musicmantg11:
We are a self-supporting parish. It is in a small town, the population count is small, but not too small.
It is always a sad occasion when a church closes.
Churches close for a number of reasons.
The most common are:
- The congregation is hellbent on destroying itself;
- Economics — the congregation is not supporting itself financially;
- Membership decline: The congregation is not sustaining itself in terms of new members;
Taking these in order:
- Self-destructing congregations: These are congregations whose members practice all that Lashon Hara prohibits. The most effective way to turn this around is strong preaching from the pulpit, accompanied by shunning the instigators of the evil talk. Total transparency, and full disclosure of everything, is the most effective preventative measure. (FWIW, this also is one of the leading causes for the decline and closure on secular organizations.)
Take a look at the congregation, and try to determine if it does any self-destructive behaviour. How much dissent is there in the congregation? How much evil talk occurs? Who does the evil talk? Are there any antagonists in the congregation? If so, how are they being handled?
( Kenneth C Haugk:
Antagonists in The Church is pretty useful to study about how antagonists operate. Most evil talkers are nothing more than low scale antagonists. Unfortunately, numbers can overwhelm.)
- Economics: It costs money to keep a church open. The expenses can range from the obvious (candles, the sacraments) to the less obvious (heat, electricity, copyright royalty payments) to the unexpected (building maintainance, building repairs.). A small church may be able to make ends meet, only to crash because of an unexpected event — a major financial contributor dies, a mandatory building repair that they can not afford, a utility bill that is much higher than anticipated;
You don’t give the age of the church building, but if it is old, it might need repairs that the congregation can’t afford.
If possible, get the financial books of the congregation for the last five years, and see how well it is doing. Look at the changes in income over the five years. Then look at the changes in expenses in the last five years. It is entirely possible that income has been flat, with expenses going up, because of inflation.
Take a good look at what money is being spent on, and consider whether or not the same result can be achieved at less financial cost.
- Membership decline: With 60 people in attendance at a service every morning, your church is slightly below the average (mode) of religious institutions in the US. (The mode is 80.) I don’t remember the specific figures for the Catholic Church.
If the average attendance at a service does not increase by 5% per year, the church is losing members. If you can obtain the church records for the last decade, try to determine the number of attendees at a service on a typical Sunday, Easter, Christmas, and the other Holy Days of Obligation. Plot a graph to see if those figures trend up, down, or remain flat. Compare that graph with the change in local population over those years.
Regardless of what the trend is, consider how to increase the average attendance to 100 on a “normal” Sunday.
Once you have all that data, look at it carefully.
- Do the numbers support keeping the parish open? If so, write the letter to your Bishop, asking that it stay open, and use those numbers to support your opinion;
- If the numbers do not support keeping the parish open, then you need to look at what the congregation can change, so that the parish can stay open. Then write the Bishop, citing the numbers, and asking for the parish to stay open, if the congregation can make these changes;
What I’ve outlined here is hard work for anybody. The major reason I laid it out, is because you said you wanted to be a priest. As such, you will run into similar situations in the future. Consider this training for those future situations.
xan
jonathon
)