The Church Answers Podcast
An Actual Autopsy of a Real (But Now Closed) Church
Welcome to the Church Answers podcast presented by Chaney and Associates. Chaney and Associates are the accounting firm for the church. Now get ready for fast-paced insights on key issues affecting the local church today. We release three episodes each week, so make sure you've seen or heard them all. And now, here's the CEO of Church Answers, Tom Rayner. Yes, just before we get into the story, I just want to talk about something. You may have heard me talk about it. You did not know your grandfather, my late father. He died before. He died in '84 and you were born the next year in '85. I think I've told you the story about him going to the autopsy of his daughter. No, I don't recall this one. Okay, well, I've written about it before, which means you haven't read that book. So let me just tell you real quickly about the story. So you're your books I haven't read, but we won't talk about that. I don't have a few books I haven't read either. The story was this, my parents planned to have two kids. They already had a son named Sam, not to be confused with your brother, Sam. So they already had a son named Sam and they wanted two kids. And my mother was pregnant and she gave birth to Amy. Amy had some type of heart defect. She ended up living, I don't know if it's six, seven, eight weeks, but it was a short life. I don't remember if they gave them any hope or not, but Amy, my sister that predeceased my birth ended up dying and just kind of as an aside, my parents were determined they were only going to have two kids. And so I would not have been born had this not happened. And I'm not saying that that's good news. I'm just stating it as a fact, but here's the story. My dad insisted on going into the autopsy room when they did that on his daughter. He wanted to find out what happened to her. They didn't diagnose us at a time. Okay. So he wanted to know what happened to his daughter. That's a lot. That's just hearing that, I mean, there's a lot of heaviness in that and I couldn't imagine that at all. He only told me the story once and it was kind of like the story that he told me about D-Day. He only told me once. It's only ask one time, but we've got an opportunity here and this is an autopsy of a church. Yeah. Yeah. And I get to totally different things. You're talking about, you know, a daughter and a human life, you know, a lot of ways you're talking about too, you know, what God's doing and there's life in the church. And while different, there's a heaviness to both. There really is. There's, you know, a father experiencing the death of the child is very, very difficult. You've been there. Yeah. And then having, having those to get those answers and that grief, that grief is real and the grief is real for a church as well. People who have been a part of a church for a long time and that life that comes from being part of a church family and then when that closes, there's a lot of grief and that. As hard as it is though, it's necessary. It's good that you got to learn, you got to grow. And so that's what we're talking about today is, is hopefully learning from a church and unfortunately from, from their closing of doors to, to learning some lessons and seeing what we can do to help other church leaders out there not make the same mistakes. That's exactly right. That's the goal. So I think you, you wrote a book about this autopsy of a deceased church. And so we're going to be talking about a story today where it's not quite the same as your book though. Is that, is that correct? So you, you wrote autopsy. Why don't you give just some quick back, back, back story on that and how does that differ from today and what we're talking about autopsy of deceased church was a book that was written in the same way that I am a church member was written a blog went viral and we ended up turning it into a small book autopsy of deceased church is composite fiction, which basically means that as I'm talking about a church, it was true in one church, that aspect of it, but not necessarily another part that was true. I put things together, I don't give real names, but I give real facts. Am I making sense by saying that composite fiction? Yeah, it's, it's, it's quite real, but, but it's made up right. That's how I say it's a reality to made up reality that, that exists today. And so while it was a unique story, and every church has a unique story, the one what we're talking about today is a different unique story, but this one is fact, right? So what we're talking about today is, is something that actually happened. So tell me where, where did we get this information and just so everyone out there who's listening, I don't know this story yet. So I'm going to be hearing it for the first time, much like everyone else who's, who's listening to this podcast. So tell us a little bit of backstory about this particular autopsy that we're going to be doing today. Or you're going to be doing today. I'm just going to be listening and enjoying it. Now you're going to offer a lot of you usually to learning, not enjoying and learning. I'm going to clarify my words, enjoying the talk, but learning a lot. Got it. I got it. This church closed as of the recording of this podcast about three years ago. Okay. I'm trying to remember exactly when that's not pertinent, but it closed. But there's, there's a story to that and why I even got the information of a singular church because it wasn't that intentional. So several years ago, I was our team, which requested to do a church consultation. We are, we get a lot of requests like that. It's part of what we do and part of part of part of our calling. What we typically do, Jess, you've been involved in some of these is we do a discovery call where we find out what their need is, what their pain point is, why they're calling it. So we get their story. We call it the discovery call. And in that story, in the discovery call, we want to know why you want church answers to help you. We listen. And as we began to listen, we began to send something in one sensing something, it was just common sense, something. This church was dying. It was, it was what I call a moribon church. A moribon church is a church that's on the age of death, but hasn't