Our excerpt from a John Koessler interview on small churches really struck a chord with some of you this week. And that shouldn’t surprise me, since I know a lot of our readers hail from smaller congregations.
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?
