Is the Life of Your Congregation Coming To an End?

Part of Congregational Life Cycles

By Megan Foley

AI Image of a church bathed in glory light from a sunset

It may be the last thing you want to consider…or a realization you’ve come to with some relief, but you and your congregation’s leadership may be recognizing that your congregation’s lifespan is coming to an end. Are any of these things happening to your congregation?

Signs of General Decline

  • “We’re down to a fraction of our former members and all are over 75.”
  • “We balanced the budget this year but I don’t know if it will work next year/in three years.”

Signs of an ‘Inflection Point’ Crisis

  • A financial crisis that results in not being able to pay staff;
  • A volunteer crisis when no one is willing to fill key roles like Board membership or President, and creative solutions like shared leadership don’t appeal either;
  • You have a property crisis, like your building needs a critical repair that can’t be done or a tax bill can’t be paid.

Congregation Appears to Be Heading for Abandonment

  • There is nearly no-one able to make decisions or perform organizational tasks like running a congregational meeting or certifying with the UUA;
  • Members have aged away or disengaged;
  • There is no-one responding at all.

What You Can Do to Respond

Connect with Your UUA Regional Staff

Your regional staff is available for questions, resources, or if you just need a thought partner to help your congregation. Please call us when you are facing a transition, seeing a conflict, or celebrating an achievement! We are your primary contacts with the UUA!

Connect with Your UUA Regional Staff

This end-of-life stage is different than one where a creative reinvention, new sense of mission, or more clarity about what work to focus on would help. If you aren’t sure if some re-visioning would help revive your congregation in a new form, contact your regional Congregational Life staff! They can help you walk through an assessment that can gauge what the possibilities are.

However, if you’re sure that the congregation needs to plan for a closing of some sort, this is a good time to begin a courageous conversation with your co-leaders to see how widespread the feeling is and if the congregation is ready to consider closing its operations. Your regional staff can help with this process, too.

Formally closing your UU congregation can be a time of great grief and sadness, or even conflict and turmoil; it can also be a time of relief and closure and a sense of accomplishment for a job well done. It’s important to know that every UU congregation is an important expression of our faith, and yet none are meant to last forever. It is appropriate that our religious forms and shapes change and morph over time and it is reasonable that a group of volunteers who once led a congregation with energy and purpose may not be able to provide that same effort decades or centuries later.

No matter what the circumstances, the closing of a congregation is not a failure and shouldn’t been seen as such. Your ministry and mission continue in the ongoing work and covenant of Unitarian Universalism. Unitarian Universalism is so grateful for the years of service that your congregation has provided our religion, and we hope that you’ll find new forms and pathways to both practice your faith and to help usher in our next collective chapter.

There is an emotional process to closing a congregation and there are important practical steps as well.

As a first step, please be in touch with your regional Congregational Life Staff. They can answer questions, offer guidance and assist with predicting and managing the ways your congregation and its leadership may be feeling and reacting.

About the Author

Megan Foley

Rev. Dr. Megan Foley serves as Deputy Director for Congregational Life as well as Regional Lead for the Central East Region staff. Before joining regional staff she served for six years as the minister of the Sugarloaf Congregation of Unitarian Universalists in Germantown, Maryland....

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