“What’s your church’s weekly attendance?” Depending on your answer—and depending on the church size of the person asking you—this question may fill you with pride or shame.
And that’s because you didn’t go into ministry to be ineffective or to make only a small impact. It’s just that sometimes we have a funny idea of what constitutes effective church leadership. Mix in our unhealthy tendency to compare our ministry “success” with the success of others, and we can get all jacked up about the numbers.
To be sure, numbers aren’t nothing. However, we certainly shouldn’t let them define us in a way that causes us to be boastful on the one end or ashamed on the other.
Here are four bad assumptions we tend to make when it comes to church size.
1. ‘Healthy Things Always Grow.’
When advocating for strategies that will better help a church reach its community and increase its weekly attendance, pastors and church leaders often repeat the refrain, “Healthy things grow.”
And that’s true enough. As a father with toddlers, I always remark and celebrate when my sons grow physically, mentally, or emotionally. While their physical growth often means that I need to purchase larger pajamas for them and place my valuables a little further back on the countertop to elude their clutches, growth is a good thing. If my boys weren’t constantly growing at this stage of their lives, both their pediatrician and I would quickly grow concerned.
So healthy things do grow. But they aren’t always growing at the same rate of speed or to a size that exceeds the healthy limits of their capacity. In fact, the rare disorders of Gigantism and Acromegaly cause children and adults to grow beyond what is healthy. These conditions are serious, painful, and even deadly.
Not every church and its leadership has the same capacity for growth, or even has the same capacity in every season. There may be times in the life of a church when it experiences rapid growth spurts, and there may be other times when its growth is slowed or stopped.
While the call of the church is to live on mission until the return of Jesus, there may come a point when a particular local expression of the church has reached its capacity for growth and, while healthy, will not experience much more substantial net increase by way of membership numbers.
This does not diminish the call for that church to live missionally, but it also does not mean that a church is necessarily unhealthy because it is no longer doubling or tripling in size over a given span of time.
2. ‘Megachurches Don’t Disciple Their People.’
To be sure, I would rather be part of a church with 50 people who are being deeply formed in their faith through intentional discipleship than a church with 5,000 people who are simply attending a worship service two or three times a month but whose faith is having no real impact on their lives.
Nevertheless, we don’t have to pretend that these are our only two options. While it is true that many larger churches fail to create the systems necessary to foster intentional discipleship at scale, it is far from the truth that megachurches necessarily can’t or don’t disciple their people.
In fact, many megachurches use their not inconsiderable resources to place a concerted focus on doing just that, creating curriculums and programs that benefit not only their own congregation but also thousands of other smaller congregations who do not have the ability to create the high-quality resources provided by larger churches and ministries.
While I was a pastor on staff at a church of roughly 300, we became aware of a discipleship process created by a church more than 50 times our size. A team of scholars, pastors, and theologians had contributed to this process and its associated resources, and the church even helped other churches implement it.
Through this discipleship process, I saw people in my own church grow in their faith, identify and address the sins and traumas in their lives, and step into a greater sense of mission. So that megachurch not only discipled their people, they helped our smaller church do a better job of discipling ours as well.
3. ‘Numerical Growth Is Necessarily a Sign of God’s Favor.’
At the same time, not all church growth is created equal. While healthy things grow, so do unhealthy things. For example, the weeds in my yard seem to grow much faster than the plants I have intentionally cultivated. More seriously, tumors often grow at a speed that is alarming and dismaying to the people who are plagued by them.
In a number of well-documented cases, certain megachurches have grown in size and influence only to inflict greater damage with church cultures that are unhealthy, toxic, or even abusive. In other words, bigger isn’t necessarily better.
While the Spirit of God can certainly move through a congregation to transform the lives of an increasing number of people, churches can also be grown through human-powered strategies centered on attracting large numbers of people to a movement that bears little resemblance to the Christianity of the New Testament.
Ultimately, the sign that God is moving through a congregation is not that more people are attending on Sunday—though that may be one of the results. Instead, the primary way to discern whether God’s Spirit is at work in a church is whether the people who are a part of it are starting to look more like Jesus.
4. ‘Lack of Numerical Growth Is a Sign of Inadequate Missional Verve.’
Certainly, not every congregation is called to grow its membership into the thousands or become a household name across the nation. Depending on the limitations of its location and facilities, as well as the giftings of its leaders, a healthy church may never grow beyond a few hundred or even a few dozen.
However, this ought never to be an excuse for a lack of missional verve among the members of those congregations. And for many smaller churches, they don’t let it be. They serve their communities to provide a missional presence, and they regularly see the lives of individuals transformed by the gospel.
It’s just that the way they are called to advance the mission on a larger scale may look different from the megachurch down the street. By partnering with missions organizations and sending out church planters, smaller churches can make an incredible impact beyond the walls of their modest facilities.
In fact, a smaller church that plants a dozen churches in the cities and regions surrounding it is likely to make a greater intergenerational impact for the mission of Jesus than a larger church that never plants any.
One Size Doesn’t Fit All.
Pastors and church leaders can tend to get defensive about the size of their churches. Whether they serve a smaller church or a larger one, they seem to be the object of suspicion and derision from others based solely on the number of people sitting in their pews. That can be difficult and frustrating.
Nevertheless, we can’t let the criticism of cynical people keep us from pursuing unity with the broader church to advance the mission of Jesus at home and abroad.
Our identity is not found in our attendance numbers. God has uniquely equipped your church to reach the lost people in your community who need his grace. By that same grace, you can be used by Jesus, regardless of your church size, to help them have a life-changing encounter with him.
This article appeared here and is used by permission.