died yet. So if a person is moribon, that person is usually already diagnosed as terminal. And they're in the latter stages of death. So when a church is declared moribon, which we do from time to time, it means outside of God's supernatural intervention that church is going to die. So I listen to some of their stories. When I say die, I want to be very, very clear. We have actually declared that some churches were terminal, but they didn't die. Rode a lot about them, about them, in a book called Anatomy of a Revive Church. Right? And we'll put the show notes about that book because it's a lot of good news. These are churches that were on the edge of death. And by all, by all descriptors, they should have died, but they didn't. So that's anatomy. Now, this was a church that we looked at all the descriptors and they should die as they were headed in that direction. So they said, what can you do for us? I began to outline those things that we could do for them, but then what would be required of them. As I began to do that, there was a palpable anger on the Zoom call. It was three or four different people. And I just waited, I didn't say what's wrong. I just waited. They said, well, this isn't what we expected. So what did you expect? And in essence, what they told me is we expected you to give us these steps or a program and we do that, everything will be fine. We sometimes call it the silver bullet. That's one of the metaphors we use or the magic pill. We can turn this around if we do the following. Sometimes it's not calling a consultant. Sometimes it is calling a pastor. If we only get a younger pastor, we will get young people in our church. We haven't reached a young person in 18 years, but we'll reach a young person with a young pastor. And I told them that simply was not the case. There was no silver bullet solution. There was a great commission possibility, but there was not a silver bullet solution. And so I told them and essentially they said, thank you, but no, thank you. Or maybe I said thank you or no, thank you. But the conversation ended because my prescription or at least my early prescription to them did not match the reality of what they thought they would have to do. They thought Tom Rayner and church answers could give them a silver bullet. So the way that I found out about this church was through this call. A subsequent to that call, again, Tamilines are not precise, but around two years I got another call and it was another church and there were two or three people in there. And one of the first people to speak was one of the people that talked to me in the former church. Okay. Do you remember me? So different church, two sets of people, but you have one person overlapping. So what, well, there's one person on that original call that church that end up, for some reason just saying thanks, but no thanks to someone said that. Now you're on a call two years later and one of that person team is saying, hey, I'm back. He is and his first question to me was, do you know who I am? And I didn't just simply, I don't have the greatest memory in the world. I don't remember names and faces that great. And I see so many, I mean, in the course, in the course, I mean, you and I, we saw lots of pastors this week, you know, how many of them will remember two years from now? So my mom definitely remember, but some of them don't, I will not. And so he said, do you remember me? I said, I'm sorry, I don't really tell me the story. He said, we call for the consultation and you told us we were going to die if we weren't willing to do some great communication, obedient, sacrificial actions. He didn't use those words, those are my words. And I said, well, what happened? He said, just like you said, he said, you almost predicted the date. I said, I don't even remember talking about the date. He said, yeah, you looked at our statistics and you said, if you continue in this direction, then the following. And it was pretty close. And the only thing that was holding them up was a little bit of endowment and a little bit of other reserve funds that were there. So they died. And I'm noticing that the other members of this church are not speaking and it became obvious that he wanted them to hear the story. From me, before they began to get a consultant. Okay. So over the course of these two years, this, he said, as a gentleman, correct? It was, man. This gentleman has found himself in another situation at another church, but this time he's like, can't do it again. Won't do it again. And so there's a big difference that I did not articulate. The big difference is the church that I'm currently speaking with, church number two, is not that dire. Okay. It has, it has needs, but it's not on the verge of death. Okay. So this, this, this gentleman is, is wanting to get ahead of the game with church number two. Bingo. You remember Bingo from a conference we did recently, every time somebody says it, Bingo? I don't know why I did that. I don't know why. I can, I can go there. I used to say it. That's why. I remember that. So that's, that's the backdrop of the story. I began to listen to him before I even started talking to them about a potential consultation. He wanted to hear, he wanted them to hear what could potentially happen to their church if they got further down the road with the erosion that had begun, but there were a long way, seemed to be from death. Okay. Okay. Now we're going to be focusing on church one, but you're getting all the information about church one from this guy who's now with church two. So I don't, I don't know if I'm getting ahead of you here. Can you tell us what, what, what happened with church two or is that later down, down the story? It's good. I mean, I don't have any particular order to this. I mean, we, we, we, we've got a couple of things that we want to cover. I just, I'm just saying like a quick church to turn around because I know we're going to be focusing on church one, the church to make it church to decided as a consequence of that to get a, the, the, the one, the Hope initiative, but it was one of our, it was, it was invite your one. Okay. invite your one. Okay. They decided to get that as an outward focus and as a result of that, they begin to see growth and it moved them in a direction toward