Autopsy Of A Deceased Church - God Centered Recommendations

Hello there and welcome back to God's Center Theology. This is Andy Cain. It's a joy to be back with you once again. Today we have another God's Center recommendation. And today we have Autopsy of a Deceased Church, 12 Ways to Keep Yours Alive by Tom Rainer.

Now Tom Rainer has the Church Answers website and they have a whole host of resources and things you can use to help your church be strong and healthy. There are many places like that out there. I used to follow his work a little bit more a couple years ago, but I've been watching some more of his stuff here lately.

And they always have really good information coming from many years of experience. And so he's drawing off all those experiences. So you've got Tom Rainer and then you've got his son that's a pastor now.

And I want to say his name's Art. I could be wrong. Maybe John. But he's got one of his sons on there and he does a podcast with him. And so they talk about all these different things about pastoral ministry and how church can be healthy.

The Death of a Church and Why It Happens

And so this is a book that Tom wrote about the autopsy of the deceased church. So if you've already deceased church and this is the autopsy of what it looks like, these are the things you don't want to do.

He says here, no one wants to see a church die. And yet far too many churches are dying. For more than 25 years, Dr. Tom Rainer has helped churches grow, reverse the trends of decline, has autopsied those that have died.

And from this experience, he has discovered consistent themes among those churches that have died. Yet it's not gloom and doom because from those themes, lessons on how to keep your church alive have emerged.

Lessons from Declining Churches and the Danger of Nostalgia

So he goes on and there's so many good things in here in reference to a dying church and a deceased church. Everything from knowing the past being the hero, which we see this a lot in our day of, you know, if we could only go back to the 1950s, everything would be better.

No, it wouldn't.

Churches refusing to look like a community, preference-driven churches, all those kinds of things. Obsessing over facilities, all these things. It's really sad. It can be very frustrating, but it's also very sad and unfortunate to see churches that have declined.

And death doesn't have to be the end of your story as a church. If you've declined over many years for whatever reason, and look, some churches decline for reasons that aren't even their fault. It's geography.

Maybe there's a big population shift and the county and the area in which you live just isn't that big anymore. So some of those things can happen, but by and large, it's through stubbornness, idol worship.

You can find what sacred cows a church has by certain things you try to change or touch on. But a death doesn't have to be your only end goal. You can have mergers, you can have redemptive death, which is another church that's healthy and growing, taking over yours.

Christ's Kingdom, Baton Passing, and the Future of the Church

Where yours would cease to exist, but now you have more people, more activity, and a much longer future. Because remember, it isn't about First Street, so-and-so Baptist of whatever'sville, USA. It's about Christ's kingdom.

It says of the increase of Christ's government, there will be no end. Not the increase of your local First Baptist, Second Baptist, Third Street Baptist, whatever you want to call it. You are mainly a tool and a baton carrier.

And one of the things we can see from older generations is being able to change the role into that of a cheerleader, where you pass that baton on to younger leadership. In a lot of these places, this isn't happening.

And so when this doesn't happen, you know, younger people eventually leave, and then the remaining members, the average age goes up because the remaining members are very older, elderly. And it only takes enough funerals, and then you're closing the doors.

So stubbornness is a really hard thing to fight, but this book does a good job of kind of helping you understand where you're at and where you need to go. Amen? Well, check it out. I'll put the link in the description.

Thank you for joining me on this God-centered recommendation.

God bless.