We recently sat down with five pastors, who are on the front lines of small church ministry, to talk about their experiences, where they find encouragement, and their advice for pastors who are feeling discouraged.
Desmond Barrett
Winter Haven First Church of the Nazarene (Winter Haven, Florida)
WHNaz.org
I fell in love with the established church. It was and is a place where God has done and is doing incredible work that is most often overlooked by denominational officials and other pastors. However, the local church provides family, a deep prayer spirit, a togetherness gathering where everyone does their part.
At a small church, you enjoy people (you become family), partnerships (you need each other or the church will close), and prayer (everything we did was always bathed in prayer). The church I am at now has 150 people, but I have also pastored smaller churches. One only had eight people.
At different times of my life, I was working 20-40 hours a week at other jobs outside of the church. I had to learn to balance ministry, work and family. At times, I got them out of order. I also had to empower leaders within the church to step up and help more.
Money often drove our decision-making. For instance, at one church, the budget was $20,000 for the entire year. So, we decided to turn off the church’s water at the road to save money when the building wasn’t in use. Then, on each Sunday and Wednesday, I would remove a piece of board at the start of the driveway, reach my hand in a hole, and turn the water back on.
God provides. At one church I pastored, we got down to less than $1 in our checking account and had no savings. But I felt God tell me to start a clothing bank. He used another church to paint the space, and an air conditioning company in town to provide funds to start the ministry. Over 5,000 pieces of clothes were given out in the first year.
Today, people seem to be hopping from church to church. They are seeking attachment to what is familiar after such an extended time of high stress because of COVID-19, pandemic-induced inflation, and political infighting. They search for the familiar, and if they don’t get it at one church, they leave to keep their search going. They don’t realize that nothing stays the same. Everything constantly changes.
To help me through rough times, I try to remember why I am serving as a pastor. Without the call of God on my life, I could make more money in the business world. But God keeps me and provides for me.
You need to stay committed to what is in front of you. Don’t deviate from the course God has you on. You are right where he needs you to be. And remember these seven words: You are doing better than you realize.
Ronnie Martin
Substance Church (Ashland, Ohio)
Substance-Church.org
I have been at my current church 10 years, and while we are at 250 people today, we started with just 25. In a small-church setting like that, you know everybody’s name and learn everybody’s story. You wear a lot of hats, but get to work with a lot of volunteers who are able to see you as a person, not just a pastor.
The lack of money can be difficult, especially if you would love to have more resources for doing creative kingdom work. But it also allows you to remember what is important: God provides what he wants, when he wants.
Resistance to change can be hard to combat in a little church, especially if people lack vision and you’re unable to convince them it might be time to incorporate something new in order to avoid stagnancy. Another challenge is discouragement. That is probably one of the biggest factors in small-town ministry. Sometimes it can feel like there is just no momentum and that people are happy to simply coast along.
People are returning to [smaller churches] after attending megachurches. They are desiring to be better connected with a smaller group of people who they can be known by. In our fragmented world, it’s more important than ever for people to feel like they belong to a community that serves one another in tangible and felt ways. To be clear, I believe this can happen in a megachurch, but it is very difficult to make something feel smaller than actually just being smaller, which then opens up opportunities to serve and care for church members that are much simpler and more noticeable.
Other pastors are probably my greatest source of encouragement. They remind me that I am not alone and that this is how the Lord works in the world: slowly, intentionally and lovingly. So try to find other pastors in your context. It is going to take some good prayer and good courage to seek these people out, but it will be so worth it when you find yourself in a valley that you can’t seem to get out of. The Lord uses people who do what we do to manifest his presence to us in unique and peculiar ways.
Martin has authored Pastoring Small Towns: Help and Hope for Those Ministering in Smaller Places (B&H) with Donnie Griggs of One Harbor Church in Morehead City, North Carolina.
Carlos Navarro
Iglesia Bautista (West Brownsville, Texas)
IglesiaBautistaWB.com/inicio/home
The smallest church I ever pastored was my first pastorate, Primera Iglesia in Stockton, California. I got that church with almost 25 people. Imagine being Timothy in charge of the church of Ephesus—no experience, nothing whatsoever. My first salary was $300 a month.
Pastors of small churches often say they deal with resistance to change. That’s exactly what happened in Stockton and here in Brownsville at first. The people didn’t want to change. They were not going anywhere. They knew that the church wasn’t doing well, but “this is the way we’ve always done it.” And that’s one of the reasons the fight starts. But I told them, “Just give me a year. You will lose nothing.”
To change their minds, I involved every single person in the ministry. I kept them busy. I said, “This is not going to be my job only. This is going to be all of us doing it together. Evangelism. Social work. Sunday school. Children, music, visitation. It’s all of us.”
For the first couple of months, everybody pitched in. But after a while, they got tired. There were a lot of excuses. “I don’t have time.” “My kids have softball games.” “I can’t come.” I said to them, “The church is going to grow, and when you come back in six or seven months, you will try to get involved, you will see a lot of people using your space.” So, I had to be tough.
