The gift of small ministry
Our American culture carries a persistent myth that growth is always good. In election cycles, we talk about the growing national GDP and growth in the stock market. We talk about career growth, the need to have a higher income or a better job title. In the workplace, our laity are pushed to produce more: more profit, more customers, more market share. An adage in the business world is that “If you’re not growing, you’re dying.”
This mindset has seeped into the church. Pastors talk about climbing the career ladder. We try to add more programs and more initiatives, all to get more people within our pews, to bolster our need to increase Average Worship Attendance. Effectively, we have confused numerical growth for virtue, inadvertently making it a stand-in for discipleship.
Yet, growth is not always a good thing. The economist Kate Raworth points out that in any given ecosystem, there needs to be some level of balance, of homeostasis. Too much growth in one area or another can cause irreparable harm. As Raworth articulates in a much more alarming way, “something that tries to grow forever may well destroy the system on which it depends – and in our own bodies we call that cancer.”[1]
But if churches are not called to be constantly growing, to what task have they been called? In my new book, The Gift of Small: Embracing Your Church’s Vocation, I argue that the focus on church growth has caused us to overlook the church’s true vocation: to form faithful Christians, to help people discover their own vocation, and to engage meaningfully in the communities in which they live and work. Whether a church is large or small, in all actuality, tells us very little about how well a church is carrying out that mission.
Small-membership congregations are especially poised to do this work, because they have natural theological and organizational tendencies that allow them to build the deep relationships that theological formation requires. At their core, small-membership churches are relational entities. They are places where leadership happens not in some hierarchical fashion, but through a constant conversation. Decisions about the future of the church are made in the hallway between Sunday School and worship service, at the dinner table between friends, and in the (in)famous parking lot meetings that follow any church function.
By leaning into these realities, small-membership churches can be uniquely formational communities: places where discipleship is nurtured, where our faith is taught in both word and practice, and where the members of the community are formed in their beliefs, ethics, and practices.
Occasionally, we carry a false notion that discipleship formation happens in a program, like a small-group or a Bible study. Or, we think of discipleship formation as its own program, where we try to recruit people to do more work within the church or the community. But forming discipleships, I think, is more like raising a child. As the father of two young daughters, I am constantly striving to help my children learn to think about the world around them, to reflect on how they act, and to help them have critical skills to navigate their world.
Occasionally, that happens in a direct conversation, where I sit one of them down and provide an explicit instruction: We don’t run into the street; you have to finish your homework. More often, though, teaching my kids is one of shared practices and lived examples. They learn to be truthful because I am truthful with them. They learn to do chores because it becomes part of our routine. They learn not to have fights at night-time because there will be a shared consequence. They’ve picked up their share of bad habits, as well. My oldest has become a master of sarcasm—after witnessing far too many satirical jokes fall out of my mouth.
Small-membership churches are ripe places to teach the virtues and ethics of the church, because they are, at their core, deeply relational and personal communities. When we in the church talk about how to help people learn to see the world with an imagination shaped by scripture, or how to take up the work of hospitality or gratitude, or how to practice repentance and forgiveness, we also must recognize that the church is likely the only community where people can see those ethics applied at both a personal and institutional level.
Because they are small and personal, our smaller congregations are the spaces best equipped to take on that work of formation. I’m not suggesting that larger congregations are incapable of this work. I’m also not suggesting that small churches are more virtuous or automatically better. I believe, though, that small-membership churches have a natural ability to foster discipleship, and we need to pay attention and learn from that.
In this season when institutional Christianity is in decline, we can learn a great deal from our small-membership churches. We live in a world where people are yearning for more connection, for authenticity, and for meaning. This is the vocation of small-membership churches, and I am convinced that, when they relish that vocation, they have a great deal to teach the wider church.
[1] Raworth, “Day of the Doughnut,” accessed October 28, 2024, https://www.resurgence.org/magazine/article4938-day-of-the-doughnut.html.