The average church in America has a Sunday attendance of about 70 people. For mainline churches it’s 50, with recent trends going that way for all churches.
But the typical Christian goes to a church of about 350 (see National Congregations Study).
Meanwhile, the typical Christian influencer (denominational leaders, conference organizers, parachurch ministries) may spend most of their time with churches of about 850.
So, the best-known influencers see church issues through a big-church lens, the typical churchgoer has a mid-size church outlook, but the average pastor in a small church sees ministry through a very different set of needs and expectations.
These differences create huge gaps for almost everything we do in church ministry and pastoral training. Gaps that go largely unnoticed.
The Silo Gap
Influencers, churchgoers, and average pastors are so siloed they’re not helping each other as much as they should.
The typical influencer has a high-number expectation about staffing, funding, faculties, and leadership style. So, they start with certain assumptions about a church’s budgeting, technical expertise, pastoral schedule, and so on.
The typical churchgoer has a mid-size church expectation. They expect a decent amount of program variety, scheduling options, pastoral availability, and staff expertise.
But the typical church has small-number needs that pastors, churchgoers, and influencers are not even seeing. Budgets are tight, options are few, training is often minimal, tech may be non-existent.
The Expectations Gap
Very few Christian influencers are aware of the financial challenges faced by the typical small church.
When a smaller congregation doesn’t have the latest programs, tech, signage and so on, the expectation is that the pastor either isn’t aware of it or doesn’t see it. And, in some cases, that’s true.
But, for most small-church pastors, the lack of technical expertise isn’t because they don’t care, but because they’re operating from a serious lack of resources that is impossible to appreciate if you haven’t sat where they sit.
The Resource Gap
When a church of 350 (again, where the typical Christian attends) wants to grow, it’s perceived as a matter of planning, implementation, and desire. Reallocate resources correctly, apply the right principles, stay motivated, and you’ll get there.
But when the typical church of 50 wants to grow, there are minimal resources to reallocate. Even if they did experience a boom in attendance, there may not be a single musician to lead those new folks in worship. And if the newcomers have children, the visiting family may be the only people in the room under 40.
That gap is huge!
Even if the current congregation is fully engaged, motivated, praying, and planning, how do they overcome the challenges of a small, graying congregation in a small, outdated building?
The answers we’re getting from most church influencers are so far removed from the small-church reality that it’s more likely to add to the discouragement of small-church pastors than alleviate it.
The Training Gap
The typical future pastor is called into ministry from a church of 350, then trained from the standpoint of a church of 850, only to discover that most churches needing a pastor are around 50 in attendance.
Nothing has prepared them for this, even though it’s a very foreseeable and fixable problem.
Instead of treating the struggling small-church and their pastor as a problem to fix, we need to get better at finding and providing resources that are appropriate to their size.
That means intentionally including small-church pastors along every step of the way when we create curriculum, conferences, classes, books . . . everything. (For more on this, check out my article, Why So Sensitive? (An Appeal To Pastoral Conference Organizers.)
The big- and medium-size church lenses aren’t wrong, but they’re not universal, either.
Let’s be sure to invite everyone to the table.
(Photo by Edith Soto | Flickr)
