The death of the local church

Are local churches heading for two extremes?

Perhaps this is too great a leap, but it seems that churches are going in two directions. Megachurches are clearly growing at a rapid pace, often with multiple campuses, with leaders that range from heretics like Joel Osteen and T.D. Jakes to orthodox Reformed guys like Sproul and Piper. As it becomes easier to handle huge crowds thanks to technology, more and more people are congregating into the biggest congregations. This is not just the big name churches but includes the program driven large churches that dot the landscape with several hundred or several thousand worshippers each week. They are big and growing bigger and there are more of them. I read a stat today that there are 1300 megachurches with 2000 or more (often many more) weekly attendees. That is almost 3 million people right now in these megachurches and by every indication they are growing in size.

On the other hand there are the house churches/simple churches that are much smaller and tend to replicate themselves instead of growing. The percentage of people in house churches is pretty hard to pin down but I think by any rational measure it is rapidly increasing as a percentage of the believing population. Estimates are that house churching people make up 8-9% of the Christian population and some estimates have that becoming a far larger percentage in the near future. House church folks are aggressively planting new house churches, with ministries devoted to equipping believers to start their own house church and encouraging them to replicate themselves.

Left out in the cold are the small to mid-size churches, churches with say 50-100 worshippers on average and one full-time “senior pastor”. Those are the churches that seem to be dying out or at least struggling. If you go to an average Baptist church in a decent sized town with say 75 people in attendance on a Sunday, I will bet you dollars to donuts that it will be heavily weighted toward older folks. Heavily weighted. We have been in churches that size where there will only be a handful of younger couples, not many children and lots of older people especially older widows. These churches tend to have a lot of unused or underutilized space in the form of offices and classrooms. They also tend to be denominationally affiliated, unlike megachurches and house churches and many denominations are imploding. Even the big daddy of denominations, the Southern Baptist Convention, is stagnant in growth, has rolls stuffed full of unregenerate “members” and is beset by all manner of squabbles small and large.

Demographically that small to mid-sized church is just not sustainable. The numbers are against them. The giving comes from the older people I would bet, and they are dying off or facing depleted resources. Younger families are fleeing many of these churches to find churches that have more programs for their kids and those tend to be the bigger churches with multiple paid staffers and a huge budget for programs. As kids become adults, they are certainly not drawn to the church full of retirees, assuming they are drawn to church at all. There are fewer and fewer people highly connected to church life and with the availability of the glitz and glam of megachurches, people seem to be either flocking to the bright lights or people are fed up with the highly institutionalized, program driven megachurches and are moving to house churches, or at least much smaller, simple churches.

The small to mid-sized church is a staple of Americana. Many Christians grew up in these exact kind of churches before the advent of the megachurch but they seem to be dying out. It hasn’t happened yet but as the older people who are financially sustaining these churches start to die and giving starts to dry up, it is going to become harder and harder to maintain the buildings and pay for a pastor. I am not a demographer but it seems that unless something changes dramatically, the aging population of these churches and dearth of families with kids inevitably will lead to the collapse of these churches and I think that collapse is coming sooner rather than later. I think you will see more and more pastors becoming bi-vocational of necessity, which I think ultimately is a good thing.

What does the future look like? If I gaze into my crystal ball, it appears that there are going to be ever larger megachurches dotting the landscape. More and more people will flock to them and their programs (and anonymity). An increasing percentage of people will flee the institutional church for the house/simple/organic church model. The average church with its single pastor will have a hard time keeping the doors open and one by one they will close down, unable to pay/find pastors willing to serve there, unable to service their debt or maintain their buildings. The statistics are grim for these “average” churches. As my children grow older, I can easily see a country with two main types of churches: megachurches and house churches. I don’t see the small to mid-sized church dying off completely, but their influence and numbers seems destined to shrink.

What do you think? Am I way off base? If I am not, is this a good thing or a bad thing for the church?