Your Church Isn't Failing. It's Normal. Here's How to Turn It Around.

Let me start with the sentence I wish someone had said to me years ago: if your church averages under one hundred on a Sunday, you are normal. Not failing. Normal.

We carry a quiet shame about this, don't we? We watch the megachurch conference highlight reels and assume everyone else has cracked a code we somehow missed. But the numbers tell a different story. Somewhere between 65 and 90 percent of churches need some form of revitalization, and roughly six out of ten have plateaued or declined. You are not an outlier. You are the majority.

And here is the promise that should steady your hands this morning: if God can save any person, he can save any church. Some churches will die. No church has to. So let's talk honestly about how to lead the turnaround of the church you actually have, not the one you wish you had.

First, make an honest choice about the path

Before any strategy, plot your church on the life-cycle curve: birth, growth, maturity, aging, and either death or rebirth. Where does yours honestly sit? From there, choose one of three paths.

• Complete and Bless. If your church is in late decline, the most faithful move may be to hand your assets to a strong ministry rather than exhaust your last few saints chasing a relaunch that isn't coming.
• Renew and Reinvest. If you're in early aging, you turn around. This is where most under-100 churches live, and this is the work the rest of this article describes.
• Continue and Expand. If you're at peak vitality, you press the advantage.

Don't quit on a church that's merely aging. And don't try to renew a church that should be lovingly completed. Choosing well here is itself an act of love.

Diagnose why you stalled

Decline has a cause, and naming it matters. Most dying churches fall into one of five types. Geriatric churches (about 40 percent) are simply aging, and a church will not grow with its oldest generation alone. Great Omission churches (about 25 percent) quietly stopped reaching out. Ex-neighborhood churches (about 15 percent) watched their community change around the building. War-torn churches (about 12 percent) lost vitality to conflict. Mismatched churches (about 8 percent) have leadership that doesn't fit the people or context.

Underneath nearly all of these sits one diagnosis: inward churches always decline. The equation to remember is Outward plus Upward equals Onward. A church moving outward in mission and upward in worship and prayer moves onward in growth. A church that loses both defaults to inward and downward.

Start the change with you, not the congregation

Here is the part we skip and shouldn't: personal transformation precedes congregational transformation. Leaders change first, then the church can. This isn't a guilt trip. It's the order things actually happen in.

And it's doable. In one renewal process, 128 leaders began a two-year journey of multi-day retreats, and 126 finished it. That's encouraging math. Begin your turnaround with a season of prayer, not a strategy memo, and do your own renewal work before you ask the church to do theirs.

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Work the 7 P's as your plan

Sam Rainer's checklist gives you a sequence to follow:

1. Priorities. Discern what's most urgent through the Outward plus Upward lens.
2. Pace. Map resistance across four groups: older and younger members, and those who arrived before and after you. You cannot lead change faster than your most resistant decisive group will tolerate.
3. Perspective. Get expectations aligned so discouragement doesn't run the room.
4. People. Honestly rate your congregation's true capacity to move: Low, Average, High, or Unusual. Most declining churches overestimate this and burn out their leaders.
5. Place. Have five longtime members and five newer or outside people walk through and rate the building.
6. Purpose. Shift outward, measured by your conversion ratio (more on that below).
7. Pathway. Name one realistic next step as a Mid Holy Audacious Goal. Not a moonshot. A faith-stretching, achievable goal sized to your real capacity.

Frame all of it with the three knows: know yourself, know your church, know your community.

Watch the one number that exposes the truth

The conversion ratio is your average weekly attendance divided by your conversions per year. A healthy target is 20 to 1 or better. The U.S. average is a sobering 85 to 1, which means most so-called growth is people transferring or being born into the church rather than new disciples being made.

Give every member a simple, personal goal: reach one person every six months. The turnaround math is striking. Win 20 a year and retain half, and you can double in about ten years. Roughly 7 percent net growth a year doubles a church in a decade. Steady wins.

Make the gains stick

Whatever ground you regain leaks back out without structure. Install the three musts: a new-member class, clear doctrine paired with high expectations, and a real process of discipleship. These are the rails that hold a turnaround in place.

And stay an optimist on purpose. Every leader must be one. In a turnaround, hope is a discipline, not a mood. Re-measure annually and let the trend, not one rough season, set your tone.

Your challenge this week

Calculate your conversion ratio. Take your average weekly attendance and divide it by the number of conversions your church saw last year. Write the number down. That single figure tells you whether your church is reaching the lost or simply recycling the saved, and it gives you an honest starting line for everything that follows.