How to Empty a Church: The Manual: Guidelines for Church-Planters and Pastors Gleaned from a Real Ecclesiastical Saga

By John S. Oldfield

Many have pontificated about church growth, telling church planters and pastors how to increase the number of attendees and members. Most have spoken authentically from inspiring experiences, and what they've recommended has worked . . . at least for some. But what about advice on how to reduce those numbers, how to empty those pews? This "manual" provides just that, and its suggestions don't emanate from an ivory tower; they, too, are based on real-life experiences. The insights and guidelines of How to Empty a Church may be expressed tongue-in-cheek, but they're not fictional; they reflect the history of an actual congregation. Fasten your seatbelt; it's going to be a bumpy--but worthwhile--ride!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: May 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781666702644

John S. Oldfield

John Oldfield, a graduate of the College of Wooster and Denver Seminary, was a pastor for over forty-one years--in rural, urban, and suburban communities. He and his wife Dagmar planted Yorktowne Chapel in center-city York, Pennsylvania "from scratch" and pastored it for twenty-eight years. With unusual transparency, he tells that story in his book, How to Empty a Church: The Manual. Due, in part, to the impact of the Passion of Jesus Christ upon his own heart and life, he has also written Prizing His Passion: Why the Death of Jesus Christ Should Matter to You . . . A Forty-Six-Day Journey. The producer of a weekly radio program for over twenty-six years and a police chaplain for twenty-five years, he likes biking, peppermint-stick ice cream, and TV cop shows. A widower, he has four children, six grandchildren, and one great-grandson. After eleven years in metro-Phoenix, Arizona, he resides again in York.

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How to Empty a Church: The Manual

Guidelines for Church-Planters and Pastors Gleaned from a Real Ecclesiastical Saga

John S. Oldfield

How to Empty a Church: The Manual

Guidelines for Church-Planters and Pastors Gleaned from a Real Ecclesiastical Saga

Copyright ©

2021

John S. Oldfield. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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Resource Publications

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paperback isbn: 978-1-7252-9999-3

hardcover isbn: 978-1-6667-0263-7

ebook isbn: 978-1-6667-0264-4

Scripture, unless otherwise noted, taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®, Copyright ©

1960

,

1962

,

1963

,

1968

,

1971

,

1972

,

1973

,

1975

,

1977

,

1995

,

2020

by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

06/01/21

To

Dagmar

. . . my beloved, lovely, loyal, and longsuffering wife,

who shared every bit of this saga with me, but

who has been absent from her body and present with the Lord

since December

29

,

2019

and to

Kristie, David, Peter, and Ingrid

. . . my beloved, long-since-grown children,

who, along with my wife, paid too great a price for

my intense involvement in ministry to others,

and who deserved so much more.

IN FOND MEMORY OF

Leonard H. Morgan Jr.

FEBRUARY

6

,

1936

—MAY

2

,

2000

The adjacent photograph was taken during Yorktowne Chapel’s sixteen-year ownership of an

1870

-vintage, originally Methodist-Episcopal, church building in an inner-city neighborhood of York, Pennsylvania. The man crouching in the front doorway and appearing to be engaged in something sinister (like robbing—or emptying—a church) is the late Leonard H. Morgan Jr., a long-time Yorktowne Chapel member and deacon who shared much of the congregation’s history. He spontaneously configured his handkerchief into a bandit’s bandana while bantering with the photographer. (The mask has nothing to do with protection against COVID-

19

in

2020

and

2021

thirty-five to forty years later!)

Leonard was a close friend and confidante of the author, a valuable assistant in his ministry of counseling and deliverance, a wise and skilled troubleshooter and peacemaker, an engaging and charming gentleman, and a major contributor to the life of the church. He died—after a long battle with cancer and complications from the treatment he received for it at the National Cancer Institute—before having a chance to see how the history of his beloved congregation finally played out. His wife, Jackie, survived him and did experience the rest of its history.

Introduction

I’m assuming you’ve been called by the Chief Shepherd to tend a flock of God’s sheep. That’s exciting! And I’m assuming you want to see that flock grow . . . not by stealing sheep from someone else’s pen but by searching for lost sheep, rescuing them, enfolding them, and then watching them reproduce. Surely that’s the ideal scenario—although, admittedly, if you’re offering the right kind of food, some malnourished sheep may find their way from others’ pens to yours of their own accord.

Many have shared, written, and pontificated about church growth. There are even Professors of Church Growth Missiology. Lots of experts have told us how to increase the number of attendees at our services and the number of members and adherents of our congregations. To their credit, most of them have spoken authentically from their very positive and inspiring experiences. Not only that, but what they’ve recommended has actually worked for other pastors and spiritual leaders . . . well, at least for some.¹

Of course, we need to define what we mean by worked. Are we talking simply about numerical growth, or are we talking about spiritual growth and maturity? In other words, the growth experienced by some of the experts has not proved to be everything it was cracked up to be. One of the most prominent leaders of the seeker-friendly-church movement startled the ecclesiastical world several years ago by admitting that, though he had succeeded in attracting huge numbers of people to his services, his whole approach had failed to produce mature Christ-followers.

