Where are American churches headed in 20 years

[William Thornton]

Timothy's topic, moved here:


Where do you see the church going in the next twenty years? Where do you see denominations headed?

One of the growing trends in the UMC is a return to more and more lay involvement and licensed ministers serving in pulpits in small towns. We are also seeing a return to larger circuits (one pastor sharing more and more churches) and also a number of churches being pastored by retired pastors.

What trends do you see happening in Baptist life over the next few years and then over the next few decades that will effect the way we need to do clergy education or think about ministry in general?

Just to get it started, I think the days of full-time pastoring are nearly over in most denominations unless pastors are full-time in some kind of sharing arrangement with multiple churches. I can see full-time clergy moving more to the role of consultation or administration while the lay people have to take on more and more of the daily ministry of the church.

I see this happening because the money just isn't there to pay full-time clergy too many years down the road. What do you think?

[William Thornton]

There is still a huge sum of money to pay FT clergy. I'm guessing it will just be concentrated in fewer churches. I'm no longer surprised at how little pay some FT SBC pastors are willing to accept.

Check my article about 1 in 4 churches closing in the next15 years. Add to that the long term trend of people moving from smaller to larger churches and it looks like the future hold less decent sized congregations for pastors.



Some of the tiny churches I've preached in since retiring are surely not going to make it.

[Tim Bonney]

[Dave Roberts]

One of the things I see in working with churches in their interim times is that for survival, a church must carve its niche in ministry. Just being an SBC church or a CBF church or a UMC church does not entice people any more. There must be an identity or ministry that accentuates who the people are and how they present themselves to their communities. For example, a downtown church might use its music or children's programs as its drawing card. A church in a less-than-thriving neighborhood might find its identity coordinating ministries to others in the area. Just having a denominational identity does not help a church. Whatever the choice is, it must be deliberately chosen and will require much investment. Just being the church on a certain corner or in a certain neighborhood doesn't help the congregation.

Also, churches need to look carefully at their facilities. Buildings from historic eras may or may not work today. I just finished an interim with a church whose physical plant is eventually going to drag it down. It has a 650-seat sanctuary with no more than 100 usually present, educational space for at least 500 with 60 in Sunday School, and a $35,000 annual utility bill. Facilities need to be right sized, but they are in a historic district requiring permission to change.

Tiny rural churches face either mergers or sharing pastors. Methodists have made that work, but Baptists don't like sharing pastors, no matter how badly it is needed. There are four Baptist churches east of where I live that are unable to support ministers. They were once a field around 1900, and they still say nobody wants to go back. It may be their only way to succeed, because all of them have "the curse of the cemetery."

[KeithE]

Talking with Todd and Christy the last few days, they described how their current churches cannot afford to hire ministers (or pay them well).

With Christy’s church I can see that they are mostly made up of uneducated (unemployed or retired) people (for some reason about half of them have obvious dental problems). Their old building needs constant repair. She works nominally 12 hours a week but actually closer to 30 on average was her guess. The salary is under $10K/year.

At Todd’s church the story in much different. They are in an very upscale neighborhood, and have an average attendance of 280 in one service and 210 in another (Todd said). It has grown from 250 in one service in the last 6 years. Their trouble is their mortgage has ballooned and now they will have only one FT minister (after Todd leaves June 14). That is all they can afford. I compare that to our church where we have 4 well paid ministers for an average attendance of about 200. Now I know those people are as a whole quite wealthy, but Todd says particularly the new people don’t give.

Now they are moving to new assignments and now are saying when all is counted, their total pay will triple.

I’d say many churches (but not all) are dying due to lack of giving. I know I only have anecdotal information, but it does seem like “tithes” are being treated like “taxes’ in Alabama and ya’ll know what Alabamians think of taxes (that is why we have a $700M deficit). Greed is killing the church yet many are harping on homosexuality or being “liberal” (the abortion fad has faded) as the problem.

[Tim Bonney]

[Tim Bonney]

[Neil Heath]

I'm moving this post over from the former topic. Thanks for starting a new one!

At the risk of diverging from the topic, I see parallels between church ministry and campus ministry in the comments about staffing.

In the early days of BSU, one CM I know had a dozen small schools at once all over Ga. He was a travelling consultant who used faculty and student leadership to run the ministry on each campus. And this was long before cell phones or internet. I myself started in Jan. of '77 with 4 campuses, and had more than one school for most of my career.

Over the years a lot of money was invested in staff and buildings, and programs grew and grew. But in the last decade those buildings have become expensive to repair and staff has been reduced in every area of Baptist life, including campus ministry. It has caused tension in the established programs who have big bucks tied up in the current way of doing things. I predict many of them will have to make dramatic changes or go down trying to maintain the status quo. In my last few working years they cut our building funds 10% every year. I spent my summers doing maintenance and repairs to keep things in good order.

Those of us in CBF who spend time discussing how to do CM in a new reality have realized it needs to be done without buildings, using part-time staff who change often, and using full-time staff in more of an advisory role. Indeed, buildings will often place limitations on what you can do as much as they enable ministry. We have to re-develop local church and lay leadership, along with faculty support that has faded because there was paid staff to do the work.

