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Is Your Church Stuck, Or Just Small?
If a church is healthy in every way but numerical growth, is it really stuck? No.
It turns out my church wasn’t stuck at all. It was just small. And if that’s the case – if a Small Church can be a healthy church – then maybe numerical growth isn’t the be-all, end-all sign of health we’ve made it out to be.
Maybe a healthy Small Church is an OK thing to be.
Is a Successful Small Church an Oxymoron?
If we hope to overcome the perception that Successful Small Church is an oxymoron, we have to start answering the question in the title with another question. Namely, “what is a successful church?”
The answer to that question is not found in buildings, budgets or butts in the seats. It’s found in the simple, two-part formula for success laid out by Jesus himself. The Great Commandment and Great Commission. Are we loving God? Loving each other? Making disciples? Sharing our faith?
Any church that’s spending its time doing that instead of obsessing over budgets, building projects, making a name for the pastor, petty infighting and the like, is a successful church. No matter how big or small it is.
Same Workload, Fewer Numbers: Why a Small Church Pastor May Need Your Encouragement Today
Pastoring is hard work, with little reward. No matter what size your church is. Pastoring a Small Church is hard work with fewer tangible rewards. Not to mention what sometimes feels like a constant drumbeat of criticism when your church isn’t growing like some people think it should.
If you’re a Small Church pastor or church leader, please take this short blog post as evidence that you’re loved and appreciated. You’re not alone. God knows. And so do a lot of us who work in the trenches with you.
How to Deal with Church Staff and Volunteer Problems Without Losing Good People
This isn’t a one-sided issue. It’s a two-sided issue with a two-sided solution. I know, because I’ve also had conversations with Small Church pastors about how hard it is to get good staff and volunteers.
Usually, it’s hard to get anyone to help at all. But sometimes I get complaints from pastors that go like this.
“No matter what I do, I can’t get these young leaders to turn off lights or take stinky garbage out to the dumpster! And when I tell them to do it, they get such an attitude about it! Like they’re too good for that. Don’t they understand that this is what a lot of ministry is about? Especially in a Small Church?” Sound familiar?
The Very Active Ingredient of a Healthy & Vibrant Small Church (Podcast)
What does quality look like in a Small Church? That may be one of the biggest challenges for Small Church pastors – especially for ministry to millennials. For decades, we’ve been taught a list of elements that need to be done well for a church to be great. But many of those elements can only be
This Generation Really Does Want Something Different from Church than Our Grandparents Did
Our grandparents took relationships for granted and needed to build structures. Our kids and grandkids take those structures for granted and need to build relationships.
Front-Load the Value: One Simple Step that Can Make Any Church More Appealing to Guests
According to church leadership experts, most people will subconsciously decide whether-or-not to come back to a church within the first 7-10 minutes of driving into the parking lot.
If your church is doing everything great, keep it up. But that’s not the case for most of us. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll admit we do some things well, but there are other aspects of the Sunday morning service we struggle with. And some parts we’re just awful at.
What’s worse, many churches take the things we don’t do well and put them at the beginning of the service. That means our church guests have made a yes/no decision about being a part of our congregation when all they’ve seen are the things we’re not that good at.
Big Church Sins vs. Small Church Sins: Who’ll Throw the First Stone?
Big churches and Small Churches bring different gifts to the body of Christ. They also face different sets of temptations, based on their size.
The biggest problem with church size isn’t that there are too many big congregations or too many small ones. I also don’t think there is an ideal church size or a bad church size.
The biggest problem with church size is when we use it as one more excuse for Christians to throw stones at each other.
8 Reasons Why It’s OK to Call Your Church a Small Church
For decades (yes, decades!) I refused to acknowledge that my church was small or that I was a Small Church pastor. Not any more. Now, I’m not just OK with it, I celebrate it.
Some people don’t like using the term Small Church because, in their minds, that term equates with a church being sickly, settling or worse. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
