It was sad to see. The church that my parents attended literally died. Largely, the people who made up this congregation got old and passed on to the next life. When they did, they left no one to pass their church on to. The church attendance had been dwindling for many years. I visited there about a year before the denomination finally pulled the plug, and it was like I stepped into a time machine back to my childhood in the early 60’s. The order of worship was just as I remembered, the songs we sang were the same, the choir had new robes, but many of the members were the same, the same nice lady still played the organ, and the same people (the ones who were still living) sat in the same pews.
This church thrived in the post WW II era. As the men who fought that war came home and started families, they brought them to church, built a beautiful little building, and expected things to go on like that forever. The only place they went on like that was in the church building. The neighborhood changed as the children of those men grew up and moved to other parts of the city. Eventually, most of the old-timers moved out of the neighborhood, too. Because they loved their church, they would drive back to the old neighborhood each Sunday, but their children wouldn’t. Finally, the congregation got old and died off. When there were only a few of them left, the denomination stepped in and gave the debt-free building to another of their local churches to use as a satellite campus. Of course, my 90-year-old parents and the other members were invited to continue attending, but everything changed, and they couldn’t accept so many sudden changes. It was no longer their church.
A similar thing happened in another denomination in another state. The church grew down to ten attendees. Their congregational polity required that they vote to turn the building over to the denomination. It looked like they would make that decision so that the assets could be used by the denomination to build the Kingdom in the area. However, at the last minute the remaining 10 members voted to keep the building so that they could use it for a small group Bible study on Sundays. (There was no mention of reaching out to the community.)
From time to time, both of these churches had been challenged to make some changes that would help them stay relevant and reach people for Christ. Both churches went through a lot of pastors—some of them were incompetent, some of them had great ideas—but the congregation was stubborn. They wanted the church the way it was, and that’s the way it stayed. Their concern was pleasing the people they already had instead of trying to reach those around them who needed the good news. It had not always been that way. At one time, these churches worked hard to affect the world for Christ, but that was long ago.
