Broken Beyond Repair?

Is there ever a point in time when you just need to let something fall apart so you can start all over again? There are eleven holes in the dike and more keep popping up. After using all of your fingers to plug the holes, do you start using your toes or do you finally say, “It’s over! Enough is enough”? I ask these questions amidst all of the bank failures that we see in our economy where physical currency has been lost by the billions, and where physical currency is going to be taken from Peter to pay Paul in order to plug the economic dike.

But financial institutions are not what’s on my mind, but rather spiritual institutions. Is there ever a point in time where it would be appropriate to say, “This church simply needs to be put out of its misery?” Seems like a sacrilegious notion. How could one wish that there be one less institution for God in our world, in our city, in our neighborhood? But yet we’ve heard laments for years about how decadent America is and yet America has a church practically every other block. The insinuation here is that some (if not most of) these churches must not being doing an adequate enough job else there wouldn’t be discussion of a decadent America. So the notion of letting a church that is leaking like a sieve simply fall apart completely is not the most outlandish thought.

What do you do with a twenty year old church that has become completely removed from its original vision? A church that started out with good intent, but ran into some of the traps and snares that befall many churches: the church becomes popular and grows too fast; the pastor has an extra-marital affair and steps down; a church with no affiliation to any denomination from which to draw support; a church that cannot seem to find much less communicate a vision to its congregation; a church where doing things a certain way is so engrained in the culture that change is hard to come by; a church that has a large attendance, but only 10% of the attendees actually do the work because other attendees do not feel, see, or understand the need or are not called and commissioned to service; a church where interpersonal relationships are lacking and impersonal emails are the standard mode of communication; a church where there is no established system of Christian education; a church where the bulk of the time is spent on trying to resolve pastor and staff conflicts; a church where the theology is driven by love and care for the congregation in an unoffending style and not driven by truth itself whether that offends or not; a church where more concern and care is placed upon those whom the church doesn’t know or barely knows to the complete neglect of its own congregation (some who have attended for 20 some odd years); a church that does not give a second thought to those longstanding covenanters who choose to leave as they are so focused on those who might attend; a church that is so concerned with offending its congregation to the point of losing attendees that it refuses to establish and communicate a vision for and to its congregation; a church where you can come and go, never engage anyone and never be called to anything; a church whose pastor has tremendous passion and evangelistic skills, yet has been placed in the position of teaching and vision casting which is not the best use of his skills.

Is this a church that needs to fail and completely start all over again? Is it worth the energy to make repairs? Can God still work regardless of this church’s future - fail or succeed? Does it make sense to keep doing something over and over again when you always get the same result (that being a negative one)? Is there something unbiblical about a church failing?

Should “church” be this hard? What is the will of God here? Is there anything wrong with tearing it all down and starting from scratch?