But for me it raised the question, when is a church a small church?
Lyle Schaller sets the threshold at 125 people for the purposes of his book Small Congregation, Big Potential. The back covers of a couple of other titles—Shepherding the Small Church and Help for the Small-Church Pastor—implicitly peg it at 150. And Chuck Warnock says his Confessions of a Small-Church Pastor blog is for "churches with up to 300 in attendance."
Of course, in order to throw any number out there, you have to decide:
1. What distinguishes a "small church" from everything else? Is it the lack of a full-time, resident pastor? Is it having only one worship service? Or when everyone in the church knows everyone's else name?
2. At what attendance level, generally speaking, does begin to change?
And we can debate all we want about the best criteria for defining a small church. But I suspect that we'll let those criteria be influenced by whether we have a more positive or negative perception of the label. So what really interests me is, do people want to identify their churches as small?
In his interview, Koessler talks about how he had to overcome a sense that the small church he pastored wasn't "good enough" for him. Lots of people get caught up to a fault in the numbers, thinking that bigger is always better.
On the other hand, I get the sense that smaller is in. The missional movement, as well as a general revival of interest in authenticity and discipleship, has made house churches, for instance, more appealing to some than megachurches. But it's easy for those of us in publishing to let the latest trends skew our perspective of what most people actually still think.
So tell me: do you, or would you, embrace a "small church" identity?
share this
Tags used in this post:
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://blog.christianitytoday.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2348
Comments
Neither. It is not the important issue. Faithfulness to God and His commands to us is the key issue. We are in a culture where "big" is better. Now, with big companies having trouble, this presupposition is being doubted. With churches usually behind the business models by about 5-10 years, we will hear more of this in about five more years. Remember, Jesus had a small church. Jerusalem started small, but became big overnight. Many of the Gentile churches were small. The churches in Macedonia were, but they were big in giving, first of themselves, and then financially beyond their means. So if we are going to measure numerically, let us do so in proportion to the number of attendance.
Posted by: Joe | March 21, 2009 12:09 PM
A small church is one where everyone expect to know everyone else.
-Josh
www.joshhunt.com
Posted by: Josh HUnt | July 22, 2009 1:43 AM