Keeping Revitalization in the Front of our Minds

Church revitalization has become a major focus for many Christian denominations in North America in recent years. As overall church attendance and membership have declined across the continent, many established churches have struggled. In response, there has been an emphasis on renewing and reviving existing churches rather than just planting new ones.

The Need for Revitalization

Studies consistently show a decline in church attendance and religious affiliation in North America in recent decades. According to Gallup polls, weekly church attendance among US adults has fallen from 43% in 2000 to 36% in 2020. The Pew Research Center found that the share of Americans identifying as Christian declined by 15% between 2007 and 2019, while religious "nones" rose by 17%. Mainline Protestant denominations have experienced especially sharp losses. Similar trends are seen in Canada according to Stats Canada data.

As congregations age and shrink, many churches are no longer sustainable. In 2019, a United Methodist Church study estimated that 10,000 of their 32,000 US churches could close by 2030 if current trends continue. Other denominations face similar grim projections. Even many evangelical megachurches built around a prominent pastor are now waning as their founding leaders retire.

In this environment, revitalization has emerged as a key strategy to turn struggling churches around rather than just closing them. Denominational leaders believe these churches can thrive again with vision, planning, new leadership, and congregational renewal. The alternative is leaving many communities without a viable local church.

Strategic Approaches

Expert Tom Rainer identifies four key ingredients: leadership development, prayer initiatives, evangelistic receptivity, and outward focus. Leadership training aims to identify, recruit, and equip lay leaders, often bringing in new pastoral blood. Churches also initiate prayer movements centered on renewal and local outreach. This fuels openness to new evangelistic efforts within the congregation and surrounding community to welcome new members. Finally, churches shift from an inward survival mentality to actively serving spiritual and tangible needs around them.

Multiple specific church turnaround processes now guide US churches, such as Natural Church Development, Transformation Ministries, Renovate, and Revitalize. Canadian ministries such as New Wineskins and Imagine Gathering take a similar strategic approach, coupling organizational change and spiritual formation. Central to most programs is instilling vision, evaluating health, changing leadership, eliminating debt, and raising morale. Denominational support provides customized assessment tools, coaches, vision casting, and leadership training to revive churches.

Moving in the Right Direction

Research by Ed Stetzer showed a 40% success rate for formal church revitalization efforts that aim to increase spiritual and numerical vitality. High-profile examples like the Brooklyn Tabernacle illustrate struggling urban churches rebounding through gifted leadership and implementing much of the above strategy. Suburban megachurches have also begun to plateau and are exploring revitalization techniques to spark renewed growth.

While not guaranteed, targeted efforts have shown progress in reversing declines with lay training and leadership change. As denominations face widespread closures, revitalization offers hope for thousands of legacy churches to have another life phase. It requires recognizing reality and harvesting assets like facilities, history, and location, which new plants need more. Long-term members often renew their sense of belonging when it takes hold and welcome the changes. The church begins to re-engage locally through a revived church.

Still, hard trends in secularization continue to pose challenges for areas where churches once held cultural sway. Bishop Dave Ulmer co-founded New Wineskins to "refocus on Jesus and his mission in a post-Christendom world." This signals the understanding that revitalization has limits in some regions and denominations without a shift in ecclesiology. Still, other efforts seem to focus mostly on superficial change rather than the spiritual and structural transformation required to reconnect with altered cultures.

Yet where leadership courage, congregational will, and divine grace exist, many nettlesome branches of long-declining churches continue to show new buds signaling spring. Church revitalization has become the most hopeful path for thousands of parishes across North America seeking to overcome stagnation and reclaim spiritual vitality. Though difficult and imperfect work, it holds more promise than surrendering swaths of sanctuaries once resonant with prayer to become eerily silent as secular spaces. By God's grace and through much labor, even some of the most deeply sleeping churches may stir and rise again.