By Brent Lacy

The Hardest Conversation in the Church Happens in a Room This Size

Fifteen people sit in the fellowship hall on a Wednesday evening. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead. The coffee is hot but nobody is really drinking it.

The topic on the table: should our church consider replanting?

These fifteen people represent roughly 80% of the Sunday morning attendance. Twenty years ago, they would have been 20% — the core group willing to show up on Wednesday nights. The math tells a story that nobody at the table wants to tell out loud.

There is Margaret, who was baptized in this building in 1962 and has not missed a communion Sunday in thirty years. There is Robert, who chaired the building committee that added the fellowship wing in 1987. There is Linda, who taught third-grade Sunday School for twenty-two years and whose husband’s funeral was the last well-attended service they can all clearly remember.

There is also Pastor Jim, who came to this church eight years ago hoping to lead a revitalization and has watched the congregation shrink by a third during his tenure. He is tired. The church cannot pay him full-time anymore. His wife has taken a job to help make ends meet.

These are not bad people. They are faithful people facing an impossible question: what do you do when the church you have given your life to can no longer sustain what it was?

What Is a Legacy Church?

The term “legacy church” has come into common use in church planting and revitalization discussions to describe a congregation that has a long and faithful history but is now in significant decline. Ed Stetzer, dean of Talbot School of Theology at Biola University, writes extensively about these churches and maintains that “nothing about a dying church brings glory to God” (quoted in NAMB, Reclaiming Glory review, namb.net).

A legacy church has typically been faithful for decades. It planted other churches. It sent missionaries. It fed the hungry and buried the dead. Its people tithed through depressions and world wars and cultural revolutions. When someone says “First Church has been part of this town for 100 years,” they are saying something real.

But somewhere along the way, things began to slow down. Young families moved away for jobs. The community changed. The old methods of outreach stopped working. New people who moved into the neighborhood did not come to church, and eventually the congregation ran out of reasons to believe they ever would.

The critical moment in a legacy church’s life is the moment it must decide: are we going to honestly reckon with our situation, or are we going to keep pretending until there is no one left to pretend?

“We Are Not Closing — We Are Replanting”

Here is where the language matters.

“Closing” sounds like death. It sounds like failure. It sounds like the obituary of everything these faithful people have built. No one wants to be part of a church that closed.

“Replanting” opens a door to something different. When a church decides to replant, it is saying: “We believe the gospel is still needed in this community. We believe God is not done here. We believe the best way to serve our community is to release what was and welcome what could be.”

This is not an easy mental shift. It requires the legacy church to look at a building where they were married, where their children were baptized, where their parents’ funerals were held, and say: “This building is not the church. The church is the people and the mission, and the mission continues even if the building serves a different congregation.”

That is a profound act of faith. It is also, in many cases, the most faithful thing a legacy church can do.

What a Replant Looks Like Practically

Every replant is different, but the basic pattern goes something like this:

Phase 1: Honest Assessment (3-12 months)

The legacy church leadership engages in an honest analysis of their trajectory. This often involves bringing in outside counsel — a denominational leader, a revitalization specialist, or a trusted pastor from outside the congregation. The North American Mission Board recommends this step specifically because churches in decline lose the ability to see themselves clearly from the inside (NAMB, Revitalize and Replant podcast).

Key questions to answer:

• What is our attendance trend over the last 10 years?
• What is our giving trend?
• Can we afford pastoral leadership?
• What is the demographic of our community, and do we look like them?
• Does anyone under 40 attend regularly?
• Have we intentionally attempted outreach in the last three years?

These questions are uncomfortable. But they produce clarity, and clarity produces the ability to make good decisions.

Phase 2: Decision (1-3 months)

Based on the assessment, the church decides: revitalize from within, or replant with outside leadership. Sometimes the answer is obvious. Sometimes it is agonizing.

If the decision is to replant, the legacy church should:

• Communicate the decision clearly and compassionately to the congregation
• Work with legal counsel to handle the building transfer
• Partner with a denomination, network, or mission agency to find replant leadership
• Establish clear expectations for the transition

Phase 3: Transition (6-18 months)

A new pastoral leader or team arrives. The legacy church congregation is given the choice to join the new congregation or to find a home elsewhere. Property is transferred. The new church begins meeting in the existing facility.

