So You Think Your Church Might Close?
10 Practical Actions to Start Now
A long-time member came to me a month after I arrived at the church. He declared, “We need to merge with the congregation down the street. We can’t continue to fund this big building with so few people.”
My response? “I just got here! Let’s see what else God could do!”
Seven years later, we did get to see what God could do: bring two churches together in merger. The long-time member had been right. It just took a while for the rest of us to catch up.
The following 10 Practical Actions prepared the church for big changes. These are Stage 1 tasks that can be handled before you begin a formal discernment process. They can happen even before you start talking about closure or merger! That’s because they are good practices for any community, regardless of size and trajectory. Churches who do these ten things now will ease later challenges during merger, closure, or other changes in ministry.
Action 1: Build Trust
“Change happens at the speed of trust,” adrienne marie brown writes in Emergent Strategy. This aphorism is powerfully true for churches contemplating closure, merger, relocation, or other major changes. Trust, more than anything, will determine whether and how your congregation is able to change. If you do only one thing on this list, focus on building trust. This means that church leaders need to earn the trust of the congregation. Listen to this short interview for how we built trust through truth-telling. And keep reading! The next four actions offer practical tips for trust-building!
Action 2: Be transparent.
There should be no secrets and no surprises about finances or decision-making processes. How do you do this? Publish financial statements and meeting minutes. Be accurate about attendance. Go beyond what your bylaws require in making meetings open and accessible. In this “Quiet Wondering” Stage, information gaps cause anxiety, and anxious behaviors then increase the chance of conflict.
In the case of my congregation, there was lots of anxiety about finances. So we made sure to clearly communicate stewardship trends and the results of our annual audits. This included clarifying the use of restricted and designated funds – a process that was more complicated than it might seem!
This transparency lowered anxiety about whether the congregation could trust the church leaders. At the same time, it prevented people from living in denial. It raised just enough anxiety that people could consider constructive change.
Action 3: Update your membership.
Define the current community by making sure your membership rolls are up-to-date. This will be particularly important if your bylaws require or encourage every member to have a vote on selling church property and other legal changes. Spiritually, it’s important to clarify who is currently part of the community and to truthfully acknowledge when people have left.
While the church I served recognized that many members had become inactive, we didn’t always know why. We experienced shame, blame, and grief as we thought about people who no longer participated in the church. We learned to relate differently to inactive members through the Caring for Inactive Members course by Stephen Ministries. Watch upcoming newsletters for how you can download sample letters that reach out to inactive members.
Action 4: Review leadership.
Match your leadership structure to your bylaws or denominational requirements to avoid heartache in the future, especially as legal decisions are made. At the same time, watch out for burn out among volunteers. A couple of overfunctioning leaders may be trying to fill the gaps. Allow people to say “no” to volunteer positions, and make it okay to lay something down. This may mean retiring long-standing ministries.
At our church, we had to be honest about how we utilized paid and volunteer leadership. We decided it was better to leave positions vacant on official forms than to pretend that we had people to fill that role. This required emotionally healthy spirituality, where those of us who were overfunctioning had to learn to let go.
Action 5: Practice discernment.
Make decisions in a way that honors the best of your tradition. Communicate clearly about how decisions are made in your polity. Incorporate discernment practices like consensus, Ignatian spirituality, or Circles of Trust (which collaborator Chelsey Hillyer facilitates). I began using mutual invitation in Bible Study and in administrative board meetings so that everyone could speak before we took a vote.
Communal and individual spiritual disciplines are the practical work of discernment. Contemplative prayer practices move beyond telling God what we want to open us up to notice what God is doing. These open prayer practices shape us to see ourselves as co-creators with God in a multitude of future possibilities. Stay tuned via our newsletter for how you can access a Serenity Prayer worship series that helps congregations to accept what we cannot change while claiming the power to change what we can.
Action 6: Sort through your building, possessions, and records.