more things that they tried. And they, they brought us on for just a little while in order to guide them through it to make any recommendations. So it became kind of a guided coaching call, coaching call instead of a consultation. Got you. As far as I know they did, they've done well, having obviously followed up with them. Okay. All right. Well, that's good. Because I think I think I'm sitting here, as we were talking about church one, I'm like, but what happened to church two? Okay. So we saw, we saw a change around with church church two. We don't know the end result, but praying there, they are still going strong. So this, this is, this is a unique situation because you typically don't get to hear the other side of the story. You know, if a church chooses to close its doors, it's very rare that you'll have someone call back and say, Hey, what you said was true. Here's what happened. And so this, this is a, a pretty unique situation with some pretty unique information that is adding reality to your autopsy of a DC church book. So it's a case study that illustrates what you wrote about. Yeah, you got it. You got it. And just for the listeners and viewers, YouTube, thank you, just for the listeners and viewers, what we're about to tell you is the full story of one church. What I wrote about in autopsy of the sea church was snippets from different churches because I never got a full story. Right. Right. I hear this and then so I connected them together into a composite fiction story. Okay. That makes sense. Start painting the picture of us of church number one. I don't know if there's a fictitious name that you and a couple come up with as we're talking here, but something better than church number one. I'm not a creative guy. I mean, I named my church, the church at Spring Hill. So if you want to think of something more creative for church one, feel free. So give us some background of church number one. Maybe maybe this is the information you asked for that you never got, but maybe you later got, tell us about the situation when you had that first discovery call that what you know now, what's what is happening with that church. This is pretty amazing because you and I have recently met with several pastors and you know, I'm not going to get into the details, but there is so much that this particular church number one looks like with some of the churches we talked about, some of the churches where we have just recently met with several different pastors about their churches over here. So there's so many similarities that I wanted to say, hey, if you don't, then you are going to do the following. Now when we talk to these churches and just I'm not even on church one yet, so I'm trying to keep my old man trying to thaw it going, but I'm going back to the churches that we just talked to recently and of these churches that we talked to recently, some of them would likely die without change, very likely die, some of them that were there, but some of them had some protection from imminent death. You remember that? One of them had an endowment, significant one of them had some additional reserve funds not as big as the endowment, we just mentioned. One of them had someone in the church, I think he said it was in the 80s that was deep pocket and any time we need something, we're able to go to that person, they'll pay for it. Some of them had some really good members, but they all tended to be elderly and things were holding together. The good news about the pastors that we talked to, they were all ready to move forward to do whatever was necessary. Right, that's the reason we met with them. They were ready to move forward and excited and they had, for the most part, it sounded like they had congregations that felt the same as well, but you saw some similarities, obviously we met some pastors, some church leaders this week and so you saw some similarities of those churches of this church number one, but obviously the pastors we met with this week had a lot going for them and there's a lot of fact that they were ready to change. Right, right. They were there to do that. Okay. So thinking back to church number one, keeping your old man brain on track here, that was probably even though they reached out, there was something they, there was an eagerness, but they weren't really to do change. So give us, give us the back story of church number one, this church that ended up closing its doors, what was the situation we found, or you found yourself in, in talking with this church? First of all, the church was in a transitioned, not transitioning, but a transitioned neighborhood. Okay. They were an Anglo church and most of the new residents had a Hispanic background. It was not that much of a socioeconomic shift. It was a, it was a going from white to brown or Anglo to Hispanic, okay? And I don't know if there's any one particular Hispanic, but it was a Hispanic. I mean, I don't know if it was, if it was one like Mexican or whatever, I just, I just know it's Hispanic. Sure. And, and significant is this, you know, a significant changer, the community, demographic and the same, by the time they call me, the entire surrounding community was Hispanic and the church was Anglo. Okay. So you're saying almost a hundred percent shift? Yeah. Okay. They would walk out the front door and they would see people that didn't look like them. Okay. Everywhere. Okay. So that was part of it. One thing I did not find out is how long it took to transition from the beginning phases of Anglos leaving and Hispanics coming in and then it becoming all Hispanic. So again, it was not a deteriorating neighborhood. The Hispanics who came in were of at least middle class to hire middle class socioeconomic. So those factors were there. So that was, that was part of it. One of the things that was very, very obvious, I said, look, if you're going to reach a community, you got to look more like your community. That's one of the things where they really balk and they said, what does that mean? And I said, well, you know, we've got to start praying towards some Hispanic leadership in the church. It's not just saying you can come sit down in our church and take what the white congregation is going to offer you. It was, it was, it was a matter of me saying, no, you don't