But where are the best-sellers that tell us how to reduce those numbers? (And I’m not just talking about a back-door revival.) It’s hard to find written material about how to empty those pews. For those who would like to be able to access such information, I humbly offer the guidelines which will follow. Bear in mind that these will not be theories emanating from some ivory tower. They will be methods that have been tested in the trenches; they have worked! They come out of my personal experience with one congregation.

You need to know, however, that I’ve served as a pastor/elder/overseer of three congregations—a rural one, an urban (later suburban) one, and a suburban one. In the first case, I was their fifth pastor, and I served for exactly seven years.² In the second case, I was their first pastor; my wife and I founded the church, and I served for exactly twenty-eight years. In the third case, I was the Senior Associate Pastor; I joined the staff of a larger congregation when my much smaller one merged with it, and I served for exactly six years and four months. The techniques I propose to share with you derive from my second pastoral tenure—the longest one.

Even before actually moving to York, Pennsylvania, from Levant, Kansas, to do something I never envisioned doing—planting a church from scratch, we named the projected congregation Yorktowne Chapel.³ I employed the techniques I’m about to share during the twenty-eight-year history of that congregation, which will always occupy a large part of my heart. Remember: as you’ll discover, I’m an expert when it comes to knowing how to empty a church; I’m creative, and I’m really good at it.

By now you know that much of this book will be tongue-in-cheek. Please understand, however: although the goal of emptying a church is facetious, my story is not fictional. I actually succeeded in doing it, and I did so by the means I’ll describe in chapters

1–11

. Please know: I’m hoping that you won’t succeed in doing it—that you’ll learn from my mistakes and from the things I did right. (More than anything else, I’m hoping you’ll be a success in God’s sight.) You can add your own evaluations along the way to some of mine, but I’ll provide most of mine in chapter

13

. As I reflect on my pastoral career in that chapter, I’ll share some candid confessions and considerations that I trust will be of genuine benefit to you as you launch into yours. It’s my goal to raise, and then help you think through, numerous issues that pastors have to confront . . . especially in church-planting. To assist you in that process, there are discussion questions at the end of each chapter.

All right, then: once you’ve been called to pastor an existing congregation, or, if you’re a church-planter, once you’ve gathered some folks and established a church, let me tell you how to empty it.

1

. In spite of the rapid rise of megachurches, we need to realize that, according to a Christianity Today article in March

2019

,

57

percent of Protestant churches in the United States have an attendance each Sunday of less than

100

people and that

21

percent of those average less than fifty. Only about

11

percent average

250

or more at the worship services they conduct. Aaron Earls of Lifeway Research, The Church Growth Gap: The Big Get Bigger While the Small Get Smaller, Christianity Today, March

6

,

2019

. More details from Earls’ research can be found at christianitytoday.com/news/

2019

/march/lifeway-research-church-growth-attendance-size.html. I would add that throughout my own pastoral career I’ve known many pastors of small churches in the United States and abroad whose parishioner I would love to have been. They have demonstrated love for the Chief Shepherd, fidelity to His word, love for the sheep of their flocks, love for lost sheep, character, authenticity, integrity, empathy, marital fidelity, and genuine capability—even though their giftedness has not translated into explosive congregational growth. Does the Lord love them less than He loves those who pastor megachurches? The Lord Himself and their parishioners would answer with a resounding No!!! Their reward, I believe, is secure in heaven.

2

. I should mention that I met the wonderful woman who would become my wife (less than a year later) right after she had returned to Denver, Colorado from working for a summer with David and Don Wilkerson at the original Teen Challenge Center in Brooklyn, New York and being immersed in hard-core urban ministry among drug addicts, drug dealers, alcoholics, prostitutes, and gang members. I should also mention that, as she and I looked ahead to my graduation from seminary (less than a year after our wedding), we just assumed we would be heading into inner-city ministry somewhere in the United States. But God had other plans; instead, He had us spend seven years in outer-country ministry, based in a farming-ranching community with a population of less than eighty! (By His grace, goodness, direction, and power, we saw some remarkable things happen there, but that’s a story for another time.)

