by Sandy » Sun Jul 29, 2018 7:14 pm
We did this at the last church I served on staff, and it was done with the approval of the whole church. We had 1,100 members, with an average weekly attendance in worship of 300, and 220 in Sunday School. We actually only found records that matched about 900 names, so we reduced the total number reported, and then went through the process of sending out letters and waiting for a response. The church decided that any names from letters returned with "no forwarding address" would be taken off the roll, along with those who requested removal. We took a good sized group off because of having a birthdate that made them more than 100, and I'm sure not many of those past about 85 were around anymore. The responses we got back, not all that many considering how many we started with, were from people who either lived locally and had joined a church of a different denomination, mostly non-denominational churches, or moved out of the area and were attending a church of a different denomination, again mostly non-denominational. Apparently most of our "non-active" or as the SBC likes to call them "non-resident" members weren't interested enough to bother, and were either not going anywhere else, or had died. We got the total membership back down to under 500 as a result, with a commitment to doing a better job of keeping track.
I'm not sure how that worked out, since we left eight years ago this August, moved out of state, joined a church of another denomination, and we are still on the membership roll there.