need to merely transition on the membership side. You need to transition on the leadership side and move toward that. So that was, that was one of the issues. Okay. Yeah. Which, which sounds like one of the reasons they died. So, but the looking at their background, the community changed. Right. Okay. Jess, we just went through that recently talking to pastors, one pastor in the urban area and everybody had moved out from the urban area. They did gone. I think if I remember to two different transitions since he had been there. So, you know, that was one of the things that we, that we picked up there. Another thing that we'll get into when we get into these five major reasons that took place that they could not recall any, this, this church that was talking to me, number one, now in this new context, that church could not recall any time doing evangelism. Okay. Nobody in the room. We're going to get to that in a little bit more when we start outlining, you know, what happened in the church, but it's basically the community that they were supposed to reach had changed and they weren't reaching it and they were not reaching the Anglo population if I understood correctly, even while they were still there. Okay. So how did that relate to just maybe the past five years in attendance and giving? So what, what's some of the other pieces of the church there? This is going to be a little bit of speculation because I'm trying to remember back on a conversation with now, with a different church, but representing the story of church number, number one. My best recollection is they told me that they reached a peak of around 200, five years earlier. Okay. And, and they were below 50 at the point they call me. So two hundred of 50 in five years, that's, that's fast. And it's, it's the accelerating death process, the death spiral, if you will, there's this slow erosion and then all of a sudden it just massively moves toward death. Okay, which I wouldn't attribute that to a hundred percent of the community changing around. I'm, and I'm trying to get ahead of us, but what was the demographic of the church? You said Anglo. What about age? It had gotten much older and much better. Now what I mean by that? People and dad. Okay. And that's the main, that's the main reason behind the attendance decline. Okay. So tennis decline is your, you were actually the age and people were just older age and, and we're actually passing away. Right. Okay. Okay. Any, any indication of where they were financially, uh, they were about to run out of money. They did not have a reserve. They did not have an endowment, obviously giving was significantly down to be there. But you know what, I tell you what, let's get into some of these things. I'm, I'm, I'm going to just take a break for just a moment. And, um, um, I want to talk just a little bit, I'll hear a little bit more from Cheney. And we're going to come back and get down to some of the diagnosis. Okay. Okay. And, and what, what we saw in this. We'll be back in just a minute to continue the story of an actual autopsy of a real, but now closed church. Stay with us. Hey folks. This is Tom Rainer back again, just to let you know that we love Cheney and Associates. Cheney and Associates are the bookkeeping accounting firm for the church. And uh, we love, we love what they're doing. We love their ministry. And we love the fact that they minister right now do business with over 1100 churches and the fact that they continue to grow reaching churches. If you really want to see your bookkeeping, your accounting done well done right, let me encourage you to go to Cheney and Associates. You can go to Cheney, Associates.com or you can look at our show notes or you can just put it into Google, Cheney and Associates, incredible organization. And they're the ones that you need to be doing your accounting in your church. Once again, that's Cheney and Associates, Cheney and Associates.com as well as you can go to Google or you can just look at it and if you have the show notes, visit our friends. You will be glad that you did. All right. Jess, we're back. Where were we? So we were talking about this creatively named church. Church number one, who's an actual real church, uh, where they were, um, they had, they had come to you. They're looking for help and we're, we were set in the stage of what this church looked like. Community around the church has changed from Anglican to Hispanic significant. You said almost a hundred percent, uh, the church had been in a steady decline for five years, went from two hundred to fifty, that was the rapid part of it. It was erosion to that point. Okay. So erosion in the last five years, just very quick, uh, decline as well. Uh, they had lost any outward focus. And so my, my, my guests that related to baptism, um, and then they were about out of money. And so the one, the one final piece I wanted to know too is, is what was the leadership situation? Did they have a pastor or they without a pastor? What was that last piece? And I'd love to hear then, you know, let's, let's get in there and why did these things happen? Now we're talking about me talking to church number one. So I just want to be clear on that. So number one did not have a pastor, uh, number one thought that they could have found a full time pastor because that was their history and, uh, I said, well based upon your budget, what do you think you'll be able to pay him? They told me, it's, no, you can't, you're, you're not going to find a full time pastor at that price. Well, that's what we have to have. Okay. It's not going to happen. So there they had never had anything in their memory in their lifetime other than a full time pastor. Okay. So you presented a completely different leadership structure that they needed to take a hold of because they weren't able to go back in time, um, to their old leadership structure. Okay. So that, that's a pretty good, you know, backstory of where this church is. And it's from what I'm hearing, it's not too uncommon, unfortunately, uh, the situation. And so what I would love to hear from you then, why did this church actually close their doors? The major pieces that led to this situation. You know, what is really funny about this, funny is maybe not the right word. Maybe ironic is a better word