Yesterday, the Guardian reported that nearly 5,000 UK chain stores closed last year at a rate of 14 per day. That, at least, was the headline. Nearly 1,000 of those were actually Pharmacies. Of those, most of them were Lloyds Pharmacies and the majority were not shut altogether, but simply taken over by independents. So, the figure can be rounded down a little to account for that. But nevertheless, over 4,000 actual closures last year is not insignificant.

Whilst the closure of chain stores inevitably affects the look and feel of town centres and high streets, it is hardly a new phenomenon. Chains frequently open new outlets and close others. Whilst it might be a cause of sadness when an independent boutique or tiny set of stores close its doors, a chain streamlining operations is hardly big news. Chains like Next and Wilko going under altogether is notable and far more significant than Weatherspoons closing some of its outlets in order to streamline operations whilst keeping the vast majority open. A good number of the closures were high street bank branches, which do not represent trouble in the banking sector nor a downgrading of service. In the most part, they reflect advances in online banking and the banks themselves actively looking to encourage electronic modes of money management. It is both easier for customers and cheaper for the banks and represents something of a no-brainer all round.

Of course, at the heart of most of these things is a market reality. Whilst some of these things may be driven by a desire to streamline operations to maximise profit, and others to encourage cheaper and more efficient means of accessing service, much of it is driven by a simpler reality: people aren’t using the outlets. There may be all sorts of factors that feed into that. The rise of internet shopping, the state of the economy, cost of living, time pressure and a range of other things that might all be worth thinking about. But in the end, the brute reality is these things close because people aren’t using them. Either they have passed their usefulness or they are beyond the reach of many. Whatever the reason, they close because people don’t go in and buy anything in them anymore. They aren’t fulfilling their function, they aren’t turning profit, they aren’t useful, people ultimately show by not shopping in them they don’t want them and so they close.

The same is true for most things that close. We may feel sad at what lies behind such decisions, but little causes as much anguish as local library closures. But almost nothing is acknowledged quite so little as the brute reality: people simply aren’t using them. For all our talk about the wonderful work they do, the services the provide, the benefits for people without funds and all manner of things like it – all of which may well be theoretically true – it doesn’t change the fact that they close because the figures don’t lie. People don’t go and, no matter how great your services available may be, if people aren’t tapping into them they aren’t really achieving anything.

We sometimes fall foul of this sort of thinking in the church. We may have once run a thriving evangelistic Sunday School that has dwindled down to a few. We may run coffee mornings that were lively and well attended but now hardly anybody comes. We may remember events, camps, rallies and all sorts of things that were once well attended and we think served the good of the church that either don’t happen now or are a shadow of their former glory. We can look back on all these things, and many others like them, and bemoan their collapse. How sad that we can’t run these things anymore. What a shame that they are no longer viable. Some of us do the sensible thing and, in the face of anybody coming, stop that particular ministry. Other of us do the less sensible thing and continue in the vain hope that if we pump all our time and energy into these things regardless they will somehow revive. But the brute reality, as for the high street, is the same: they are no longer viable because they no longer serve people, their needs, wants or desires.

The truth is that many of our ministries no longer serve people. They do not meet any particular need they have nor meet any of their desires. We often give ourselves away when we bemoan the loss of the Sunday School (or whatever ministry it is) because we often express greater regret at no longer being able to run that ministry than we do concern about why it doesn’t meet people’s needs or connect with the community any more. We seem to grieve the loss of the ministry itself – much as people often grieve the loss of high street shops – rather than having any concern for the actual needs of the people those things were meant to serve. When they close, simply because the people no longer find them useful, helpful or served by it in any way, we show great sadness at the closure without much thought or concern for why people no longer come and, more important, how we might serve their present day needs more helpfully.

Just as businesses that don’t close unviable outlets and refuse to evolve in response to changing cultural and personal needs are the ones that go under. Churches, though not businesses, similarly go under when they refuse to wind down ministries that aren’t serving anybody and do not think about how to reach their community as it is, in the face of wholesale cultural and personal changes, rather than how it was 50 years ago. In a sense, it doesn’t really matter what the reasons are that make certain ministries no longer viable in particular places. What matters is the brute reality that if nobody wants it and isn’t tapping in then your ministry, no matter how faithful you may feel you are by continuing with it, isn’t actually serving anybody at all. If we are adamant we will continue to run it in the face of community buy in, we have lost sight of what the church is actually there to do. We have allowed a vehicle for the making of disciples, and the church’s primary people-focused call, to become subservient to the running of activities that Jesus hasn’t specifically asked us to run that were supposed to operate as a means of reaching people he has asked us to reach and not as an end in themselves.

The high streets that do well are those that change in response to people’s needs. They are the ones that provide either what people want or what they can only get here. There is a reason why the hospitality sector is often the first to help regenerate town centres: you can’t download your meal out off the internet! The church needs to think about these things too. Like the high street, we have two things we can do. We can either provide things that people want and need, which will differ from community to community, that provide opportunities for us to share the gospel within them. Otherwise, we need to offer what only we can offer which is, specifically, the gospel itself and a number of good things about the church that, in recent years were castigated as “weird” and to be smoothed out, but that we might want to lean into a bit more.

These are our options. Unless we want to go the way of high street chains and complain about the decline of the church, we have to grasp the nettle. If our ministries are dwindling, it is because our ministries are not serving the people they were designed originally to serve. If we are no longer reaching people its because we are either offering them nothing unique or nothing they want or need. In some cases, it might be both. So we need to press into what is unique about the church – centring clearly on the gospel – and build ministries around the actual needs and desires of the communities we are in, again recognising these things are vehicles for reaching people with the gospel rather than viewing the people as fodder for our ministry, and seek to evolve what we do as the culture inevitably changes around us again.