If the church in America is going to make any meaningful progress toward addressing the 40 million adults who’ve left the church in the last 30 years, we must run on two mission-critical train tracks: individual and institutional.
Jim Davis and I geared our book The Great Dechurching more toward helping individuals demystify what’s going on, grow in relational wisdom, and adopt a more persuasive posture with the people in their everyday lives. However, if Christians are to have any meaningful long-term influence, we must also have the parallel institutional track: local churches making progress on this issue. The aim for churches is threefold: close the back door, open the front door, and send out the church better equipped.
To radically distill this plan, here are three critical questions your church must ask.
1. Close the back door: Do we have a process for people moving out of our community?
What’s the number one reason people give for why they’ve dechurched? “I moved.” Just like at an airport, there are two kinds of moving—arrivals and departures. You need to have a plan for both. Let’s start with a strategy for departures since it’s simpler:
Conduct exit interviews with individuals and households when they move.
Communicate that you’d love to be helpful and resourceful as they move, and as part of that will help compile a list of three to five good churches to check out in their new community.
Check in periodically in the months after their move to see how you can pray and how the church search process is going.
What’s the number one reason people give for why they’ve dechurched? ‘I moved.’
While these actions won’t necessarily help your church (you’re the one losing members), they’ll help the wider church. By holding members’ hands as they transition to other faithful churches, you’re lovingly preventing people from becoming a dechurching statistic and serving the churches where they end up.
2. Open the front door: Do we have a process for people moving into our community?
Next, we can consider the church’s “arrivals” strategy. The ways in which people find local churches continue to evolve, but there’s plenty of low-hanging fruit to be gathered using these approaches:
Train your congregation on how to invite someone to church (35 percent of unchurched people will go to church if you invite them, and our study found that 17 percent of dechurched people would go to church if you invited them). Give them a script: “Hey, I don’t know if you have a church you attend regularly, but we really like our local church, and I feel like I’d be a bad friend if I didn’t extend a personal invitation for you to come.”
Multiple platforms help you identify people who recently moved into your area, such as the Bless App, Gloo, and LeadsPlease.
Multiple platforms help you do direct mail, such as Cactus Mailing and Outreach.
Make sure you’re listed on the various church search engines (where appropriate), such as TGC (currently revamping), 9Marks, PCA, SBC, ACNA, and Acts 29.
Review your website to make sure it’s friendly for people new to the community and easy access to all the information they’d need to see if you’re a good fit and to make their first visit smoother. Consider the ideas from Clover and ReachRight.
3. Send out the equipped: Do you provide training on how congregants can have spiritual and gospel conversations in their everyday lives?
It’s no secret that many churches struggle to equip their members to communicate the gospel effectively. This is especially true as we’ve moved into a post-Christendom context where Christianity is often seen as regressive or even oppressive. Consider these suggestions:
Identify and assess your current plan to train your congregation on having spiritual and gospel conversations.
To analyze how your community outreach is doing, consider metrics like how many first-generation believers your church has baptized this year.
Ask thoughtful questions about your area: What are the biggest idols in your community, and what gospel metaphors speak most powerfully to the underlying wants and fears embedded in those idols? What contexts or communities are the most responsive?
Host training about the integration of faith and work.
Additionally, we built a free 20-point checklist for local churches to audit themselves and are giving away our rechurching toolkit to anyone who registers for our TGC25 conference breakout session, “How Your Church Can Reach the Dechurched.”
More Important than Strategies
We’d be remiss if we didn’t make explicit the most important thing—Jesus Christ will build his church.
Jesus Christ will build his church.
We can have all the best practices and implement all the best systems and structures, yet none of it means anything if the wind of the Holy Spirit isn’t blowing and changing people’s hearts through the gospel. All these ideas assume we’re building our churches on the rock of the gospel and feeding the sheep with a steady diet of Word and sacrament.
The Gospel Coalition