is the guy that was most vocal to me in the first discovery call, church number one that ended up dying was now one of my biggest fans ever. Hmm. Okay. And he had, he had consumed my books. He was watching the articles come in on church answers. Uh, he said he's been to several of the webinars. Okay. Okay. And he basically said, based upon what I've learned from you, this is what happened. Hmm. And he said, I've now gone back and diagnosed our death. Okay. So he was able to tell me it wasn't necessarily me going back and trying to pull it out of him and try to figure out what happened. I said, well, what, what, what have you learned from this? I may not have articulated it that way. Sure. And I said, you know, tell me what you think, and as best as I can recall from that conversation, he nailed it. Okay. Absolutely. He did his own autopsy or he did his former churches on autopsy. Okay. Which again, that is so rare. And so this is, this is such a cool story. Um, all right. So tell us what, what did he find out? Number one, there was no evangelism and not even an attempt to reach the community. So there was no demographic type of growth as well. Demographic growth mean you're reaching Christians, uh, who are not in a church right now, but you're, you're biting them in. So there was no demographic growth in the church reached, I should say, demographic growth is coming from the Hispanics and they had zero evangelism. Okay. So we, we talked about this week. One thing to talk about is, is the way churches do things outwardly, um, and I community videos in three ways, community service part, I love this part community service, um, which is actually getting out there and, and doing something for the community, you know, it could be helping out a local school, painting some walls. That's a classic example. Um, the second thing a church can do is outreach. And as that term, the way I see it is you go and you reach out to people to invite them to come back to your church. So that is going out in the community and say, come join me. And then the third way is through evangelism, which is sharing the hope of Jesus, sharing the gospel. So you go out to the community, share the gospel with the hope they'll respond. And then they come back into your church family. And so a lot of churches think of outreach or evangelism and they don't have a way to define what they do. I think most churches do community service, but they think they're doing outreach or evangelism. There's some that do outreach that think they're doing evangelism and very few that actually think and know and do evangelism. So this church is doing zero of that. Well, that's a three categories. Let me tell you what they told me of the three categories. And it wanted to recently tell I heard you categorize them that I even thought about the third one, which is community service is the way that many churches think about this. I know they do intuitively, but I never thought to categorize it into here's how we view evangelism. Evangelism can be a evangelism, evangelism might be outreach, but that's just inviting people to come to our church or send them come in community service is doing good for the community, which is necessary. But there's really not a plan to bring them in to become a part of a disciple making church. So I listened, I listened to him and I'm going to evaluate them on each of those three areas. Okay. Okay. Zero zero zero. There's my evaluation. They weren't doing anything, including community service. Okay. Yeah. We met with these pastors, what was common? It was, let me tell you what we're doing in the community. We're doing this. We got the school right up the street. And if there's ever a need, they call us and we will give anything to those kids. We heard one after another of community service. That's how they were defining evangelism. And if we asked them how many people they'd reach with Christ, which we may not have done it explicitly every time, their answer would have been zero zero. Yeah. And I think a lot of churches, I've got an aside note here, a lot of churches do community service at their church facility. So many churches, and I think this is kind of a, to me, is a little bit of an indicator is that you, a trunk or treat, classic example, doing a trunk or treat. Great thing. Don't get me wrong. That's right. Don't do it. But they do a trunk or treat. And there's no intentionality about getting to know the people. There's no intentionality about getting some information to follow up with them. They simply do trunk or treat and it's done after the event. And virtually no one comes to the church because of the event. Churches like that think though they're doing outreach and evangelism just because the people walked on the church property. But really it's a community service. Great thing to do. Great thing still. But you need to understand its purpose and what you're doing it for. So this church wasn't even doing that. Everyone doing any of the above and what we have, what we heard from these pastors with whom we met was most of them were doing some kind of community service in their church. And so they couldn't understand why they weren't reaching people evangelistically. They had, I don't think, Jess, correct me if I'm wrong, but we've talked to several pastors recently, you and I have, I don't recall any of them doing any evangelism. No, not that I recall. And that, yeah, that's, that's tough. Yeah. That's something I personally. I always like to make sure I, as a lead pastor, I'm always sharing the gospel in some way, in some form, on a regular basis. And so because if you lose that as a lead pastor, it trickles down fast in the church. Oh, you're so right. Lead pastors are the ones that modeled it the most for their church members. So if a church is not reaching people, it is a possibility that the pastor's not being intentional about reaching people with the gospel. Okay. So this church was not doing an evangelism. This church was not doing any outreach. And it wasn't even doing any community service. They weren't even in get out there, you know, just, you know, like we help a local food pantry. You know, it's one of the ways we do community service in addition to our evangelism. We miss the outreach. We've usually focused on community