Our Numbers Are Down and We Don’t Know Why
This is a hard thing to say out loud, and the men who say it to us usually say it quietly.
This is a hard thing to say out loud, and the men who say it to us usually say it quietly.
Attendance isn’t what it was. The building feels emptier than it did ten years ago. Nobody can point to a single thing that went wrong, and that’s part of what makes it heavy. It just slowly became this.
We want to be careful here, because a company that sells outreach has an obvious temptation to tell every discouraged congregation that visibility is the answer. It may not be. Decline has several different causes, they call for completely different responses, and only one of them is something we could help with.
So here’s an honest sorting, including the parts where we’d tell you to keep your money.
If the congregation was built in the 1960s and the core of it is now in their seventies and eighties, attendance will decline no matter how faithful everyone is. Funerals outpace additions. That isn’t a failure of anyone’s work. It’s arithmetic, and it’s the most common cause we encounter.
What helps: reaching new people, genuinely. This is one of the two cases where outreach matters.
What doesn’t: blaming yourselves. A congregation can do everything right and still shrink for this reason, and the men leading it often carry guilt they haven’t earned.
Children are raised faithfully, they grow up, and the jobs are three hours away. They’re still Christians, still attending somewhere, just not here. The congregation did its work well and the fruit of it is sitting in another state.
What helps: honestly, not much, at least not in terms of getting them back. You can stay connected to them. You can make sure they’re planted somewhere sound. You can be glad!
What doesn’t: treating it as failure. And we’d gently say that chasing growth to replace them can become its own kind of grief avoidance.
Somebody stopped coming eight months ago. There was no falling out. They missed a few weeks, life got complicated, and the longer they were gone the harder it got to come back. Nobody called, not out of indifference but because everyone assumed somebody else had.
Add up fifteen of those over a decade and you’ve accounted for a substantial part of the decline.
What helps: picking up the phone. Visiting. A congregation that systematically reaches out to everyone who has faded will usually recover more people than any outreach effort would bring in, and it costs nothing.
What doesn’t: anything we sell. If this is your situation, do this first and do it for six months before you consider spending a dollar with anybody.
Sometimes attendance declines because something is wrong in the congregation. A conflict that never got resolved. A leadership problem. Teaching that drifted. A reputation in town for being cold, or harsh, or divided. People left for a reason and the reason is still there.
The honest test is whether people who leave tend to leave for other congregations rather than leaving the faith. If so, that’s information, and it’s worth hearing even though it stings.
What helps: dealing with the actual problem, which usually means hard conversations among the leadership, and sometimes asking people who left what happened and really listening to the answer.
What doesn’t: outreach. And we want to be direct about this. Bringing new visitors into a congregation with an unaddressed internal problem does not help, it exposes more people to it and the visitors leave too. If this is your situation, please don’t hire us. Fix the thing first. We’d say the same to our own brother.
Some congregations are healthy, warm, faithful, and effectively invisible. The teaching is sound and the welcome is genuine. It’s just that no stranger in that community has encountered them in a very long time, because there’s no way for one to.
The tell here is simple. Count the people who have started attending in the last five years who were not already connected to somebody in the building. If that number is zero or near it, you have a findability problem rather than a health problem.
What helps: being findable, being clear, and answering the people who reach out. That’s the one we do.
Usually It’s More Than One
Most congregations we talk with have some mixture, often the first and the third together, sometimes with a bit of the fifth.
Which is why the useful exercise isn’t picking one. It’s sitting down with your leadership and honestly apportioning it. How much of our decline is funerals. How much is young families leaving town. How many names can we list of people who faded and were never called. Is there anything unresolved among us. And how many genuinely new people have found us lately.
That conversation takes an evening and it’s worth more than any service anyone could sell you, because it tells you where the effort actually belongs.
A Word to the Men Carrying This
If you’re an elder or a preacher watching a congregation you love get smaller, we want to say something that isn’t strategy.
Faithfulness and attendance are not the same measurement. There are men who shepherded well for thirty years in a town that emptied out, and they will hear well done. There are congregations that shrank while doing everything the Lord asked of them.
Figure out the cause, address what can be addressed, and keep sowing. But don’t read the number as a verdict on your work. The Lord knows what the field was like.
If you want help thinking through which of these is actually your situation, we’re glad to talk, and we’ll tell you honestly if the answer isn’t us.
At Project Go, we help churches of Christ that are healthy and hard to find. If that’s not your situation, we’ll say so. Book a call.
Not Sure Which One Is Your Situation?
We’ll help you think it through honestly, and tell you plainly if the answer isn’t us.
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