Should You Close Your Church after Reopening: Rethinking Your Church Growth Strategy

Every time you think 2020 is going to get easier, it just gets more complex.

So here’s a question: “Should you close your church after reopening it?”

While that sounds like a terrible question, what if it was your best church growth strategy?

I know that probably sounds like heresy and you may be too annoyed to read further, but just hang on for a second more.

As the coronavirus resurges across the US, and even areas that thought COVID wouldn’t impact them are breaking all-time infection records, clearly this is a time to ask all the questions.

But this is a deeper question. In Canada, our cases have slowed to almost a trickle, but I think it’s a live issue here too…if you really want to reach more people.

As much as we say it’s not true, there’s a nagging sense among many church leaders than unless the building is open, the church isn’t. If you’re actually going to reach people, that may have to change.

So why would anyone want to close their church after reopening if no one ordered you to do so?

Well, that depends on your mission.

If your goal is to gather people in a building, then keeping your building open despite public health risks and diminished returns makes sense.

But what if that’s not your mission?

Most church leaders (myself included) would say their chief goal and mission is to connect people to the hope of Christ and to each other.

So, if your goal is to reach people, let me walk you through a few strategic points that might help you assess whether keeping your building open at all costs until someone orders you to close it might be actually be harming your mission, not helping it.

Here are 8 things you may want to consider if you really want to reach more people. Read More

The authors of a number of the articles that I have read in my search for articles for Anglicans Ablaze are obsessed with the idea that the church is not the church unless it reoccupies the building. Their ecclesiology or the ecclesiology of the church leaders whose churches they are writing about may explain this obsession at least in part: It conceives the church in terms of warm bodies occupying a common physical space. The emphasis is on the visible church. The spiritual nature of the church as the Body of Christ in which its members are united to each other and to God by the Holy Spirit and through which God manifests himself in the world through the individual and collective actions of its members receives negligible attention.