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CHURCH DEVELOPMENT More Churches Needed To Offset Church Closures
By Charles W. Courtoy
Executive Director of Church Development
When we start new churches our expectations are
that they will last hundreds of years. A few will, but most will not.
In a recent Church Champions meeting at Simpsonwood in Atlanta, an executive of the Church of the Nazarene shared that research he had done of his denomination revealed that less than 25 percent of the churches launched 75 years ago are still in existence. That has led the Church of the Nazarene to establish new church planting as a priority. As a result, they are growing at an annual rate of 10 percent.
I did a survey of the 1994 statistics of the Florida Conference’s 716 churches and discovered that 296 were declining. Some of them were among the largest of our conference at one time. Some have since closed, and a number of others are in danger of dying.
I recently looked at information from the last 39 years and discovered that the conference had closed 67 churches and lost 27 through mergers for a total loss of 94 churches. During that same period the conference launched 206 new churches and missions.
It is interesting to note how many churches and missions have been launched and how many have closed during the past decades.
Launched |
Loss through Discontinuation/Merger |
|
| 1960s | 89 |
16 |
| 1970s | 24 |
24 |
| 1980s | 36 | 13 |
| 1990s | 57 | 41 |
Most of those closed or merged had been in existence 40 years or longer. Only two of the 1990’s closures were launched in the 1990s.
The implications of this survey are: n we need to redouble our efforts to launch new churches; n the stagnation in membership growth in the Florida Conference is partially the result of increasing numbers of once healthy churches dying; and n we need to help established churches recognize the importance of renewal and revival while they are still healthy.
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