Some of my assumptions about church growth - and church death - were corrected when I read The American Church in Crisis by Dave Olson (Zondervan, 2008).

For example, if a denomination is growing, would you guess it has more church closures, or fewer? On average, do more rural churches close, or urban churches?

The following excerpt describes the dynamics of closing churches in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. (Used with permission.)

I’ll let David explain.

• Churches that closed declined eight times faster than did those that remained open.
• Closed churches were less likely to be in rural, small town or large town communities. Instead, they were much more likely to be urban.
• Closed churches were in communities that had lower median incomes, educational attainment and age, but a higher percentage of households with children and a higher poverty rate than those that stayed open.
• ELCA churches were three times more likely to close when they were in communities where less than 75% of the population was white.
• The two case studies also highlight the second counterintuitive fact about closures. There is an inverse relationship between the closure rate and the growth of a denomination. The lower the closure rate, the more likely the denomination is declining. The higher the closure rate, the more likely the denomination is growing.

Figure 7.3 shows that the denominations with high closure rates are growing rapidly and those with low closure rates are declining.  The mainline instinct never to let a church die actually discourages energy from being directed toward the development of new churches.  Growing denominations create an atmosphere that encourages and provides for health and growth in all their churches while allowing unhealthy or marginal churches to die with dignity.  Growing denominations also reinvest the assets of closed churches into new church-planting projects, usually producing multiple new churches to replace each closed church.