Follow American church-life today and there is one word that keeps popping up – DECLINE. Every major denomination except one – (the Assemblies of God, whose aggressive church multiplication strategy is making a great impact) – is experiencing a decline. And even the positive note of big churches getting bigger is dampened by decline in belief/discipleship metrics among Christians – like belief that the Bible is the Word of God, or that marriage is between a man and a woman, or that adultery is a sin. Books and blogs and doctoral dissertations are filling up the shelves about what’s wrong and how to change it. Reading many of them myself and looking forward to reading more. Let me suggest a resource if you’re in this battle to stop the decline in your own church or if you’re planting a church that you don’t want to stall:

Tony Morgan’s FREE E-books The Leisure Suit Trap: 8 Reasons Your Church is Stuck and Hanging Up the Leisure Suit: How to Get Unstuck. These can be read in an hour and give practical helps that you can put into action right away. Follow Tony’s Blog for other helpful thoughts on organizational effectiveness, systems, etc.

A few other helpful resources for revitalization:

• Comeback Churches by Ed Stetzer and Mike Dodson. Research based on 300 churches that turned it around.
• We use this graphic  from Comeback Church to help diagnose a church’s need for Revitalization.
• And also this graphic from Tony Morgan about the why behind churches in decline.