This blog is about an average middle aged American guy who found himself trying to steer a church family out of a ditch. I got elected (that’s the first problem in the church) in Sept 2018 to help run a church that all the structural integrity of an Indy car has just hit the wall at 200 miles per hour and the slo-mo camera guys are getting highlight reel footage. Parts flying everywhere! This is one guy’s perspective on what happend, why it happened, and how you can hopefully avoid the same mistakes at your church. Along the way I discovered what a decade of ‘starvation mentality’ can do to a church family, what a denomination in crisis looks like to a member church, how the Evangelical church in America has completely come off its moorings and is adrift in consumerism, materialism, overly-simplistic and flawed theology. And you’ll hear how Jesus is at work anyway.
In September of 2018, I was elected “Deacon” of a small suffering church in North Carolina (average Sunday attendance ~30). At the end of that same week (and before the new deacons were seated as a board or had a meeting), the pastor of over a decade decided to retire. The week after that, we started really trying to figure out how bad the finances were (very bad). Like most of the 4,000ish churches that will close this year, the congregation was largely unaware, or in severe denial. They were hurt, angry, and grumpy. My fellow deacon board (also the “board of directors” and I set out to keep the church open, in the same denominational tradition and keep our congregation together. That turned into a “merger”. This blog will address the past nearly two years of what happened and how it all turned out. I’ve been a church attender nearly all my life. I’ve got kids, though, so I attended, taught a little Sunday school, ch...
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