service and evangelism. But this church was doing none of it, which also related to no demographic growth. So because they were so internally focused at some point, hopefully someone walked out of the door and say, whoa, this community is completely different, but that didn't happen to them. All right. So one of the reasons they had to close their doors and it's a primary reason for something churches is they lost the intentionality of sharing Christ in some form. What else? That's number one. What else you got? Well, number one was a heart problem. Now we're going to look at a bone problem or some of the structural problems. The second one was related to finance, but it was particularly deferred maintenance and deferred maintenance with hardly any endowment, they had some endowment, but the cost of keeping their building up was greater than any funds that they had in reserve are endowment. Okay. So here's what they knew. They knew that if they did not fix some major parts of their church, that it was going to physically fall apart. That's not a metaphor. It was going to physically fall apart. We heard of a church yesterday that had a serious mole problem and that has to be taken care of and now they're looking at the cost of that. So yeah, one of the reasons they were contacting church answers was, hey, we need to get some of our building fix. It's not, we've got to lost community. We got to get some people in here to help us fix our building. So they were holding on to the physical, tangible asset that they had and that was a wake up call to be like, we don't have the ability to even fix our gathering place anymore. And that was probably, if I had to guess that may have been the actual biggest wake up call because so many associate church with the building and obviously, biblically, the churches is the people. But if there's this mindset, if we can't meet in this building, we no longer exist as a church. And so there is, that's, I mean, which is another problem in and of itself. There's a little bit of definition, but that was the wake up call like, we can't fix the leaky roof. We don't know, whatever the problem was. I don't know what it was. Okay. Yes. One pastor was talking about whenever it rained, they had to get a cup to catch the water. So it wouldn't come into the office. Yeah. I remember that this week. Yeah, which happened to be the same as the bold problem. So you could put two and two together. Yes, right. They were both tied together. Right. Exactly. Okay. So that's wake up call. So that, and yeah, and that's, you know, the finances are often one that you can deduce. It is the biggest wake up call, especially when it comes to not being able to continue to maintain your facility. But obviously I think this is connected back to the first one. But the second one was why did they end up closing their doors? Well, they had a physical location problem that they could not fix as well. All right. So I'm covering a little bit more. There's a mentality here. There's a culture thing that's going on, but they're seeing the symptoms of that. And so they closed their doors. You know, evangelism, the demographic growth too, they had a financial problem that ultimately led into a facility problem. Are there anything else, any other pieces that this church, why they closed doors? The third one was the syndrome that we mentioned earlier, which was the silver bullet. And the definition of a silver bullet, if we do just, if we do this, we think our church will turn around. Okay. And they wanted the most help with the silver bullet. They wanted church answers to find them a pastor. We're going to talk in the fifth point about the previous pastor, but they wanted a current pastor. They probably, I don't recall this, so this is more tongue-in-cheek than actual memory. But they probably wanted a pastor that was somewhere between 39 and 43 to 48 years old. They wanted a pastor with probably 2.3 kids. And they definitely wanted a pastor that was white that could do something in this Hispanic community. Yes. Right. That's all tongue-in-cheek. And probably that was the silver bullet bullet. 30 years experience as well. 30 years experience as well. And the type of pastor that would put Alistair Begg to shame in the past. I don't know if there's any pastor that can do that. Yes. I agree with that. They did not just, I did not discern their silver bullet when the first call took place. Okay. They told me what their silver bullet was. We want you to find a pastor. Okay. How long had they been without a pastor by the time you had talked with them? I'm going to speculate. Okay. I don't remember, but I think it was around 3 years. Okay. Okay. It was longer than a typical gout, because remember what they were doing, they were looking for a full-time pastor with very part-time financial resources. Right. And they're meeting you. They're calling even too late at this point. So they're looking for a silver bullet. Their silver bullet was a pastor. Which is common. Mm-hmm. It is. It is. Yeah. And it's tough, especially, like you said, in a community and a church that has no financial ability, a community that doesn't meet the church that doesn't have financial ability, they're looking for something that did not exist. And as our listeners and viewers here and see these different points we're making, here's what I want you and I to just kind of add to it, what we're talking about is not uncommon. Right. Maybe all of them in one church might be, but even that way you can see from time to time. I know that early in your church's history, we looked at the possibility of another church that we might could have adopted, but boy had had some of these same symptoms. Mm-hmm. All right. So that's three, three things that this church leader was able to tell you. What else? What else we got? And hopefully, if we got a little bit of time, I'd love to hear a little bit of like what could they have done, potentially. So we haven't gotten there yet, but I had a little bit more of the diagnosis or what did you uncover with the autopsy here? Well, they had nostalgiaitis, which is just probably not even a word. But everything was we remember when and it was not the previous pastor, but it was the pastor before that. Oh, so they were stuck. They were. And again, I