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SHOULD ALL CHURCHES BE BIG?

“There seems to be only one cause behind all forms of social misery: Bigness. It appears to be the one and only evil permeating all creation. Whenever something is wrong, something is too big” (L. Kohr, The Breakdown of Nations [E.P. Dutton, 1978] xviii).

I begin with a caveat: One must take care in criticizing strategies for church growth. One of the ways we mainline Protestants legitimate our decline and excuse our evangelistic infidelity is through our criticism of church growth. We have certain time-honored alibis like, “Bigger is not better—we are tightening our ranks for service.” Or, “We don’t want to play the numbers game, we’re after quality not quantity.” Or, “The reason why we are not growing is that we take tough stands on the issues.” And so forth.

It is therefore wise to be suspicious of any mainline Protestant (like me), teaching in a UM seminary, who criticizes aspects of the church growth movement. Beginning in the 1960s, our denomination began closing and downsizing our once prominent, large, innercity churches. We did not know that was what we were doing at the time, but that was the result of our polity, clergy appointment, and lack of creativity. Our denomination has just begun to feel the effects of the loss of these great “flagship” congregations. Other denominations have been more successful in keeping their large congregations. So be suspicious of my criticism of big churches; it may be merely an alibi for decline.

Recently, a church growth expert has called our age, “the era of the megachurch.” If that characterization is true, then our era will be one of massive change for American Protestant Christianity because American Protestant Christianity has been and remains today an essentially small church movement. Most pastors will spend most of their ministry within the small church, churches of somewhere under 200 to 250 members. They are at the very heart of American Christianity, but do they have a future?

Today, it appears that to be an evangelical, one must also be an enthusiast of church growth. Evangelism means going out and sharing the gospel with more people, bringing more people into the kingdom, growing bigger. The models for ministry on Sunday morning television, or in the majority of clergy journals, are those pastors who have very large churches. If the large congregation, congregations with a Sunday morning attendance of 600 or more, is to become the norm for American Christianity, then we have two major problems: First, this excludes the vast majority of American churches. The normal, Sunday morning experience for the majority of American Christians is a church where few are gathered. Second, there are theological questions concerning the megachurch as the model for church. I preach every Sunday in a congregation which could be called a large church. Our Sunday morning attendance averages from 800 to 1,400 persons. I can tell you, from my own experience of over a decade, the large congregation, even mine (especially mine!), should not be taken as the model for the church of the future. To be big is to be, in the light of the gospel, not necessarily to be better.

The main thing that we have learned in our numerous studies of the small church is that small churches are not merely smaller versions of large congregations. A small congregation is not only quantitatively different from the large congregation, but qualitatively as well. Carl Dudley (Unique Dynamics of the Small Church [The Alban Institute, 1977] 5) depicted the small membership church as the Christian gathering characterized by strong attachment and sense of ownership by the members. The small membership church is notable for the closeness of relationships among its members and the church’s function as the preserver, the bearer, and the protector of congregational tradition and culture. We do these churches a grave injustice when we evaluate them on the basis of criteria derived from larger churches.

Life in the small membership church is no picnic. When I first started examining small congregations, I first thought that most of their problems were financial. They simply did not have enough money to have a “quality” music program, full-time pastoral leadership, and many of the print and media resources available in larger congregations. The better I got to know the small membership church, the more clearly I saw that most of the tensions within small churches are the result of their most positive characteristics. In the small membership church, everything is close, sometimes too close. People know each other, really know each other, “warts and all.”

Small membership churches tend to have distinctive personalities. They are difficult to join. One must be adopted by the small congregation; it is not enough simply to have one’s name added to the role. Small churches tend to love like a family and fight like a family. Therefore, their disagreements can be particularly conflicted because they tend to be very personal, very emotional, and strike at the heart of the congregation.

This emotional intensity and cohesion can easily lead to a negative assessment of the small church. Pastors accuse small churches of being “provincial” and “closed.” Many are. These family-like characteristics seem to be inimicable to the openness demanded of those who would share the gospel.

And yet the small congregation reminds us that the gospel is not simply a matter of, “Do you agree?” The gospel is more an issue of, “Will you join up?” To be a Christian is to be invited to be part of a journey, a people who are busy responding to the loving intrusions of God in Jesus Christ, a family.

To be a Christian, it is not required that one adore the pastor, or that one have a capacity to arrive on a Sunday morning willing to be entertained for an hour. To be a Christian means to assume responsibility, actively to become part of God’s revolutionary movement in the world. The small membership church does not have enough members to have the luxury of inactive, apathetic, passive members. Everyone has a name, a first name. The role is always taken on Sunday morning. When people are absent or people fail at their job, everyone knows it. Therefore, small congregations tend to have a much higher lever of involvement and a much deeper level of commitment than larger congregations.

Furthermore, aside from these rather sociological characteristics, there is theological justification for not equating being big with being better when it comes to the church. There is, within the NT itself, justification for the normative status of the small membership church. I have a friend who is an Islamic scholar. He noted the other day, “There are no directives within the Koran for how a Muslim is to behave as a minority within a majority non-Muslim culture.” The Koran assumes that Islam will quite naturally take over the world, conquer all competitors, and be the majority faith.

Yet I suddenly realized there is little help within the NT for how Christians are to behave as a majority within a culture. All of our writings in the NT are the Scripture of a people who are a minority, sometimes persecuted and often ignored by the majority culture. It is obvious that the church in the NT is a small group movement, fighting for its life, on the fringes of the majority culture. Therefore, biblically speaking, the small church does not have to defend its smallness. Rather, it is the large church which must explain how, following a crucified Lord, preaching a gospel which is inherently at odds with the surrounding godless pagan culture, this church somehow managed to be successful!

Not only must the large church explain to the NT how it got to be so successful, but it must also explain our North American penchant for equating success with size.

Of course, many small membership churches are small because they are closed, provincial, dominated by a single family, hostile to the leadings of the Holy Spirit, and a host of other theologically non-defensible reasons. Yet, if this is the “era of the megachurch” then we must take care to be honest about the ways in which the large congregation can also be unfaithful to the gospel. Impersonality, a style of worship which is more performance than participation, the degeneration of the church into a gathering of those who merely admire an attractive pastor, a church which is little more than a conglomeration of narcissistic support groups that merely mirror the psychological hangups of our culture, and the transformation of the church into a large impersonal volunteer organization with little individual engagement of its members—these are also signs of infidelity.

Although L. Kohr would disagree, bigness is not necessarily badness. However, in the American climate of success, and bigness, we do well critically to examine our attitudes about the size of churches. We need churches today that foster distinctive Christian identity, who equip individual Christians for resistance to the corrosive acids of American paganism, and who create an alternative means of forming community to those offered by the world. I believe that the small-membership church may be uniquely situated to respond to the faith challenges of the 21st Century.

By William H. Willimon, Dean of the Chapel, Duke University, and Professor of Christian Ministry, Duke Divinity School.

Suggested Reading:

N.T. Foltz, ed., Religious Education in the Small Membership Church (Religious Education, 1990).

L.E. Schaller, The Small Church Is Different (Abingdon, 1982).

J.W. Carroll, ed., Small Churches Are Beautiful (Harper & Row, 1977).

W.H. Willimon and R.L. Wilson, Preaching and Worsh in the Small Church (Abingdon, 1980).