We need a theology of church decline before church growth

what if God doesn't always bless faithfulness

What does it take to grow a church, numerically?

If your answer is:

a) a spiritually faithful pastor will be fruitful and the church will grow

or

b) if we implement the right practices, then the church will grow

then you are Job's friends, and this post is for you.

Christians, rightly, want church growth. That is a healthy desire, in and of itself, if it is an expression of the desire to see people come to know the Lord Jesus as their saviour and lord, and live a life of grace in response to his saving grace. That's the fuel that should fuel mission, in a nutshell (a very evangelical nutshell). And so, understandably, those in Christian ministry want their ministries to grow. They naturally want to see more people come to know Jesus and to be part of their local church.

And so, again a natural consequence, is that quite a bit of time and energy and thought and resources and books and conferences and so on and so forth goes into, "how do we, humanly speaking, work best to best achieve this?"

I don't have any problem with this question. I just think we need some pointy other questions. Especially when you survey the breadth of church growth materials. And recognise that we platform people who have grown churches, which is not necessarily an indication that they know anything about church growth that's worth knowing.

So let's go back to my initial answers. Certainly I feel taht many people will happily give the caveat "faithfulness does not necessarily equal fruitfulness", especially in terms of numbers, and yet... and yet.... The whole reason that caveat exists is precisely because our temptation to think in these terms is so, so strong. We tend to think, "If a person is faithful and doing what God requires of them, and praying and preaching the gospel, then the growth will come and people will become believers." As much as we think the caveat separates the two, faithfulness leads to fruitfulness is a default operating assumption.

The second assumption is actually the same as the first one in many ways. Because it too is predicated on the idea that if you do the right things, you'll get the desired results. The difference is the focus of "right things". In version one, it's, "do all the right spiritual things, and God will bless you", and in version two it's "do all the pragmatic right things, and you'll convince people". They are both versions of "do X, and Y will result". Which is why they represent the theology of Job's friends.

Job's friends have a world view that is simplistic and mechanistic. They think, "If you do right, then God will bless you. If you do wrong, then God will punish you." And a very major part of the book of Job is predicated on this being wrong, because Job is an example of "do right, and suffer bad things," which breaks the logic of his friends. We, again, tend very strongly to have a mechanistic and magical view of how God works, and in this question of church growth we just port it over to ministry. "Do right (i.e. faithful ministry, and effective ministry) and God will bless you (by growing your ministry)."

I think the endpoint of such a belief needs to be examined too. What do you think will happen if a church's ministry team is 100% faithful and effective? They obviously will just keep evangelising until every person on earth is a believer. That... seems contrary to the expectations that Scripture gives for the success of the gospel in the world.

The very fact that churches grow and decline, that Christianity has grown and diminished at various points and places throughout history, ought to give us pause. That the church in the Sassanid Empire was probably a numerical rival to the church within the Roman Empire in late antiquity, should give us pause. That Europe is incredibly post-Christian and secular, should make us examine. That individual churches close their doors, should raise questions.

And so my pondering is: what does it take to have a theology of church decline where you sever the link between assuming that if someone is faithful, then somehow that means God is obliged to grow their ministry by converting people? What do you do with contexts where people appear to be faithful and yet the church slowly declines? I don't have a ready-made answer to these questions, but I do have some frameworks.

If, (i) God is sovereign in electing people to salvation, and (ii) we are to use all our best efforts to live godly lives and share the good news about Jesus, and (iii) prayer is 'effective', and (iv) fruitfulness is not directly tied in a causal way to faithfulness, then it may in fact be that in God's mysterious and providential ordering of the world that you 'could do everything right' and still see little to none to negative church growth. And that ought to be a humbling reality. It ought to also leave us discontent, in the right kind of way, precisely because we should want people to come to faith.

If we sever the 'necessary connection', we can begin to ask a different and difficult question: what would it mean and look like to be faithful when there is little, zero, or negative numerical growth? What's it like to be faithful when churches decline? What's the theology of that?

Photo by Luc Constantin on Unsplash