Mission giving was still good. Many churches have specific mission funds and missionaries they support with zeal. That’s good. But if the church is reaching no one in the community, that’s bad. You can’t conveniently excise “Jerusalem” from Acts 1:8.
Meetings were well attended. Sadly, most of these meetings served little purpose. They were fixtures from “the way we’ve always done it.” The same people came to the same meetings and accomplished the same thing: nothing.
Sometimes it is better for a church to have obvious conditions of decline and decay; members are most likely to notice. But, in some of these now deceased churches, the depth of decline would never have been noticed. These and perhaps other factors masked the impending death knell.
On a positive note, thank you for your great response to Autopsy of a Deceased Church over the past years. Because of you, it is the all-time bestseller in church leadership. We are celebrating by providing our first-ever video study course to accompany the book. Perhaps it’s time to take your leaders and members through this study.
It is my prayer the book will be used to prevent yet the death of another church. When it comes to the death of a church, even one autopsy is one too many.
This article on the death of a church originally appeared here.