Host a “clean out day” to clean out classrooms, choir closets, and other overstuffed spaces. Establish (and implement) a record retention policy that keeps what is essential while reducing excess. Figure out where important legal and archival documents are. (This might be a good time to update who has access to safety deposit boxes.)
As you sort through years of accumulated “stuff,” connect with your denominational or town archives to preserve your important history. Mark transitions by celebrating major anniversaries and inviting back previous pastors. Compile your church history and share the story! Prior to my arrival, members of the church published a booklet about the stained glass windows in the sanctuary. As we left the building, it was so comforting to have a beautiful keepsake featuring those stained glass windows.
Action 7: Connect with neighboring congregations.
Connect with other churches in a spirit of collaboration rather than competition. Look for where you have common gifts and struggles – and where you complement one another. This doesn’t need to be with the goal of merging (or easing the transfer of membership after closure). Starting with that purpose might even make it difficult to create deep, trusting relationships. Instead, the goal is to expand options for current and future ministry while reminding yourselves that you’re not alone.
In our 2021 merger, the churches had first offered a shared confirmation class in 2015. We began a shared college ministry and adult anti-racism classes nearly a year before conversation about a potential merger began. We wished we had begun these types of collaborative efforts even earlier. We witness to the Body of Christ, which is broader than the local church, when we partner with other Chistians.
Action 8: Tell the church’s story in context.
Name the church’s enduring values, gifts, and passions, Share the gospel motivations from the local church’s past and present so that these commitments can undergird future decisions.
You can then contextualize congregational history within broader societal changes. When my congregation saw their historic membership and attendance figures lined up against their denomination and community’s population shifts, they stopped blaming themselves for the decades-long decline. They were part of a larger pattern.
And an even bigger pattern emerged when we zoomed out from the local church’s story to the universal Church’s story. While the individual congregations named in the New Testament no longer survive, the faith does. Each local church is part of the larger body of Christ — a body that gives up its own life for a love that cannot be conquered by death.
Action 9: Address grief, death, and dying.
Church closure, change, and transition processes will bring up unresolved grief. Normalize these processes as a faithful part of living. Lean into the church’s gift for talking about death, dying, and grieving. Be with those who are grieving. Discuss end-of-life preparation.
Pay attention to the stories of those who have sold the family farm, or moved into a retirement home, or gotten remarried in their 70s. How people navigated these big personal changes will shape their approach to congregational shifts. Individuals with personal struggles will have greater difficulty with changes in the faith community.
Our congregation learned to practice lament. We leaned into holy days like Ash Wednesday and All Saints. I preached about grief, loss, and letting go and designed worship series on Exile and Revelation.
Stay tuned via the newsletter for information on the resource bundle, which gives you worship scripts, sermons, and a template for an End-of-Life preparation workshop.
Action 10: Get support.
Set up your support system. Connect with your denomination. Read our recommended resources. Use all of your vacation, and stop overfunctioning. Remember that the future of this church does not depend solely on you. Our calling is to follow Jesus the Savior – not to be saviors ourselves.
Pastors should consider preparing for their next job opportunity, especially if they are in search-and-call systems. Pastors and other paid staff should establish a personal emergency fund, since clergy – especially female clergy – “felt stress in searching [for a next call] due to financial strain” (Gail Cafferata, The Last Pastor, page 138).
Finally, talk to people who’ve been through it before. Personally, I don’t know what I would have done without the people who eventually became my Good Friday collaborators. They encouraged me every step of the way as we laughed, cried, and prayed together. Having an experienced support team will shape each stage of moving forward.
And if you’ve done none of these things?
That’s okay. Breathe. This will be a faster and more difficult process. But you can do this. The Good Friday Collaborative is here to help, and are happy to set up a free consultation to help you discern where to get started.
Disclosure: The Good Friday Collaborative is an affiliate of Bookshop.org, and purchases through some of the above links will earn the Good Friday Collaborative a small commission while also supporting local independent bookstores. Join the monthly newsletter to download a full annotated booklist.
