‘It’s like taking care of your mother with dementia; We did everything we could’
Once a bustling congregation of nearly 1,500 members, Pollard Baptist Church is closing its doors.
Decades of decline had taken their toll at Pollard, leaving five faithful members to make the heart-wrenching decision to pull the plug.
The final worship service will be May 1.
“We grieve over what has come to pass,” said Wes Smith, Pollard’s pastor for the last six years. “We understand every living organism does die eventually. As great as the churches listed in the New Testament were, none of those are around today.”
For the tiny remnant of believers, the closing creates a deafening silence from the pulpit where God’s Word had been proclaimed for the past 126 years.
“It’s heartbreaking; it really is,” said 70-year-old Linda Cornwell, who has known no other church. She was enrolled in the "cradle roll" as a baby and committed her life to Christ at age 15. “It was August 1962,” she said. “Twenty-five people were saved on the same night.”
Churches close every single day in America and even though some have been around for more than a century, like Pollard, they fade from existence due to irrelevance, population shifts, societal changes and poor church leadership.
Churches, like human beings, are born and they live and they die. Read More
Just a reminder of the real need for vigorous church revitalization as well as aggressive church planting in North America.image: kentuckytoday.com
No comments:
Post a Comment