Year ago, I heard a statistic that for every new church that is planted, three churches close down. I wonder if God attempted to prune them, but they resisted it. Just as the Lord prunes an individual’s life, He also has a pruning process for a church body. If we are not sensitive to God’s activity, we lose the opportunity for God to heal, restore, strengthen, and make the body fruitful again.
In some ways, a church plant is easier to go through than a pruning process. When a new church body begins, those who come together have a vision from God, and they try to establish the ministry from the ground up the best way they can. While there might be hiccups along the way, the experience is full of excitement, change, and transformation as new people come to the house of God, get saved, delivered, and begin a new walk with the Lord. Over the years, relationships get established, ministries develop, and traditions are created. Those can all be good things until they dampen the courage to do what God is asking for a church to do.
Nor do they put new wine into old wineskins, or else the wineskins break, the wine is spilled, and the wineskins are ruined. But they put new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.” Matthew 9:17
The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.” John 3:8
Jesus spoke about the fact that new wine has to be poured into new wineskins. Jesus came with a new move of God on the earth and the old wineskins would not have been able to contain the gospel. People had to let go of their old mindsets that were established on the Levitical Law and the associated rituals and ceremonies and embrace the message of salvation through the cross.
I wonder how we would have responded to Jesus’ message as a Jewish person at that time!? Could it be that in the name of being faithful to God and honoring our traditions, some of us could have rejected the gospel? It took courage for those who forsook their old wineskins to follow Jesus. Following the New Testament era, God continued to move upon His people in different ways in various seasons of history for His purpose. For example, Martin Luther had to challenge and forsake the Catholic teachings that twisted God’s word to benefit the Popes’ pockets. This cost Luther everything, but it opened the door for people to hear the truth from someone in power!
When Jesus spoke to the seven churches in John’s vision in the book of Revelation, His overall message was that the churches tried to do good, but they either strayed from their first love or allowed mixture with sin. I would imagine that those churches did not intend to disobey God outright, but their disobedience came by gradual compromise and fear of offending leaders or members. Maybe their sense of loyalty blinded them in protecting what God desired to cut off.
If we are going to stay in step with God, we must listen to His voice and allow Him to take away anything that cannot be part of the new season. This requires paying attention to His voice rather than being comfortable with our ways. Most people don’t like to rock the boat because the consequence of that could be the loss of relationships or ministry.
If the Lord shows us something is not fruitful any longer or causing harm to the body of Christ, we must be courageous enough deal with it. This means allowing God to prune what He deems necessary to be pruned. This would be difficult and painful, but the alternative would be to stay in comfort and reject God’s leading to become healthy again. The truth is that most churches don’t die overnight, but they die a slow death because they neglect the promptings of the Lord when He asks something that is hard.
