’s Sunday school. Other congregations actually have an apostle in residence—typically a preacher, often the pastor—who performs a defined function just as the treasurer would. I do not usually think of an apostle in such structural ways, as a role to be played only by certain people. I think of apostle as a mode of being that many persons experience in varying degrees.

Because the word literally means one who is sent, I define an apostle as any leader who:

has had a living experience of meeting Christ somewhere, somehow.

moves with a sense that that they are chosen and sent out in life to do and to share something of