Churches aren’t meant to be islands.

One of our biggest issues was that we had been an independent local Baptist church for 196 years.   “Independent Autonomous Local Church” sounds great to most Americans.  Hey, we’ve even thrown away entire denominations.  People now seek out “non-denominational” – ironically not understanding that the fact that they look for it expecting something means it’s basically a brand of its own.  We like freedom and independence for sure. But Christianity does not lend itself to isolated practice.  First, our entire faith isn’t a “loner” faith – faith is based on our dependance on a merciful God in whom we have our most important relationship and our salvation – we don’t live for ourselves or save ourselves.   Secondly, the interdependence of congregations and help for each other is as old as the Epistles.  Nearly the entire second half of the New Testament is letters to churches with help and advice on how to improve their operations, doctrine and lives.   And even if we had at one point had a plurality of elders at one point, we only had 3-5 grown men left in the church – none of whom had any serious biblical study or training (and all the able-bodied men were on the deacon board). 

In our case, we realized our deficiencies in expertise and immediately reached out to those we thought would and could (and should) help us. The most obvious was the local SBC association. Unfortunately, another side-effect of SBC history is that a lot of churches (including ours) had provisions in their corporate charters so that the assets (real estate, mostly) would be gifted to the association if we ceased operations.  So our association had some mixed motivations.   The first gentleman who came to talk to us from the association reported to us that he had told our now-retired pastor to “shut it down years ago” due to low attendance, multiple scandals, etc.    We received some basic guidance from him in the form of a couple hours’ worth of meetings, but ultimately, they were clearly expecting and even hoping for us to shut our doors – and to get the money from the sale of the property, or to simply replant after we had all left.   So biased was this discussion that he didn’t even mention the funds available in the North American Mission Board (“NAMB”) which would later provide funding to the church that we ‘merged’ with to replant in our building!  

As for our little group of deacons, the introduction of the association to our conversation was seen as an affront to our church’s autonomy and was enough to rile up a few of the remaining members, because it was “their church” and they simply demanded we hire another pastor and keep on going.  That required money that we clearly didn’t have (since many members had also stopped giving altogether at this point), and in frustration we lost one of our deacons before the month was out.  She left the church entirely after that, tired of her phone ringing with the same 10-12 angry people trying to bend her ear.  Of course, the remaining deacons knew that the issues were far deeper than just the hiring of another pastor we couldn’t afford – and putting that pastor in a horrible position if we had hired one.