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The Strategically Small Church Rating: 5 on a scale of 10 Review This is a nice book, if nothing else, it is reassuring. My wife was reading it for a pastor's conference for her job. I read it out of my general interest for how churches function and grow It is a well written book. It talks about small churches, what a small church can do to accomplish its mission. He defines a small church as being under 500 people. I don't know about you, but a church of 500 is pretty big in my opinion. He reports there are 19,000 churches, with six percent having sizes over 500 people, so most of the churches around are small by his definition (if you calculate using these numbers with a little estimation, it suggests there are only about 4.7-6 million people attending churches, hmm?) I can't say much for other places, but where I attend church, we have taken advantage of just about everything he spoke about. In other words, I did not learn anything new in this book. I did feel like he affirmed most all of what we have been doing. It's good to know small can work well. Interestingly, we have been trying to grow larger. Growing larger is not very easy to do. Attendees of a church often like being the size of church they are, and this works against growing numerically. We do most of the things he recommends already. I am encouraged. We let the passion of our members drive what we look at doing. If there is a champion, then something can move forward. If there is only a prophetic word, but no champion to move an idea forward, then it does not move forward. We try to limit our major ministries to about three or so at any one time. We have participated in collaborative ministries such as helping another church in town run a meal program for people short on food. We provide workers on one Wednesday night a month, it takes maybe 16-20 people to do this. After a year of this, it is quite a lot of work, but we help amplify something a single church about our same size would have a hard time doing alone for a sustained amount of time. We have participated in several Habitat for Humanity building projects, including a teen build, a women's build and several disciple's build projects. We have been fortunate to have a pastor who was "low control" in his character, most things do not have to be about him. We have been highly successful running an Alpha program for development of spiritual seekers. It is an intense program, with high demands for about 3 months, including a weekly meal. At first, we tried two programs a year, but it was overwhelming after about 18 months, now we are trying to accomplish one Alpha a year. We are not always clear that we are being successful equipping people to use their gifts outside of our church, and we have even had problems getting the right people into the right jobs inside of our church. Similarly, we have struggled to have good administrative functional structures that everyone understands. Small often means we work without a complete set of policies for everything. If you involve children, you can often involve their parents. Some churches meet in YMCA's to save money and to be able to use a larger space, in our case our sanctuary is what we call a "sanctanasium", it is a gymnasium built 30 years ago as part of a larger vision for expanding our church, phase one was completed but the phase two, building a sanctuary, has never happened and may never at this point. When push comes to shove we have opted for being able to conduct ministry in what we have and not what we hope for or dream about, we can do without a sanctuary. I like a lot of his short one-liner comments such as: "Despite the difficulties, learning to understand the church as family will be profoundly rewarding", or "The tendency of the American church to rely on exceptional preachers discourages leadership development". The first line is profound, but not very well explained. The truth is, a generation of generation X folk are trying to work this out. It is especially difficult for them. The second line captures something important. We would all love to have a highly skilled preacher. Recently, our Clerk of our meeting made an interesting diagram of most of our activities, using circles for each with the size of the circle suggesting the relative importance of each activity. Sunday morning preaching came out as the biggest circle. We all looked at the diagram and agreed. Never the less, we have involved many other people than the senior pastor in preaching. This can help to develop people and we think it can be very refreshing for both the body and the senior pastor. Sunday morning preaching has a very big impact and it is important for it to be well done. We have developed a culture where perfection is not the standard. This can be difficult. When you experience growth, new people often come with expectations, there is a natural drive that develops to make things "better", this drive toward excellence, in all of its forms can be difficult when perfection is not the goal. It creates a "friction" which works against growth when excellence rubs up against tolerance for imperfection. We have opted to not be perfect, but this comes at a price, it can help keep you small. I agree that we often believe success means we should grow larger. I agree that growing larger should not be the metric we use for success. So, are there some metrics we should use? He notes correctly that large churches work to break themselves down into "smaller churches" to regain the small church experience, while the smaller church is trying to create the big church experience with limited staff and ability in an effort to grow larger. He recommends the small church recognize and take advantage of its small size which gives it certain capabilities that may not be recognized in a strategic sense. He assumes all churches ascribe to the work of making disciples and reaching out into the world. This is a big assumption. My experience would suggest this is not always true for many churches. Some churches are good at making disciples initially, but then are not good soil to grow and mature folks. Other groups might be able to grow depth in people but no interest in making new believers. In fact, you could probably write a whole book using the metaphor of soil, transplanting, nurseries, etc. He mentions very little about growth. He mentions little about systems theory. His premise more one of being comfortable with who you are. He says the center of the church is moving toward these three actions: 1) Leadership development, 2) Discipleship and 3) Spiritual formation. I like this list. We should take this to heart. I have been asking around our church what we think or believe the process of discipleship actually is? We don't know. Leadership development is not really even on our radar. Spiritual formation