Churches are getting smaller and larger”—that’s the analysis of some who read church demographics. As the culture shifts, the two survivors seem to be large, full-service churches, and small, intimate-family churches.Many books and seminars trumpet churches that are large. Fewer provide help for churches that are small.
Leadership asked three veterans of small churches to give honest and practical answers to questions such as “What does growth mean when it may cause a church to lose what is most precious to it—its family feeling?” The candid discussion came from:
- Kathy Callahan-Howell, who planted and has ministered for twelve years in a small, urban church: Winton Community Free Methodist Church in Cincinnati, Ohio.
- Gary Farley, a former bi-vocational pastor, who served in the Town and Country department of the Home Mission Board (Southern Baptist) for thirteen years. He is director of the Center for Rural Church Leadership.
- Martin Giese, pastor of Faith Baptist Church in Park Rapids, Minnesota, and co-director of the Country Shepherds workshop, a training seminar for pastors of rural churches.
How do you define “small church”?
Gary: The small church sees itself as a family. People are connected through ethnicity, vocation, or place. Often there are several generations.
People in small churches interact with each other outside of church—at the post office, at the Lions Club, at the turkey shoot, or the Friday-night football game. They drink coffee at the cafe in the morning before they go to work.
Martin: Which creates a climate of intimacy and a strong level of accountability that can be uncomfortable. It also makes evangelism difficult. How do you evangelize someone who has watched you go through your teen years—or watched your dad go through his teen years?
Kathy: In my denomination, a church of, say, two hundred is considered big. There’s a denominational factor in defining “small.”
I pastor in an urban neighborhood and, in one sense, just like a rural church, my people have lots of interaction with each other outside of church. But in contrast to Martin’s setting, in an urban setting, people in small churches have huge networks, so evangelism isn’t as hard.
Martin: Many people in a rural setting see themselves as a ceo; they are management, and the pastor may be viewed as labor.
Gary: Most older churches have developed bell cows—matriarchs and patriarchs who have carried them through difficult times. But then a lot of young pastors arrive with a kind of military mindset: “I’m ordained, I’m going to lead, and this old guy needs to get out of my way.”
In a small church, different people can lead parades around different things. Good leaders have sense enough to know when they need to be out front and when they need to be in the back somewhere. Over time, as people see you’re not there for your aggrandizement, more and more trust devolves to you.
So how do you reconcile your call to lead with the reality that you need to be given permission to lead?
Martin: I knew a pastor in a rural church in western Minnesota. He was delighted when, in the early part of his ministry, all his initiatives were passed in business meetings with no discussion. Then he was puzzled later when none of the decisions was implemented. He discovered that the real business meeting began after the official meeting adjourned. People would get cups of coffee, meet in the aisles of the church, review all the meeting decisions, and either ratify or nullify them.
He learned to work within that framework, but he initially thought that all those yes votes meant something.
The key word is “consensus.” The small church gravitates toward consensus and feels anxious if there isn’t at least a perception of consensus.
What does growth mean for a church whose identity is as a family?
Kathy: The family image still works: In a family there are children, and then those children get married and have children. That’s how a family grows.
Gary: Sometimes, though, when small churches grow, they get to a certain size and then fragment.
Martin: The key word is slowly. There’s a limit to how large a group can get and still preserve the family feel. That may be one reason small churches fight so fiercely not to grow.
Our church is situated in a rural area, but we use the term rurban, because the area draws a lot of retirees from urban communities. It’s about fifty-fifty between rural and urban people, and that creates tensions that affect nearly every decision we make—from whether to leave the lights on to how we develop ministry.
Kathy: It’s overwhelming for a smaller church when it suddenly becomes the “in” church—the sermons are good, the music is good, so it’s the happening place to be. People feel invaded. Growth can have a negative effect if the church suddenly receives an influx of people disgruntled from a church split or frustrated with their former church.
But in our case, we’re seeing slow growth, almost all of it from conversions. With that kind of growth, it’s much easier to envelop new people.
It’s overshelming for a smaller church when it suddenly becomes the “in” church; people feel invaded—Kethy Callahan-Howell.
Martin: When a congregation I served grew from around fifty on a Sunday morning to seventy, an elderly lady said, “I just don’t know anyone around here anymore.” What she meant was “I no longer can catch up with everyone’s life on a Sunday morning.”
How do you respond to that concern?
Martin: I sat down with many of the older people and said, “A lot of things have happened here through the years, and we’re outgrowing this building. That’s not easy. But you know what? The Lord is answering your prayers. Isn’t it odd that an answer to prayer would bring some pain, some adjustment?”
Kathy: I accept that some churches need to be small—as long as people are coming to the kingdom, as long as there is spiritual regeneration. What isn’t healthy is for a church to say, “It’s okay to just be us and never reach out.”
Gary: I used to think that every small church ought to change and become a big suburban church. I don’t believe that anymore. I think there are people who fit best in a small church.
Sometimes those who fit best are eccentric people who wouldn’t feel as accepted in a larger setting. Do you ever worry that new people might be turned off by quirky members?
Martin: Sometimes you wonder whether you have enough functional people to establish an outreach. But I believe that God will bring people sufficient to accomplish what he wants to do.
