Pilgrim Soldier

As I wrote in my last post, yesterday I was at an NCD conference all day with Christian Schwarz. One of the things that struck me was his comments about church size and the relative effectiveness of big and small churches that their research has shown them. I’ll come to the actual comments after a few of my own!

In my opinion, there has become a growing obsession, over the last few years, within the church that “Big is beautful”! You see on the publicity for countless books that this author is the pastor of a church of 7000 members, or that another author has grown a church from 7 members to 5000 members! In itself there is nothing wrong with this and I congratulate these people on the successful ministry that God has given to them!

The problem though is that of the various corps I have belonged to the biggest average congregation of any of them would be around 130. At the same time the most ’successful’ corps I’ve been to had an average congregation of around 30, yet over the years I’ve known it has seen many people saved and many others grow to a point in their faith where they’ve moved on in their ministry to support other corps/churches.

In fact when I was Corps Secretary of an inner-city corps in London I remember being told that our congregation of 50-60 people each week made us one of the largest corps in the Division! At that time I was quite sad that the Army had reached such a sad state of affairs and was dismayed that only 3 or 4 corps in the UK had congregations of over 200 each Sunday!

The problem is that many people within small corps/churches are frustrated at the size of the church they attend. I suspect that a lot of this is because of the mentality that “Big is beautiful”. Numerical size is equated with quality. It’s automatically assumed that a big church is more successful! Where this attitude

However, according to NCD’s research this is simply not true. In a church of 1000 plus members 17% of the worshipping congregation use their gifts to help the church grow, whereas in churches of less than 100 members this percentage increases to 31%. [1] Yes the actual numbers are less in the small church, but their congregations are much more involved in the mission of the church!

What’s even more remarkable is that on average small churches grow 1600% more than large churches! In the NCD material the following illustration is used:

“When we compared all of the churches with less than 100 regular attenders (the average size being 51 worshippers) with all of the churches that have a regular attendance of more than 1,000 (the average being 2,856) the result was striking. We discovered that “small churches” grow 16 times more than megachurches.

“…On average, the small church category has a 1,600% higher growth rate. … Small churches really have no reason for a low self-esteem.” [2]

This is not an excuse for small corps to rest and put their feet up though! Being in a small congregation is actually a much harder commitment than being part of a big church. When someone falls by the wayside in a big congregation there is far more chance of someone being able to pick up their role. This possibility is far less likely in a small one!

Give them their due, big churches have their place and many, many people get saved through them and for many “Big is beautiful”, but in my eyes “Small is sensational!”

Source:

[1] Christian A Schwarz, Color Your World with Natural Church Development, p. 35

[2] as above, p. 34