As a child, my hometown of Chandler, Texas, was still very rural, with a population of just over 1,300. The intersection in town was just a four-way stop.
My church was the center of my family’s life, at least when a high school football game wasn’t being played. By the 1980s, a small neighborhood around the church building had emerged. But there were still vestiges of the farmland it had once been.
Some of my earliest memories are from when church ended, and my friends and I ran across the street, squeezing through a barbed-wire fence to play in an old barn that was probably, in retrospect, not suitable for young children to be playing in.
While our parents mingled in front of the church building, we were jumping in the hay or uncovering items from what felt like an ancient era.
As I got older, the barn was razed, and a new preacher started pitching the idea that the church should purchase the land it once stood on. He had a dream of constructing a bigger church. In college, where I studied to be a minister, I would learn that this was a “church growth strategy.”
Don’t build for the size of church you are. Build for the size of church you want to become. It’s okay to go into debt for this because if you build it, people will come.
Some loved the idea. Others couldn’t see the wisdom in a church with around a hundred people taking out a massive loan to build a new building when they already had a perfectly okay building.
When the decision was made to purchase the land, many in that latter group left the church. Most of them joined another Baptist church out on the lake.
It was my first experience with a “church split.” But by the time this happened, I had graduated high school and moved on.
In my early 20s, the new, bigger building went up on that old plot of farmland. And the old saying proved true: Once they built it, people came. The church grew and became vibrant, by all appearances.
But then some of the more longstanding members, those who originally wanted the new building, left for some reason or another. They started a new church on the other side of the railroad tracks.
Times changed, new pastors came and went, and the church dwindled to just a few people in that new, cavernous building. Some people joined the Methodist church. Others went out to the church on the lake, while a few started a new one on the other side of the railroad tracks.
Some left altogether and either became “spiritual but not religious” or its distant country cousin “‘Family values voter’ who spends Sunday mornings at the deer stand or in a boat.”
Eventually, many of them ended up at the rural church-turned-megachurch outside of town. That church attempted the “church growth strategy,” but at a more opportune time, I suppose.
My parents remained, as did a handful of folks who had been around since I was a child.
Before the church dissolved a few years ago, I was in town and ran into Bobby Tom at the gas station. Bobby Tom was one of the last people still on the church rolls, and yes, that was his real name.
We talked about the church and all the people leaving. He told me he’d never leave, even though he never actually went. His reasoning?
“My daddy told me never to switch churches, never to switch political parties, and never to switch wives. Now I’ve already failed at two of those, so I’ll be damned if I fail at the third.”
Many churches face the same fate as the church that nurtured me. It can seem that the best way for a church to fill the pews is to preach the white, male MAGA “gospel” of American exceptionalism or to quietly uphold that worldview with a wink and a nod and an appeal to “unity” and “centrism.”
But this isn’t a lamentation or a think piece on the state of the American Church. You’ve probably already scrolled past a dozen of those today.
All our churches will die someday– the one on the lake, the one across the railroad tracks, and the mega one outside town. Even the one I have spent almost all my adult life in.
Church death, like human death, is part of life.
This also isn’t an appeal to stay in your church or any church, for that matter. I believe in the power of churches to transform communities and help bring God’s justice and healing to broken systems that destroy. (Assuming, of course, that they confess and repent of their complicity in these broken systems.)
But I also believe, as we sing often at my own church, that every tree has its root in the stream of God.
Instead, it is a reminder to myself that one of the purest, most holy experiences of God I have ever had within the context of church was playing in that old barn with friends after squirming in our seats through an hour of worship. It was there that I was permitted to wonder, to wander and to cultivate curiosity and joy.
May this be your experience in your churches, old barns or deer stands.
Senior Editor at Good Faith Media.