wish I remember the details. I wouldn't be surprised if it was 30 years ago at the time they call me, but it was a long time ago. I happen to be that pastor in a church right now. And what I'm saying is they remember my pastor in the 80s is where they want to go back to. That's ancient. Totally. And so am I. So they, they were in like a mental time capsule. That's a great way of putting it in. They, they just, they mentally lock theirself's in, maybe even spiritually, it sounds like they locked themselves into this, this era and they're living off of that. Exactly. Look at constantly looking back, constantly looking at the review mirror. Okay. Well, let's get to the fifth thing that is taking place or head taking place. The pastor that was no longer there was coasting. Hmm. Okay. This, this is the pastor at left three years as I recall three years earlier. Okay. And that pastor was coasting or some people call it quiet quitting. He was getting close enough to financial viability, whatever the retirement he thought needs, thought why didn't he, this, in this call, I didn't learn this in the initial call, but in the second call, I learned that, okay, this, this, this pastor really just didn't do a lot of leadership for the church that could have taken him to the next level. He didn't want to fight. He didn't want to fight. And you can always suppose that this was before the total transition of the community had taken place. It was before the big decline, he'd taken place. The way that I understand it now, having talked spoken with this pastor now about pastor number one, a church number one is that that was the opportunity and he didn't seize the planet. It was too much work. Yeah. I could, I could probably speculate that I don't know how many, so you talk about the last five years, it went from two hundred to fifty, right? And the pastor was there, you know, the first two of those last five years and you said that was a fast road, but there was slow erosion happening before that. So I don't know how long the pastor was there, but I can speculate, it was probably several years where the foot just kind of kept slowly coming off the gas pedal and then that start of the last five years, there was probably is completely off the gas pedal. And that's when it's a free fall started happening fast and the pastor goes, I'm, I'm just, I don't, maybe not, I'm speculating here. I'm not judging hearts, but kind of like, I don't want to be the one that it completely falls apart on my watch. I'm just going to go ahead and retire. I may, maybe, maybe there's enough to go, maybe I can get out. Maybe there's enough to salvage this and I know I'm not the one doing it. Maybe there's hope. Who knows? Maybe however that could have, could have gone. But this, this pastor long years before this had taken the foot off the gas pedal. And there's, there's one factor that I neglected to mention in this is now coming to me as we talk about it, during that five year dive, they had several key members die. And I don't believe it's gone. Yeah. Yeah. They're, they're dying off. And, and, and I can tell you that it was primary, I asked them, are y'all primarily female? They said yes and attendance. Okay. And so, uh, a lot of the deaths were the males and it's, it's not unusual to see when you get down to just a few people that is typically dominated by females. Okay. Okay. So I, I love, I love optimism. I love hope. I love the, the ability for potential change. So if you would have had the opportunity, I'll let you decide what, what year you would go back. If you could have gone back five, seven, ten, whatever year would have been, and you could have jumped to that church and said, Hey guys, these are the things you need to do. What are some things? And again, I'm not silver bullets, but what are some key things that, and maybe someone's listening to this and maybe they feel like, ooh, we, we are about to, about to that year five point. It feels like the wheels are going to come off very soon if we don't do something. What advice would you give those church leaders? Well, the first part of the first question you ask is, I'd probably go back between eight and 10 years. Okay. Uh, there would be sufficient resources, I would think to be able to move forward. I don't know where the community transition was at that point, but I would, I would presume that you could start making plans to more welcome the new members rather than build a fortress and a moat and keep them out. Okay. So I go back eight to 10, 10 years, you know, you could say, well, why don't you go back further? Because they probably were more dynamic and larger than, no, I think, I think the right leadership could go in and, and do just what needed to be done. So one of the first things that leader has to do is is that person ready to be the change agent? Are you ready to let God use me to take some probable bullets, not the silver bullets, but just the painful bullets. Are you ready to take those bullets to lead change? Because if you're not leader, and this, in this case, you're saying to make it me, Tom, if you're not ready to do that, don't even try it. Because it is going to be costly to lead this church to change. And Jess, when I wrote Anatomy of a Revive Church, which we've already mentioned, that's one of the key issues. The pastors of these churches said, I'll do whatever it takes to God. I'm here. I'm ready to go. So there's a healthy spiritual desperation. That's a good way of putting it. That, that, that a pastor who's seeing a church that's beginning or is already in decline that needs to start taking place. For me, I, and we talked about this week, I, I call it that spark, that, you know, is your flame as a, as a church leader as a pastor, is your flame bright enough that other people in your church can begin to light their torch off of it. And I'm still not from Toser, but that's been a rallying cry for my own life recently. And I think that needs to become more of a rallying cry for pastors who are experiencing churches like this. And, and I, and the way, and this is, I don't have the data, I don't have all your, your fancy research, and does seem like there are some older pastors that need to start begin to ask that question as well. Because we need more churches for the