Have you ever been to a church leadership conference and walked away more discouraged than encouraged?
Sure, you’re grateful for what God is doing in the large, fast-growing church that the main speaker(s) is pastoring, but you’re wondering how you could possibly apply those grand (and, let’s face it, expensive) ideas in your small, struggling church?
Or maybe you’ve left a few conferences excited to try those bold, new, can’t-miss ideas at your home church, only to see them fall flat.
Has it ever made you wonder “was the speaker wrong, or am I stupid?”
Here’s some good news. They’re not wrong, and you’re not stupid. You’re just in very different contexts. And one of the biggest differences is the relative size of the churches in question.
What’s The Right Size?
We need to ask better questions about church size.
Seth Godin is a world-renowned marketing expert and writer whose insights are far more about treating people well than promoting a product successfully. Last week he wrote a short article (they’re all short—he’s a master at that) entitled What’s the right size?.
Here’s a taste:
There are no city buses with just four seats. And none with 400 seats . . .
Most projects have a right size and technology and communication networks have changed the best “right size” for many organizations. If you’re struggling, it might be because you’re fighting the laws of organizational physics. Radically transforming the size of an organization changes more than we would think. We can begin to right size by asking the question.
Seth Godin, What’s the right size?
Better Than Bigger
For so many years in church leadership circles, the only acceptable answer to the question “what’s the right size?” has been “bigger, of course!”
But what if we’ve been wrong and Godin’s right? What if bigger isn’t always better? What if there’s such a thing as “too big” for the congregation you serve? Maybe there’s such a thing as “too big” for every congregation.
I’m not saying there’s a universal size limitation that every church should be subject to. One hundred might be too big for some churches, while 1,000 is just getting started for others. We can’t make that call for them.
But, like Godin, I’m convinced that asking the “what’s the right size?” question is something we all need to do.
Then, we need to be content with the size that best fits the mission the Lord is giving us.
When we do that, maybe we’ll discover that great ministry is being done in a whole lot of faithful small churches not despite their size, but because of it.
It starts by being open to the possibility that your church’s current size is an asset to work with, not a problem to overcome.
(Photo by Ivan Radic | Flickr)
