Part 3 of a series, “Five Disruptive Church Trends in 2025”

April 10, 2025

By Rev. Rick King

Carey Nieuwhof is the Canadian pastor and trend-spotter I read who annually publishes a list of “disruptive church trends” that he believes will affect churches of all types, even though he writes with a primarily evangelical audience in mind. I’m interested in how we can view this year’s five disruptive trends through the lens of our merger process. Each week, we’ll look at a different trend and see how it applies to us as we try to plant a new church out of a merger of two existing churches facing challenges. Source of the content is Nieuwhof’s blog, but the take on it is my own.

This Sunday is Palm Sunday, and one week from today is Maundy Thursday, which is a joint service this year with New Life Presbyterian, here at Falcon Heights at 7 p.m. Communion and Tenebrae service with a joint choir: Holy Week is almost upon us!

Makes me think of Easter, a favorite Sunday of the year for baptisms, especially of new converts. Christianity thrives best when there is a constant influx of new followers of Jesus into local churches.

In fact, an influx of new believers or converts is one of the features of a healthy community in most faiths, not just the Christian one. Having to introduce, interpret, and answer questions about one’s religion—not to mention welcome, form, and integrate new members into the fellowship again and again—is part of what keeps a religious body healthy.

And the metaphor of a physical body is appropriate for religious communities, because what keeps a body alive? Constant change. One of the clinical definitions of death is “when a body stops changing.”

That’s why this third disruptive church trend is alarming: church closures appear to be outpacing new church plants three to one right now.

A few years ago, leaders in some denominational circles were calling for increasing the number of new church starts, for a couple of reasons: Each year between 4,000 and 10,000 churches close their doors (it’s hard to get an exact figure); and prior to COVID-19, only 3,000 new churches were planted annually—at the same time as lots of churches closed during the pandemic, resulting in a net loss of churches nationwide.

By rough estimates and a lack of reliable figures for post-COVID new church starts, that leaves us with a gap of 7,000 churches.

Although he calls himself a firm believer in church revitalization, Carey Nieuwhof notes that the data clearly show that new churches reach more people than existing churches do. And he says that if we look beyond the earlier statistics above, the estimate could be that 8,000-12,000 new churches annually would be required to keep up with population growth and church closures.

But this is important not just because of institutional survival, but for vitality reasons: Churches growing with people who are new to the Jesus story and healthy, vibrant community, are exciting places to be and powerful change agents in their areas for the better!

Can you and I conceive of this merger not as a consolidation, but as jump-starting a new local church?