next generation. We need more pastors who are willing to leave a legacy not of deceased churches, but a legacy of revived churches. And so there's an idea of like, where's that spark? Okay. I'm jumping it. Sorry. I get a little preachy here, but you keep going. One of those, one of those issues, Jess is the age of a pastor, the median age of a pastor in the United States right now is age 60. So we have to ask the older guys to step up. They're not enough of the younger guys right now. Right. Yeah. There's a reality you can't coast in retirement that you have to, you have to, you have to floor it into retirement. Next thing I would do is I would do everything I could, not only to welcome the community, but to embrace the community. Okay. To say this is where we're headed as a community. If we truly want to be a church for the neighborhood, a church for the community, we will start taking those steps that are necessary. And as I indicated at the beginning of this, that means start thinking about how do you move toward, in this community's case, Hispanic leadership, right? Not just welcoming Hispanic members, which you should do, which they weren't doing, but Hispanic leadership as well. Yeah. And can, you know, the pastor go out into the neighborhood and get to know people and ask God to put someone in his path that may become that leader that he can mentor in the future. So somehow to embrace the community, because you cannot become evangelistic unless you love the people you're trying to reach. Right. And you can't reach them if you don't know them. So that's, that's why I'm a big proponent of it, because what can happen over time is that our eyes can be trained to see what we want to see. And that it's so important to do a demographic and a demographic report. Know your community, we put that in show notes too, because that, that report should be an annual report for churches. It should. And if you, if you want to go from coasting to flooring the gas penalty, keep that analogy going. 16 to flooring. You, you've got, you've got to know your community. And there's, there's a reality that you may not be seeing your community as it's changing. And so if you can, if you can allow your eyes to see the hard data and you can know your community, then you're going to be better poised to reach your community. So that's, that's a key thing to do annually. Keep up with your community trends. Another thing that I would do is I would, I'm going to go back to, to, to, to your categorizations, which I really like, I would take, I would lead the church through three levels of reaching beyond themselves. Let's do something with community service. Right. Two or three months after that, we're going to do some outreach. Okay. Now we're ready to really do some evangelism in the community. Move them into that. And like you and I worked with some churches this week, put it on a calendar that you're going to lead your church to do the hope initiative as one example. Are the good news neighbor or invite your one, whatever the case may be, are something that is not a church answers product, but you're going to start reaching the community. We had these pastors put it on the calendar and as a result, I think we'll see some good things happening in there. I, I think a great practice in any church, as a church leader is when you, when you do your annual budget, do your annual calendar. And so whenever that is, do both at the same time, most wait, most don't have any intentionality. They just do the budget that I'm worried about the calendaring. Put intentional outreach, intentional evangelism on your church calendar, when you do your church budget. And what you might find is you actually might allocate more resources when you do that. When you choose to do your calendar and your direction and your strategy before you do your budget. So that would be our recommendation as well, just as a quick little tidbit there. Well, the reason, the reason I wrote an enemy of a revived church, yes, is because I wanted to have a positive story that was out there. Autopsy of deceased church was a huge bestseller because it, it opened some eyes that needed to be open. It still is, but anatomy is the hope. And for a church that is wondering where they are, read autopsy, but have anatomy right in your hand ready to follow that one up too. Yeah. All right. Any last words before we wrap the subject? No, I, my heart still goes back to that idea of like, let's just, I'll just get a little bit more fired up. I am tired even in my area of hearing about churches that are dying, hearing about churches that are closing, hearing about coasting. And it's because there's, there's, there's a need. I mean, there are people who are distressed and rejected, like see, but that is shepherd. It's our job to go out and to the harvest and parades the Lord, the harvest is in networkers and do his harvest. And so if you're listening this, let that fire you up a little bit. We're all working at this together. I'm a local church pastor. If you're a local church pastor, we're in this together. Let's get excited. Let's get, let's get focused. Let's get dedicated. Let's get some fervency and some expectancy for God to move, you know, God's looking for, for availability, more than ability, I tell my church people all the time. So let's, let's become available and let's get after it. And you know what? I can't close it with anything better. So I'm just going to thank our audience, those of you on YouTube. Thank you. And we'd appreciate you giving us a thumbs up and maybe subscribing to us and those of you who are listening on your podcast app to give us a rating and review, but above all, thank you the audience for being there for this particular story. It's just indicated it's not a fun story to tell, but it's a needed story to tell. Thank you all. We'll see you in the next podcast call the church answers podcast. You have been listening to the church answers podcast presented by Chaney and Associates. Chaney and Associates are the accounting firm for the church. You need to focus on ministry. Chaney will focus on finances. Also please subscribe and give a review to the church answers podcast on YouTube and on your favorite podcasting app. (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING]