The church life-cycle (part 2)
My last post explored the first four stages of the church life cycle: The Dream, Birth, Adolescence, and Adulthood. I tried to add some colour to the sociological categories. If you’ve been part of a church that has been through these transitions, I trust the unique feelings of each stage returned to you as you read.
My post this week is a little more sombre. No human organisation lives forever, and churches are no exception. The Church (capital C), as Jesus promised, will last, but its local, contextual iterations will not.*
The second half of the lifecycle includes (becoming an) institution, decline, and finally, death.
Stage 5: (becoming an) institution
The shift from adulthood to institution is a subtle one. Outwardly, a church can look healthy and stable. Morgan and Mann assert that in a stagnating church, total giving and membership numbers may still be on the rise (see giving-lag diagram below). If you look closer, though, there will be some clear telltale signs of ill-health.
Tony Morgan’s Giving Lag. High giving numbers aren’t a guarantee that your church hasn’t entered the institutional stage.
Methods (that had been initially chosen because they were effective at fulfilling the vision) become sacrosanct.
In earlier stages, it was the vision that trumped everything else. Any change that helped to fulfill this vision was considered. Change now becomes an inconvenience.
Attendance and volunteerism will be in decline. However, the church’s healthy financial position means that bills still get paid, and responsibilities that were once done by volunteers are now done by staff.
The church becomes focused more on insiders than outsiders. It slowly becomes organisationally complex and evangelistic complacent.
At its birth and adolescence, the church had no choice but to pay very close attention to its community and its needs. Now, if the community’s demography or its needs change, the church likely won’t notice or care.
This missional complacency is a far cry from the hustle of birth and adolescence. The issue, of course, is that now the church has a building, a pastor and/or staff, and often multiple committees. Had it not successfully navigated its earlier stages, it would have none of these things.
The institution stage can last a very long time.
Stage 6: decline
Alice Mann perfectly sums up the moment of realisation that all is not well:
“At some point, even the coyote realises that he is falling. The congregation finds it can no longer dismiss temporary or random noticeable fall-offs in worship attendance, volunteer energy, pledging households, first-time visitors, new member retention, and so on. After refusing for months, years, or even decades to look down on its situation, the congregation arrives at a moment of painful recognition.”
While it may feel that decline has suddenly snuck up on them, in truth, the declining church will have spent years gradually disconnecting from their immediate community. Often, by this stage, few church members actually live in the church’s immediate vicinity.
Though the church may have faithfully served the community in practical ways, these acts of service tend to be one-way (we give, you receive), meaning friendships (which are built upon mutuality) rarely form.
Ideally, the church’s leadership will seize this opportunity of painful recognition to do some learning. The three questions, formed and imprinted during adolescence, will be revisited (Who are we? What are we here for? And who is our neighbour?)
Decline, like becoming an institution, can continue for a long time. It usually takes a good deal of it before the church will consider reexamining the status quo and/or grudgingly admitting that change is required.
A newfound openness to change is very significant. Kurt Lewin, the godfather of change management, called it ‘survival anxiety’. If deep urgency for change exists and is felt by many congregants, a skillful leader can use it to implement significant change.
If the pain of survival anxiety is not felt (or not widely felt), the church will not take a learning posture or reexamine its assumptions about mission and ministry. Change will not occur.
Mann’s Congregational Resources (money, people, energy, buildings) and Tolerance for Change. Congregations tend to lose their visionary and missionary qualities rather quickly. A new openness to change can occur when resources are no longer sufficient to sustain the status quo. At this point, either innovation brings about fruitful change or conflict shuts down talk of innovation, and the church moves towards death.
Mann’s remarkable analysis demonstrates how a crisis, usually financial in nature, can result in life-giving change. However, if a church waits too long, its spiritual and relational vitality becomes too weak to endure significant change. From this point, death becomes inevitable.
Stage 7: death
A church dies in one of two ways. The first is what Mann calls ‘a holy death’. She writes.
“The hospice movement has helped many individuals to make their last months both dignified and emotionally rich, but this cannot happen if the person keeps waiting for a cure. When a congregation faces its impending death sooner, while there are still enough members around for a wonderful ‘funeral event’, the concluding days of that commitment faith community can be spiritually powerful.”
A holy death is a decision to end the church with a party. It’s a choice to celebrate and acknowledge the church’s faithful presence in its community. After this, members may merge or join another church and choose to bless some other ministry that carries forward their values.
What would cause a church to decide against a holy death? Unfortunately, years of decline often provoke symptoms of denial and blame. The decision to have holy death requires the church to honestly acknowledge its trajectory (the opposite of denial). And see that they do have some agency (the opposite of perceived powerlessness/blame).
While choosing a holy death might feel like giving up to long-tenured church members, it is, in fact, the courageous option. An ‘unholy’ death neither glorifies God nor celebrates all that the church has been. If a church community decides to press on despite running desperately low on resources, they will most likely do so in a mixture of denial, depression, and anger.
The people blame the minister for not being a capable enough preacher or administrator; the minister blames the board for being stuck in their ways; the board blames the domination for not being helpful. The community itself can even be blamed for being indifferent to the Christian message.
Feeling that there is little within their control, the church’s energy can be focused on doing well what is within their power. Ronald Heifetz calls this tendency to keep busy doing familiar activities rather than engaging in learning and reflection ‘work avoidance’. It is a desperate hope that if we keep doing what worked before, somehow, our problems will go away.
Of course, institutionalism does not need to lead to decline and decline to death. If a church has the willingness to learn and change, and its leaders have courage, vision, and conflict management skills, renewal can be achieved. More about that another time.
*A cursory reading of church history demonstrates this fact clearly. And Jesus alludes dispassionately to its reality several times. See Matthew 5:13.
Sources: William Bridges, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change; Gilbert Rendle, Leading Change in the Congregation: Spiritual and Organizational Tools for Leaders; Alice Mann, Can Our Church Live?: Redeveloping Congregations in Decline; Tony Morgan, The unstuck church: equipping churches to experience sustained health.