The 60% Season: Leading Through Loss

Easter Sunday, 2005. Finney High School. Resurrection morning — the day every preacher circles on the calendar. And I stood up to preach knowing the room was changing under my feet. By the end of that season, sixty percent of our congregation was gone.

Not to another city. Not to heaven. To other churches, to Sundays at home, to wherever people go when they decide a season is over. If you lead anything — a church, a team, a family — you already know the number isn't the pain. The faces are. You don't lose a percentage. You lose the mother who was with you in the basement in 1998. You lose the couple you married. You lose people you would have sworn were load-bearing walls.

I'm not going to relitigate the why. Twenty years later, the why matters less than what happened next — and the people involved long ago became people I pray for instead of people I explain. What I will tell you is what the empty seats taught me, because if you lead long enough, some version of this season is coming for you too.

The exodus is information, not identity.

The first temptation is to let the loss tell you who you are. To preach every week to the people who left instead of the people who stayed. I had to learn to say to myself what I'd been saying to everybody else: we speak to the potential, not the problem. That had to start with how I spoke to me. The 60% was information — about season, about alignment, about what God was pruning. It was never my identity, and it isn't yours.

Rebuild slower than you want to.

Our rebuild took three and a half years. I didn't choose that number — I noticed it later. It's the length of Elijah's drought. Droughts don't break because you're in a hurry; they break when the rain is ready. We spent those years doing unglamorous things: loving the people in the room, building systems that didn't depend on any one person, letting the culture heal. And the drought ended. In the summer of 2009, a congregation that had been counted out moved into 52,000 square feet on Detroit's east side.

The people who stay become owners.

Here's the part nobody tells you about losing sixty percent: the forty percent who stay didn't stay to attend. They stayed to build. Volunteers show up; owners rebuild. Those same people — the ones who folded chairs at Finney High — paid the final balloon payment on that building in 2019. Debt-free. The 60% season built the 100% church.

So if you're staring at empty seats this morning, hear me: the seats are not the story. What God is building in the people still sitting in them — that's the story. Count what stayed. Water it. And keep your calendar open, because higher is beautiful, but higher is expensive — and the drought is where you find out God can afford it.