Hispanics typically only build [church buildings] for 100-175 people. And that’s just about it. That’s basically the size of the building we have here. It’s not about becoming a megachurch. We have planted 25 churches since 1999. And, of course, every time there is a new church, between 20-40 people leave. That is a big dent to our budget every time we start a church.
Our church lost 40% of the membership from 2020 to 2022. People didn’t want to come anymore. No tithes and offerings. They didn’t want to get involved. But then after that, people started coming back, and some of them were kind of embarrassed because they saw the core group, the roots, the foundation of the leadership, had remained.
Maybe you are serving at a church or are a church planter, and your state convention or your region association is giving you a stipend. And you are at your church for two or three years, but you don’t see any results. So, you think the best thing to do is just to move to another place, to another city, and to request [more] funding. But if it’s God’s will for you to stay where you are, don’t give up. Do what is according to God’s will and God’s Word.
Luis Sánchez
The Simple Church Collective (Greater Seattle Area, Washington)
SimpleChurchCollective.com
We are intentionally small. In our microchurch or simple-church network, we currently have five churches, and the number is growing. These churches can average five to 25 people. We won’t put a cap on the number of people who can join. But someone once said that in our kind of space, churches should be no bigger than the number of people that you can remember to pray for. So, if 50 is your capacity, then you can be doing community with 50 people.
We talk about four irreducible minimums in order for a church to be a church: worship, community, mission and leadership development. And when you have a more intimate setting, you’re able to do all of those in a closer way and get to know your people more, where their strengths and weaknesses are. The community part is really deep. We go from just living in proximity to living in communities. As a pastor, you get to be in the front row to see people’s lives change.
I haven’t ever served at a church that had a multimillion-dollar budget, but I have been at a church that had a strong volunteer base because of the type of programs that were running. But our focus here isn’t on gathering—it is on disciple making. So we have a lot less overhead than other prevailing-model churches. And that’s one of the beauties of doing simple church.
Simple church leaders have their hand in two or three churches. You’re developing more leaders, and part of that is modeling to other people what you do. The average life span of a simple church is 18 to 24 months.
We prefer the term “co-vocational” rather than “bi-vocational” because God is in both places. I’ve always been co-vocational to a certain degree. Currently, I am starting a power-washing business. Our goal is also to launch a food truck to further connect with people in the community, and to be able to use it as a way to serve people who may be struggling with food insecurity. Being in the marketplace allows you to rub shoulders with people who think differently than you do. It allows you to stay on mission. Unless you’re intentional, you’re not going to have one foot inside of the world for the sake of mission.
Everything goes back to love, right? We need to remember soul care. Pastors of small churches just need encouragement. We also need to remember that it’s simpler than we make it out to be. Loving God, loving people, making disciples—that’s the thing.
Aaron Tinch
Ebenezer AME Charlotte Hall (Mechanicsville, Maryland)
EAMech1804.com
Rivers of Life AME Church (Greenbelt, Maryland)
RiversOfLifeAME.org
I have been told that the call on my life is so strong I had to serve in two churches. I manage leading them both because they allow me to do Bible study virtually, so I don’t have to be in person. That is super helpful. Rivers of Life got displaced from the place that we were worshiping at, so we haven’t got a new physical location yet, but we still worship virtually. Then I have in-person worship with Charlotte Hall.
Charlotte Hall has been averaging 17 people. The beauty is that it was started in 1804. There was once a railroad that ran in front of the church, so people who were attempting to flee from slavery were jumping off the train, running into the church and hiding underneath a trap space in order for them to be able to continue along the Underground Railroad.
The first time I ever stepped out on the grounds of Charlotte Hall, I truly felt the presence of ancestors there, encouraging and galvanizing us to go forward. It truly has been rejuvenating for my spirit. It reminds me of the necessity to carry a torch further and not allow that flame to be extinguished.
I am bi-vocational. I was a juvenile probation officer. Then I started to do substitute teaching just to be able to be in that space to see what the needs of the families and children were. Now I’m now working with the Washington, D.C., government and the Office of Gun Violence Prevention as a program analyst.
Time management is a big, big piece to being bi-vocational, especially with two churches. Boundary setting is an even greater one. I have been explicit in sharing with the churches that I lead that my family comes first. I make sure my wife and my daughters are good, then I can be at my very best for the church.
The greatest happiness I’ve experienced in leading a small church is getting to know everybody. You get to know their dynamic. I know when stuff is going on with people without them telling me. The other thing is getting to see them have small wins that they didn’t think that they could accomplish. With Rivers of Life, the joy of being with them is getting to see them turn themselves into something that others might have doubted. I tell them all the time that other churches might have more people than us, but they aren’t going to outwork us.
When you lead a small church, you have to check your ego. You can’t compare yourself to the giants within your denomination or other churches in your area. You’ve got to do the work based off of the resources that you have. What we have in our hands is enough for what God has called us to do. And if God wants us to do more, then God will put more in our hands.
