Small Churches
I recently encountered an Alabama pastor and his wife in a department store. This pastor has served in a (numerically speaking) small church for several years. He faithfully drives a distance to preach to a handful of people. During our conversation he excitedly told me about a new family that had started attending church. He already baptized one the children from the family. I became excited from his excitement. He was in a church where one family coming made a big difference. I told him, “Thank you for faithfully serving that church. You are truly doing kingdom work.” That church was a caring, loving gathering of Christians who meet every week to worship, pray and hear the word. The new family will be well cared for and loved. They will make an impact in the church and the community. Karl Vaters has become one of my favorite authors and teachers. He celebrates the “small church” and encourages pastors who pastor “small” churches. The small is in parenthesis because these churches are only small numerically but powerful in the kingdom.
I don’t want my church to be small. It just is.
I want my church to grow numerically. But it’s not.
I follow all the how-to lists to get it to grow. But they don’t work.
I’m told to pray more. So, I do.
Plan better. So, I do.
Work harder. So now I’m burnt out.
But my church is still small.
Now what?
What’s Better Than Bigger?
How about this.
Let’s do small church well. Really well.
Stop worrying about filling more seats, finding a bigger/better/newer building (or any building at all) and be the best church family we can be with who and what we have right now.
We need to stop trying to duplicate the success of the big church down the street. I’m not them. You’re not them. The healthy church God has for us will look very different than the healthy church God has for them. But as long as we’re
- Jealous of them
- Bad-mouthing them
- Thinking we’re better than them
- Thinking they’re better than us
- Or trying to be like them
We’ll never be the church God wants us to be.
Celebrate What You Have
In our obsession with becoming a bigger church, sometimes we forget the importance of being a better church. Right now. At this current size.
Numerical growth is great. It should be celebrated. But it shouldn’t be the only thing we celebrate.
Our obsession with numerical growth has caused a lot of healthy small churches and their pastors to feel inadequate. Even if the only thing “wrong” with them is that they’re not getting bigger.
Many churches contribute to the growth of the kingdom of God without seeing their own butts-in-the-seats growth.
So, let’s stop worrying about getting bigger. Let’s get better.
Your Church Matters
We need to stop idealizing the glory days of our church’s past.
But let’s not make the equal, but opposite mistake of obsessing over what people are looking for in a church today, either. What people need from church hasn’t changed. They need Jesus. In us.
Let’s discover what God has in mind for our local congregation right here, right now.
My church exists for a reason. So does yours.
So how do we discover that?
Maybe if we let go of what we’re not called to be, we can start to see who we are called to be.