Some creative models are emerging, and it's exciting to see what can be done. We have powerful new tools in the technology we use daily. Both churches and CM's are going to adapt if they thrive in a different world. I see it as an opportunity to re-dream who we are and what we do. It can be exciting to see it happen and be a part of it.

[Blake]

The next 20 years will be very interesting for churches in the US. I don't think the loss of Christendom in America will go over well, especially when it becomes an undeniable inevitability within the South. I often wonder which theologies will be found to be more resilient in post-Christendom than others. I doubt that non-confessional churches and denominations will fare well. I'd like to believe robust discipleship programs will be a necessity, but that's probably wishful thinking.

[Dave Roberts]

One thing that I see in Baptist life is the demise of associations. Given the communications revolution and the fact that groups work more by affinity than by hardwired connections, I see a shrinking role for the local associations. In urban areas where they support community missions such as shelters, pantries, programs that offer job training and literacy skills, they may continue, but just having an office and a DOM is a luxury of extra layers of staff that will soon be gone.

[Jon Estes]

[KeithE]

[Sandy]

[Tim Bonney]

[Tim Bonney]

[KeithE]

[linda]

Just a quick thought re the idea greed (as in nontithing) is killing the church:

We are finding the younger people in our church are the very most financially generous people we have known. But we are also finding them to care zilch about funding a building or paying for a full time pastor. Their thoughts run along the line that so much more good could be done with the money. I suspect it may be that since they have college degrees, often grad school, and are working menial jobs they assume the pastor could do the same.

Is this still greed? Or a reordering of how church functions? Or spot on?

Your thoughts?

(For the record, I'm far from a young person. I'm a geezerette.)

[Tim Bonney]

[Tim Bonney]

[linda]

Thanks for replying--I appreciate it.

Bear in mind I live in a very high poverty, high unemployment area. And bear in mind we just had another industry layoff, where maybe 20% ?? of our workers lost their jobs last week. What we are seeing from the young adults is not giving for projects over infrastructure. What we are seeing and hearing is them using more than 10% of their income "for Christ" but rather than tithing to the local church, they are buying groceries if they still have a job for those that don't still have one. Or paying the rent. Or paying a car payment or dr bill, etc. I suspect come next school year they will be buying school clothes and supplies for the laid off worker's kids. They also do this for friends and relatives caught up in our liberal drug culture. They also take very good care of the senior citizens they know. In fact, staying in this area for the sake of the old folks might be part of their economic woes.

I'm totally on board that not tithing in order to save money for a short term mission trip/vacation next year could be defined as greedy. No question.

But I'm wondering if our local young adults are really guilty of that, considering many are holding down two jobs, or couples holding down four, in order to survive and pay the student loans back, raise the kids, etc when they make the hard decision that "overhead" such as our aging beautiful Victorian era huge old buildings, full time staff for tiny churches, upgraded sound systems/copyright fees for new music, etc aren't how the money should be spent right now in this place?

And wondering if those of us who have been blessed to have lived at least part of our lives in middle class comfort, with middle class jobs/education/resources/churches/towns may have to rethink some ways of "getting the job done?"

[Tim Bonney]

I also pastor in economically challenged area. That is partially why I'm pastoring a church that runs 270 in three services but only has one full-time pastor. When I was younger that size church would usually have two or more pastors. This is the largest church I've pastored but I've pastored smaller churches that had a much bigger budget.

I don't think it is a bad thing at all that young people are doing direct ministry to the needy. I think that is just awesome! I also believe that churches don't have to have fancy buildings to be churches. Nor to churches have to have full-time pastors. There are a lot of ways to do ministry.

What I think is that people just have to be realistic. If they don't want a big church structure and want their money to go in other directions that is great. But what I see is that a lot of people unrealistically also want the church to be there as it has always been without putting in the financial support it always took to make it happen. And in fact in costs more to run a church than it used to.

Salary has never been a big concern of mine. Most of my ministry I've lived in what would be called middle to lower middle class. If I have enough to pay for a reasonable living and my needs I'm fine. If I had wanted to make a lot of money I'd be doing something else. God has always taken care of me and my family. And that's all I need/want.

What I object to is a church full of middle class or wealthier people who want full-time ministry on paupers pay. I object to that because it shows they don't value ministry or the pastors who are answering that call. They also aren't doing their church much good as a pastor who is always stressed about being able to make ends meet isn't going to be able to give the church their full attention.

When I was an American Baptist one of the things the Area Minister was there to do was to tell churches what a reasonable salary looked like. Often, I understand, they had to tell churches they were not offering a fair salary.

Actually I've often found rural and/or poorer congregations to be more loving and generous with their pastors than wealthy churches. One church I pastored didn't have much money. But when my car broke down the member with the car shop would never let me pay for the repair. A local farmer would give us a bunch of beef every year Christmas. And they always did what they could to keep the parsonage in good repair.

I've said before, I'd much rather have a poor congregation that cares about me and my family and prays for me and ministry than a wealthy congregation that thinks I'm their hired gun.

[KeithE]

[KeithE]

[Tim Bonney]

[Blake]