The Backside of the Life Cycle Curve
As a district superintendent, I walked with churches in every stage of their life. I supported new church plants, congregations living into their vision, churches celebrating over a century of ministry, and communities that faithfully completed their work. Every year, local congregations are born, discover who they are, mature, decline, and close. The graph that describes this process is called the Life Cycle Curve.
The Life Cycle Curve begins with a small group of committed individuals who gather around a shared vision, often described as birth. As a congregation grows and moves up the curve, it expands as it builds relationships and programs. When it reaches maturity, the congregation is at a stable size and structure for its context and has clearly established leadership and traditions. At this point, it is at the top of the life cycle curve and without intentional renewal, a faith community will decline.
Churches on the backside of the curve experience numerical decline, a reduction of leaders, and loss of vision. Sometimes this manifests as deep worry about long-term survival or grueling efforts to keep a prized program afloat. A congregation that finds itself on this part of the life cycle curve can still revitalize itself by refocusing its efforts on developing a vision or realigning themselves. Revitalization may also focus on rebuilding relationships within and outside the congregation and creating new programs as well as redeveloping old ones. A faith community may also choose to relocate or merge to refocus its efforts. If a congregation decides to do neither of these options — denying or willfully refraining from making a decision — the congregation will eventually face closure.
Successfully turning around a congregation that is declining requires intervention as soon as possible. A natural place for this would be at the moment a congregation hits maturity. The hope is that by doing so, a church will not reach decline. Instead, a congregation would re-envision itself and push on to its next iteration. There are many resources available to congregations at this stage, including hiring consultants, local workshops, and sending a team to a conference.
For congregations already in decline, the Good Friday Collaborative has developed new resources that can help regional/judicatory leaders and congregations determine what reasonable options are available to halt the decline and move towards a new vision.
These assessments focus on four primary areas of a congregation:
Spiritual/Emotional: This area considers emotional and spiritual health, including a congregation's faith identity, response to conflict, and willingness to adapt to changing circumstances.
People: This category goes beyond the number of people to examine demographics, leadership depth, volunteer burnout, and orientation toward the broader community.
Finance: This area examines a community's ability to raise funds, manage its budget and endowments, as well as its willingness to comply with denominational expectations and standards.
Building: This category focuses on the use and maintenance of a congregation's physical plant, including its existing structure and land.
These four areas are designed to create conversations, provide an honest assessment for regional and local church leaders, as well as consider what options a church can reasonably pursue. Regardless of how a congregation proceeds, it will need to address conflict, change, and uncertainty.
Over the next several weeks, we’ll release articles that will explore each of these areas in more depth. To instantly see how your congregation scores on this assessment, we encourage you to use our Quick Assessment. To gain a fuller picture of a local church and its options, you may also purchase our new Judicatory Leader’s Assessment of a Congregation or a Congregation’s Self-Assessment. We hope that these assessments will help congregations in decline choose the most faithful path forward as they strive to continue to do the work of ministry in their community.
Are you ready to lead your congregation into the next faithful phase of the curve? Download our Quick Assessment Checklist and get a snapshot of your congregation’s place in the church life cycle today.