Small-church pastors don’t take one another seriously—Martin Giese
The elderly woman I mentioned, who said she didn’t know anyone anymore, had a nervous tic and was flighty.
Then I found out she had one son who served in Korea and never came home. For two years she didn’t know where he was. Then somehow, in the providence of God, a guy found her, in a rural village in Minnesota, and told her he had seen her son starve to death in a Korean prisoner-of-war camp.
Yet she wasn’t bitter at God; she loved Jesus.
Kathy: People who have a problem with a diverse group of members don’t belong in my church. We have a multiracial church, which we set out to create. I want people to attend our church because they have a heart and can accept people.
Our church has a gentleman who functions at a low level. One Sunday he couldn’t find the hymn in the hymnal, and a woman, Sharon, walked up and stood beside him through the entire song, holding the hymnal so he could sing with her. Then she went back to her seat.
I was so proud. Those are the people I want in my church.
What other things can a smaller church do especially well?
Gary: Endure. The life expectancy of a metropolitan church is about fifty years. Contrast that with a rural church whose life expectancy may be centuries.
Recently I looked at a list of Southern Baptist churches that were in Kansas City in 1928—and practically none exist today. Those that have survived do so in name only, usually in a different location.
Kathy: Smaller churches can get a higher proportion of people involved in ministry. I love all the hoopla about finding your gifts, and certainly it’s easier to be energized when you’re working out of your giftedness, but the reality of a small church is that some people are going to have to do stuff they’re not gifted to do.
Pastoring a small church in an age that glorifies bigness can make a minister feel small. What contributes to that feeling?
Martin: When a pastor doesn’t feel his peers take him seriously. But even we small-church pastors embrace that ethic. We don’t take one another seriously, either.
Another factor is the constant dripping of negative self-assessment by our people: “Well, Pastor, we’re not much of a church, and you’re just the pastor for us.” People don’t mean to denigrate their shepherd, but the effect is to shift your focus from what God has called you to do to the struggle of the church.
Gary: We’re generalists rather than specialists, and our society pays specialists better. It puts a lot of pressure on a person to know about everything and be good at all things.
I see more and more churches being pastored by, out of necessity, bi-vocational leaders. A person in that position can think, If I were really accomplishing something, my church ought to be able to support me full-time. Changing economics are only going to exacerbate this problem.
How can a pastor help raise a church’s self-esteem?
Gary: One way is for the church to do something well and then celebrate that. It may not be great by the standards of First Church, but it’s good for your church—for example, a successful vacation Bible school. You build on that sense of accomplishment.
Kathy: A small church has to focus—do one or two things well. If it tries to spread itself too thin, it won’t do anything well.
The attitude of the pastor makes a huge difference. The word that comes to mind is vision. People will catch it.
When we started our Free Methodist church, we inherited a few saints from what used to be a United Methodist congregation. That church had died, and several women who joined with us caught the vision for our church plant. Today, they get so excited: “Oh, look at all these new people.”
It’s not that they’ll never feel discomfort, but they were able to get on board.
Martin: You celebrate survival. Many pastors with ambition come to a place and say, “What have you people been doing here for forty years?” That’s a terrible mistake. The reality is, in some settings, survival is an achievement.
When we were going through our transition from the old to the new building, I interviewed our custodian on the platform. He was in his eighties. He had hand-dug the basement of the old church—with a shovel. When the young people, excited about leaving the old building, heard this guy talk about hand-digging the basement, they suddenly understood what it was costing him to leave. The newcomers had a new reverence for the contributions of the old-timers, and the old-timers felt affirmed and ready to move on, even though that was painful.
What does a smaller-church pastor have to change internally, for the church to be able to grow?
Martin: Recognize the existing leaders.
We do ourselves and the kingdom a disservice when we conclude we’re the leaders when, in actuality, in every church there are people who are already leaders. Our credibility goes up as we recognize those leaders God has placed in that church. Then, as time passes, they grant us more and more leadership opportunities.
Kathy: As a church planter, I had to change from planter mode to pastor mode—that was a crisis. While planting the church, nobody else was making decisions, because there wasn’t anybody else, so my husband and I made all the decisions. Figuring out when it was time to shift into using other people was hard.
Kathy, what has motivated you to stay at your church for twelve years?
Kathy: Three reasons.
One is my family; my husband feels he’s where God wants him to be.
Another is a commitment to long-term ministry. We’re just beginning to reap fruit from seeds we’ve been sowing for years.
The third is I have outside interests such as writing that help me feel I’m part of a larger picture.
Martin: During at least three periods when I was at one church, there were claw marks on my walls. Were it not for a sense of call and commitment, I would have cut and run. During those times, I started to learn about my motives for ministry.
“Just be faithful” is the philosophy of many smaller churches. How does a church measure its faithfulness?
Martin: I would say no church needs to be more than “just faithful.” But the question is, “Faithful to what?” Churches struggle and die when they persist in being faithful to the wrong things, such as to the program that worked in the late forties.
But being faithful isn’t a matter of large or small. We need biblically effective churches in every size range. In the kingdom of God, small and insignificant are two different things. There’s no such thing as an insignificant ministry in the kingdom of God.
1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or contact us.