This is the hardest phase emotionally. Old members grieve the loss of what was. The new leaders feel the weight of expectation and the challenge of reaching a community that may have tried a new church before and been disappointed.

Phase 4: New Life (1-5 years)

The new congregation begins its own journey. Some legacy members become the faithful core of the new church. Others move on. New people arrive. Slowly, the new identity takes shape.

Mark Clifton’s experience at Wornall Road Baptist Church in Kansas City spanned all four phases over more than a decade. A church that had declined to eighteen people in a sanctuary built for 600 gradually came back to life. Clifton notes that his own willingness to stay for the long haul was essential — quick replants rarely work (Clifton, Reclaiming Glory, B&H Books, 2023).

The Building Question

One of the most charged questions in any replant is what happens to the building.

Many legacy church buildings are paid off or nearly paid off. The physical plant may have been built and maintained by generations of sacrificial giving. For the members of the legacy church, that building represents decades of faithfulness. It is sacred ground.

At the same time, a building full of memories is also a building that costs money to maintain. Roofs need replacing. HVAC systems fail. ADA compliance requirements update. For a small congregation in decline, the building can become a financial burden that prevents the church from investing in ministry.

In a replant, the legacy church typically transfers the building to the new congregation. This can happen through a variety of legal mechanisms — outright donation, long-term lease, shared use agreement, or sale at a reduced price. The mechanism depends on the denomination, the state, and the preference of the legacy church.

Here is what matters most: the legacy congregation needs to feel that their building is being used for gospel purposes, not sold to the highest bidder for conversion into apartments or coffee shops. A replant by a faithful church planting organization, a denomination, or a partnering local church provides that assurance. A sale to a developer often does not.

Models for Sponsoring a Replant

Not every legacy church needs to be the one replanted. Some established churches choose to sponsor a replant in another community — giving their resources, people, and credibility to help a dying church somewhere else become a new church.

This is the model Ed Stetzer describes when he calls churches to move from “addition” to “multiplication.” Instead of every church trying to grow itself bigger, healthy churches reproduce. They become the parent, the sponsor, the midwife that helps something new come into being (Stetzer, “A New Church-Planting Era,” Outreach Magazine).

The Rural Home Missionary Association (RHMA) has built its entire ministry around this principle. Operating since 1942, RHMA plants and strengthens churches in communities of 5,000 people and fewer — the small towns that large church planting networks often overlook. Their missionaries plant in towns across rural America, supported by sponsoring churches that believe the gospel belongs everywhere, not just in suburbs (rhma.org, “Who We Are”).

RHMA’s approach involves:

• Responding to requests from communities that have no gospel-preaching church
• Initiating church plants in towns identified as spiritually underserved
• Sending missionaries who serve multiple years, not months
• Training through conferences, internships, and residencies for rural ministry
• Pastoral support and counseling for isolated rural pastors

What Pastors of Legacy Churches Need to Hear

Pastor Jim is tired.

Pastor Jim is the bi-vocational pastor of a legacy church. He arrived with hope eight years ago and has watched the congregation continue to shrink despite his best efforts. He prays and preaches and visits and serves, and every year there are fewer people on Sunday.

Pastor Jim needs to hear this: the decline is not necessarily your fault.

Many legacy churches were on a trajectory decline before the current pastor arrived. Many were going to decline no matter who was in the pulpit, because the decline was driven by demographic, cultural, and economic forces well beyond any one pastor’s control.

If you are Pastor Jim, here is what the experts say:

1. Honestly assess whether revitalization is possible. The NAMB framework asks five questions: Humble hearts? Desire for the community? Commitment to biblical authority? Willingness to take risks? Faith that God can work? If the congregation can say “yes” to most of these, revitalization may be possible. If not, replanting may be the more faithful path.

2. Do not stay where you are being slowly destroyed. Staying in an impossible situation out of guilt is not faithfulness. It is self-destruction. God does not require you to set yourself on fire to keep a dying building warm.

3. If you stay, stay on God’s terms. If God is calling you to remain as the pastor of a legacy church in transition, God will sustain you. But do not confuse God’s calling with the congregation’s guilt. Those are not the same thing.

4. If you leave, leave well. Help the church face reality. Help them explore replanting. Help them find their next pastor. A departing pastor who helps the church plan for the future is a gift to the congregation.

What Board Members of Legacy Churches Need to Hear

You are stewards. That is a biblical term with biblical weight.

