Strengthen the Things Which Remain: What a Church Down to Six Members Can Teach Us
A Mobile, Alabama, congregation had voted to close and was preparing to chain its doors. Scripture has never counted a small remnant as finished.
See where this is ›MOBILE, Ala. —
This week The Alabama Baptist told of Manor Baptist Church in Mobile, Alabama. The church had voted to close and given its money away, and its members were preparing to chain the doors. Six people remained. Two years later the church has more than 70 members and has baptized 30 people.
Most of us know a church like Manor as it was two years ago. It may be a white frame building on a county road with a dozen people in the pews, or a city congregation whose neighborhood changed around it. The arithmetic looks settled, and sensible people begin to talk about what to do with the building.
“Be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die: for I have not found thy works perfect before God.”
Revelation 3:2, KJV
Those words went to the church at Sardis, a church with a name that it lived and yet was dead. The Lord did not flatter Sardis, and neither should we flatter ourselves. A dying church may be dying for reasons that call for repentance. Yet the command was not to close the doors. The command was to watch and to strengthen what was left, and a command like that assumes something can still be done.
Ezekiel stood in a valley of dry bones and was asked a question no man could answer. “Son of man, can these bones live?” The prophet's reply is the right reply for any pastor or board looking at a hard set of figures: “O Lord GOD, thou knowest” (Ezekiel 37:3, KJV). He did not claim to know the outcome. He preached as he was told, and the increase belonged to God.
The report from Mobile has no secret method in it. Pastor Donald Turner's family gave two months of their tithes to repair a run-down building. The six members, who had planned to leave, stayed when he asked them for one more week. Sunday School had only his family in it for six months. A man who had sat in that church for about a decade heard a sermon on the Lord's Supper and recognized he was not a believer. That is plain work and plain preaching, with no budget to speak of.
“Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts.”
Zechariah 4:6, KJV
Those words came to Zerubbabel when the rebuilt temple looked small to those who remembered the old one, and the same chapter asks, “For who hath despised the day of small things?” (Zechariah 4:10, KJV). We should not turn one good report into a promise that every small church will grow. Some faithful congregations will stay small all their days, and some doors will close. Numbers are not the measure of faithfulness, whether they rise or fall. Our point is narrower: nobody should write the ending for a church that the Lord has not finished with.
So let the small church take heart, and let the larger church look around its own county. Is there a congregation of six nearby that could use a pulpit supply, a work day or a word of encouragement? Our Lord said, “upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18, KJV). Until He returns, the work is the same as it was at Sardis: watch, and strengthen the things which remain.