3

. Although irrelevant to the thrust of this book, I should mention that—in total ignorance of the normal methods and procedures for church-planting back in

1974

—we launched Yorktowne Chapel with a full schedule of services: Sunday School classes, a Sunday-morning worship service, Children’s Church, a Sunday-evening worship service, and a Wednesday-evening Bible Study and Prayer Meeting. For the first six weeks of our history, we held all of those in the rented facilities of the Yorktowne Motor Inn (subsequently known as the Yorktowne Hotel), a social landmark in downtown York. I should also mention that, almost immediately after the manager of the hotel (who was not the person with whom I had made the rental arrangements) angrily told me that we could only function there for that short period of time, the senior pastor of the historic and prestigious First Presbyterian Church in downtown York offered to help us out. After presenting the radical idea to his twenty-six-member ruling Session (Board of Elders) and miraculously securing a unanimous vote, he invited us to use their exquisite but little-used, colonial-style, John Calvin Memorial Chapel for all of our services, their nursery (just across a courtyard from the Chapel) for our babies and toddlers, their beautiful but unoccupied and unused second-story Session meeting room for my office, another upstairs room for our children’s church, and their custodial services . . . all at no charge! Meeting there, as it turned out, for eleven months, we were able to establish ourselves in the city, and I was able to start drawing a weekly salary to provide for myself and my family—just when our financial resources ran out! It was such unexpected blessings (and there were many—including the gift of a dishwasher for our kitchen, the gift of a chain-link fence around our back yard to contain our young children and our dog, and the love offering, requested unexpectedly at the end of a morning worship service by Pastor Jim Cymbala, from the people of Brooklyn Tabernacle in its original location, with which we purchased the hymnals we ending up using for twenty-eight years) that confirmed to Dagmar and me that we had undertaken this otherwise-scary project according to the plan and purpose of the Lord of the harvest. Simply stated, we knew God was in it; we were not doing this on our own.

Chapter

1

The Helpfulness of Heterogeneity

— a renewal in which there is no distinction between Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and freeman, but Christ is all, and in all.

(Colossians 3:11)

First, I urge you to set out to make your church multiracial and multicultural in constituency. That’s biblical, isn’t it? After all, even the leadership of the church at Antioch, Syria—the first largely Gentile church in the Book of Acts—was multiethnic, multinational, and multicultural. Among the prophets and teachers were a Levite born in Cyprus (Acts

4

:

36

), a Jew of very dark complexion, a North African, a foster-brother of Herod Antipas, and a Pharisee from Tarsus in Cilicia (Acts

13

:

1

–

3

). Not only that, but one of the big lessons taught by Jesus (e.g., in His parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke

10

:

25

–

37

) and one of the big decisions of the early church (at the Jerusalem Council in Acts

15

:

1

–

35

) was that ethno-religious barriers should not exist in the body of Christ. In his writings, Paul made it clear: There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Gal

3

:

28

).¹

So . . . regardless of your own ethnic identity, try hard to attract and incorporate blacks, whites, Hispanics, native Americans, Southeast Asians, and others. Try to merge inner-city folks with suburban sophisticates. I did—try, that is. Our first business cards even advertised: Evangelical, Interracial, Intercultural. We were serious about this.

Some Success

At first, we enjoyed the semi-regular attendance of some of the multiracial staff and residents of a local, faith-based, rehab facility for women,² but when their leaders had a falling-out with Dagmar and me (and other board members, who, like us, had found it necessary to resign from our positions) and forbade their staff and residents from attending, there were only whites—largely suburban in orientation. Then, once we had purchased an old, red-brick church building on the corner of College Avenue and Duke Street in York’s inner-city, one somewhat eccentric, older, black male began attending. At some point, one Hispanic family came. Gradually, other blacks entered the picture—in the case of the adults, seasoned believers seeking a church where the word of God was taught responsibly and where they would find acceptance. A black woman up the street started sending her black foster children to our Christian Education program . . . to get a break from them on Sunday mornings. Later, a white family from the suburbs began bringing a large family of Cambodian children. Still later, a few other (fluently bilingual) Hispanics began attending sporadically.

Eventually, as it turned out, one of our four deacons was black, half of our Sunday School teachers were black, our classically trained organist was black, at least three of our vocal soloists were black, and one of our drummers was black. Not only that, but, once my initially unplanned prison ministry to male inmates had sufficiently evolved and stabilized, the core team members were a black brother with a background in York’s streets, a Puerto Rican brother with a history of twenty-seven years as a heroin addict and as an on-and-off prison inmate in New York City prior to his conversion, and I, a white man (perennially desirous of a nice tan). I was ecstatic! It was a dream come true.

Steady Decline

Alas, however, the Hispanic ex-junkie and his family left, amicably, to attend a brand-new, evangelical, Spanish-speaking, Methodist church, where the adults in the family could worship in their heart language and the cultural trappings would be more familiar to them. Although we missed them greatly, we fully understood the reason for their departure and remained good friends. It was a somewhat different story when it came to the black brothers and sisters in our congregation. Some of the reasons for their eventual exodus we understood; some we really didn’t.

We discovered, and understood, that the sincere attempts of our white, worship-team leader to get us all to sing and sound black on certain songs by black composer-artists (such as Soon and Very Soon, by Andraé Crouch) were considered patronizing and were not well received. We discovered, and understood, that our reluctance—to avoid unintended racial offense—to rebuke, correct, or discipline black children and teens when they displayed poor attitudes or behavior was