A Place Where Everybody Matters

Life and Ministry in a Small Church

Risley

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781498272261
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Small churches need the work of all of their people to survive, and this means that there's a productive place in the church family for every person, no matter how gifted or challenged. Small churches are uniquely personal, and they provide an unparalleled opportunity for Christians to learn, grow, and live out their faith consciously, every day.Small churches become a family, children of God, and brothers and sisters of Jesus together. There's no place to hide in a small church. The normal human dramas of good and evil, sin and repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation all happen in our relationships in the family.A small church is a place where people can serve an apprenticeship in faith, learning from those before them and passing on their experience to those around them. In a small church the pastor provides context by preaching and teaching, serves as a role model in encouraging the ministry of others, and, by loving the people, helps them see themselves through God's eyes. The rest is up to the people themselves and to God.

Part I

The Small-Church Environment

1

Introduction

Are you a pastor or a leader or a participant in a small church? Have you even been embarrassed about the size of your church? When you tell someone who asks how many people come to your church, do they look at you with pity or concern? Do folks tell you about how much bigger their churches are or how fast they are growing? Does it feel like people think that your small church is somehow not good enough because it is just not big enough?

Malarkey, balderdash, and other less polite words! Paul’s churches in the New Testament were probably not much bigger than yours, and maybe even smaller—and they changed the entire western world! God has been at work in and through the people of small churches from that time to this, in every era of history. You should never need to be embarrassed about the size of your church, and by the time you finish this book you will know why small churches are such good places to grow in faith and to live out our lives as disciples of Jesus.

A small church is a place where everybody matters. Every contribution is needed, and each person can see the way his or her own work contributes to the work of the church. There is always more work that needs to be done than there are people to do it, so each person who does his or her part of the work is visibly valuable. We all work together, teaching each other and learning from each other as we go, and so growing in faith is something that each person is busy both doing and encouraging in others.

Some churches are in denial about their smallness, still living and spending money as if they were bigger churches. Some small churches still hope to be rescued from their smallness by a change in the economy, new people moving into the area, or a new pastor. When the people of a small church realize that size and money are not going to be available to “fix” their “problems,” the door is open for them to truly become the church themselves. They can see that the church will not do anything that they do not do themselves and that the church will not be anything that they do not make happen. When the people take ownership of doing the work of the church, they become the active representatives of Christ in their own neighborhood.

In this way, being part of a small church can be an unparalleled opportunity to live as a member of the body of Christ. No one is in the audience. Everyone is an active participant. Everybody has a contribution to make, and everybody’s contribution matters.

What Is a Small Church?

What does it mean to be a small church? One of my favorite definitions comes from Richard H. Bliese in Christian Century:

A small church can be defined as one in which the number of active members and the total annual budget are inadequate relative to organizational needs and expenses. It is a church struggling to pay its minister, heat its building, and find enough people to assume leadership responsibilities.1

Do you see yourself and your church in this definition? I know that we did, and many other churches, both bigger and smaller, probably do too.

The church where I found myself is one that struggles to find the resources, both people and money, to do the ministry it feels called to do. In fact, this church has been struggling for so long, for almost all of its two-hundred-year history, that the struggle has become the normal state. The brief times in history when the church was “comfortable,” those periods of regional growth in the 1840s and the 1970s, are times we always look to as golden memories. The reality is that, for most of the years between the first meeting of neighbors in the house across the street in 1796 and next Sunday’s worship service, almost everything the church has done has been a stretch.

This church is not alone. Most experts consider a church to be small when it has fewer than 200 members or has fewer than 150 people in worship on an ordinary Sunday. From our perspective, and maybe from yours, even those levels of membership and attendance can seem heavenly, because our membership and attendance are usually less than half of those minimum numbers.

We Have a Lot of Company in Our Smallness.

These days, many of the churches in our mainline Protestant denominations are small, and the number of small churches is growing. For my denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the number of churches with fewer than one hundred members is consistently increasing, while the numbers of churches in the larger size categories is consistently decreasing. As you can see in the following table, both in our region and nationally, there are more smaller churches and fewer larger churches over an eight-year period:2

Churches by Number of Members	1999	2007	gain/loss
Northeast Region
churches with 1–50	173	259	+50%
churches with 51–100	247	266	+8%
churches with 101–200	362	328	-9%
churches more than 200	397	307	-27%
National Totals
churches with 1–50	2,497	2,845	+14%
churches with 51–100	2,326	2,451	+5%
churches with 101–200	2,655	2,437	-8%
churches more than 200	3,717	3,059	-18%

This Presbyterian experience is not unique, and many other denominations share this trend. We have a growing number of small churches, and many churches that have not been small need to come to terms with their new life as small churches.

You may have experienced some of the reasons for this increasing number of small churches. An overall decline in membership across the mainline denominations is felt in individual churches as a decline in size. This comes as a result of many factors: an increase in very large churches, often outside the traditional denominations; more alternative forms of worship; transportation making many more worship choices accessible; modern expectation that the worship experience compete with movies and television; and use of traditional Sunday morning worship time for secular activities like sports and shopping.

The result is that many churches that had not thought of themselves as small churches are becoming small. Since this is a kind of bad news, we tend to avoid thinking about it, hoping that, if we just hold out a little longer, things will turn around. Denial can lead us to using resources we don’t have to support ministry patterns that no longer work for our actual church size. Focusing on the fact that things aren’t the way they used to be can get in the way of figuring out how to do effective ministry as the small churches we are now.

However our small church came to be small—whether it’s just starting out, has been small for generations, or has just found itself in a newer, smaller size—it still has a call to ministry in Christ, and it does have a lot of company in its smallness.

Should We Be Trying to Be a Bigger Church?

Our church is not a rapidly growing church, and yours probably isn’t either. With the exception of a few hectic periods in the church’s life, the attendance on Sunday mornings has been pretty much the same for two centuries. When we look at books about small churches, it seems that the main goal most experts have for a small church is to stop being a small church and become something bigger.

Growth does sound like a good thing, a sign that we’re doing something right. Many small churches have been seduced into following the holy grail of growth, looking for the numbers that would somehow prove that their ministry was “successful.”

There are lots of arguments about why bigger is better. With more money, a church can afford more and higher quality programs, better materials, more skilled and experienced staff, and more comfortable and presentable facilities. More people mean that there are groups of people, and not just a few individuals, in each of the age groups and interest categories, like young families or older singles. This makes it possible to offer more programs for specific needs.

The economics of scale are real. If a church has 150 or more people in worship each week, there is probably enough money not only to pay for a full-time pastor, but also to hire other supporting staff. There are likely enough qualified program leaders, with professional support, to offer programs with the quality that modern entertainment has led people to expect. There are enough people to put together social service projects or mission teams without taking time or resources from other critical areas of the church.

Since most of the challenges in a small church seem to depend on limited resources, it’s hard not to think that our size is the cause of our problems. After all, if we were only a little bigger and had a little more money, today’s top three problems could be solved. What we don’t realize is that our expectations grow with our available resources, and that the problems to be solved don’t go away. More importantly, big changes in size lead to a completely different set of problems that result from changes in scale for the things we were already doing well.

Should we be trying to be a bigger church? I believe that the answer to this question is not obvious. If we spend our time focusing on how we can grow our church, we waste a lot of the energy and attention that we need to give to being the church in this present moment. If we do a good job of the ministry that’s put into our hands, growth may or may not follow, depending on many factors outside of our control.

Rapid growth may come to a particular church at a particular time, when its ministry to the population it serves is effective and when the population it serves is growing rapidly. This time of growth can be a very great blessing to all of the people...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Part One: The Small-Church Environment
• Part Two: Work and Activities of the Small Church
• Part Three: The Pastoral Role in the Small Church
• Bibliography