The resources God has entrusted to your church — the building, the finances, the community relationships, the history — are not yours to hoard. They are yours to invest. And sometimes the highest and best investment is to give those resources to a new congregation that can deploy them for kingdom purposes you can no longer accomplish.

When the board of a legacy church considers replanting, the question is not “do we want to close?” The question is “what is the most faithful use of what God has placed in our hands?”

If that means giving your building to a new congregation with a new name and a new mission — and then joining that congregation as its founding members — that is not failure. That is multiplication.

If that means your legacy lives on through the gospel preached in that same building to a new generation you will never meet — that is not defeat. That is legacy.

Ashley, Illinois: A Real Story That Is Still Being Written

In December 2020, the last church in Ashley, Illinois closed its doors.

Ashley is a small town in the southern part of Illinois, in a region where towns like Ashley are everywhere — and where the number of towns without a gospel-preaching church is growing every decade.

For three years, the town had no church.

Local believers prayed. And in January 2024, a small group began meeting for Bible study at the Lantern Pub — a local gathering place, not a church building. From that unlikely beginning, a group of believers covenanted together as Church of the Redeemer on December 1, 2024, choosing to organize as a Reformed Baptist congregation — autonomous, gospel-centered, under the lordship of Christ.

Their website states their desire plainly: “that the people of Ashley may come to know the fullness of joy through the gospel of Jesus Christ” (redeemerashley.com).

This is what replanting looks like in a small town. Not a grand launch with a marketing budget and a celebrity pastor. A handful of people. A pub. A Bible. And faith that God is not finished with Ashley, Illinois.

The Gospel Has Not Forgotten Small-Town America

There is a temptation in American church life to assume that the action is in the cities. Church planting conferences feature urban church planters. Church growth books profile suburban megachurches. The implication is that the future of the church is in places with foot traffic and coffee shops and demographic growth.

But small-town America still needs the gospel. Rural communities still need congregations that will baptize their children and marry their young people and bury their dead and be present week after week, year after year.

The Rural Home Missionary Association has understood this for 84 years. Ed Stetzer calls it “reaching the least-reached.” Mark Clifton calls it “reclaiming glory.” The Bible calls it fulfilling the Great Commission — “in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1.8, ESV). Small-town and rural America is not the “ends of the earth” geographically, but it is increasingly the ends of the earth in terms of spiritual attention.

Every legacy church that replants, every sponsoring church that sends, every missionary who goes to a town of 2,000 because the gospel matters there — these are not backup plans. These are frontline mission work.

And when a handful of believers in Ashley, Illinois covenant together as a church in a converted building, with no denominational budget behind them except the faithfulness of their own giving — that is the church being the church. Not the institution. The body of Christ.

A Final Challenge

If your church is in decline, you have two choices: maintain or multiply.

Maintenance means keeping things as they are for as long as possible — which, for most declining churches, means a slow diminishment until the last faithful person dies or moves away.

Multiplication means taking everything God has given you — your building, your history, your faithfulness, your heart for your community — and investing it in something new.

One path leads to an obituary. The other may lead to new life.

The choice is yours. But you should know: you do not have to make it alone. Organizations like NAMB’s Replant Network (namb.net/church-replanting) and RHMA (rhma.org) exist to walk this road with you. Denominational leaders are available to consult. Other pastors have walked this road before you and know the terrain.

Take the hard conversation. Ask the uncomfortable questions. Consider the possibility that the most faithful thing your church has ever done is to replant.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between church replanting and revitalization?

Revitalization seeks to renew an existing congregation, while replanting involves a new church being established in the same location, often with new leadership and a fresh mission focus.

How long does a replanting process typically take?

Most replanting efforts take 2-5 years to reach stability, though this varies significantly based on community context, resources, and the health of the legacy congregation.

What role does the legacy congregation play?

Legacy members often provide historical knowledge, community relationships, and sometimes financial support. Their buy-in and blessing are critical for a successful replant.

How do we know if our church is a replanting candidate?

Key indicators include sustained attendance decline over 5+ years, inability to call qualified pastoral leadership, and financial patterns that cannot sustain basic operations.

What resources are available for churches considering replanting?

Denominational networks, the Church Planting Network, and organizations like the Replanting Network offer training, coaching, and financial support for replanting efforts.