is completely foreign to our vocabulary. It bodes badly for small churches if we are not even sure what these things really mean. We have subscribed to the notion that programs and activities will train up people and they will spiritually grow in the process. As he points out, this does not necessarily work. It is not working for us. Instead, he reports that what may be working better is a focus on the "priesthood of all believers" in concert with the primacy of the mission of the church in general, i.e. evangelism, making disciples, and passing on the faith. Well, as a Friends (Quaker) Church, we already know this and try to do it. We have been successful birthing new believers, but it takes a lot more than just birthing new believers to develop disciples. He says "Intimacy is the new Excellence". The boomer generation was focused on excellence, the millenial's apparently are not, they need relationships. Well, the boomers have been so focused on excellence, we let our kids grow up in divorced families, with absent fathers, with both parents working, with drugs and alcohol readily available and used (by us), sitting in front of a television, with cable news and whatever else you want to watch non-stop, with computers everywhere, video games, and every convenience we could afford along with all the advantages we could dream up. Now, we have a generation with what I call an "attachment disorder" en masse. Does larger size help in this situation? Theoretically, he says it does not. Smaller churches may be able to meet relational needs better. I believe the problem and solutions are far more complex. I will admit, I never "got" what the TV program "Friends" was really about. It just seemed odd to me. It was in my generational shadow. He asserts that what it was about was the attempt of a new generation to adapt to the reality of broken homes. Having witnessed the young adults my young adult children have lived with in college, I can testify there is devastation out there in family land, including families from within the church. There are a lot of angry young people upset at fathers and mothers, but honestly, more angry at absent fathers. We have a lot of work to do. A generation without fathers will demand compensation for this. We are seeing this already in our own church in young families. There is a stream of desire for emphasis on the aspect of "father" in their spiritual and family life. Young people are looking for family, an authentic family. When I did my psychiatry rotation in medical school at a state hospital, there were many patients on many different wards. Most of them had an order in their chart that said something about them having "milieu therapy". I wondered what this was? I asked and was told it had to do with them participating in the social milieu of the ward. It was considered helpful to their psyche's to participate in interacting with other "crazy" people who are quite ill and staff. Yes, for people who have been isolated, having to interact with other people may be helpful to a degree. Milieu therapy may help people get outside of themselves if they have been depressed and alone. Is it the whole answer, absolutely not. Unfortunately, often times in our churches we practice a version of milieu therapy when it comes to discipleship and development of spirituality. I agree with his observation that Sunday morning worship may be an "'entertaining if sometimes 'undemanding' impersonal mass gatherings on the weekend." The response of young people is to look for something more meaningful and relational. Small intimate communities are becoming a preferred choice of many people. Unfortunately, in my experience, these communities have many problems, too. Still, some people are opting for belonging, accountability and intimacy. We spend a lot of time talking about the up and coming millenial generation, but for me, this is not really where the problem lies. I think we misperceive the real issue. When we look at our church, the generation that is missing is the 27-45 year old group. These are not millenial's. They are the generation that followed the boomer's, they are the "nomads" of the generation X group. This group is on average a very difficult group to engage. They have developed out of the shadow of the boomer's. As a result, we don't understand them very well. Their development has come about in spite of us. They know all our flaws. They just want the essentials, going for what will benefit them most, take no prisoners, they can see the world crumbling around them, they sense the coming disaster. The disaster has arrived. He asserts we are moving from excellence to authenticity. For me, authenticity is a loaded term. If we must move to authenticity, it implies we are not authentic now. It saddens me to have to agree with this statement. We are not authentic now. It saddens me because I feel like my generation came up with this phrase, then again, perhaps every generation seems to lack authenticity to the generation that follows, perhaps it must be this way, and it is just part of the vast cycle of time that goes round and round. Perhaps it is discomfort with cycles, or even our failure to recognize them in western culture that is at the heart of our issues. If an up and coming generation longs for real dialogue, I say let's give them real dialogue. The current implication is that we have failed to give them real dialogue. It is true I fear. And the church is one of the worst places to have real dialogue. Why? Why are churches so bad at real dialogue? We must confront this and understand it. I believe it has to do with our collective nature. Churches function as collective bodies. The problem is, we may have one set of rules for small groups and one on one communication, while we have a different set of rules for collective discussions as a church. There are things at church we just can't talk about. Those who are coming of age as young adults have watched this all their lives, and they want more. We have given them movies, "veggie tales", TV shows, youth group competition, speakers, and education. Yet, somehow in this process, we have not given them honest dialogue. The rooms are no longer smoke filled, they have comfy chairs and white boards, with coffee all around. The young adults I meet think and feel much differently about gay and lesbian folks than the church preaches. The young adults I meet may be more concerned about the environment than my generation was. The young adults I meet are more concerned about politics than we were. And, they are ready to examine ourselves as a nation, as people, and as churches, and are ready to deconstruct and reconstruct the world in a new way. We will need to listen, and with great care, we will need to supply them with the values needed to recreate the world we know. This must happen. It will happen whether we want it to or not. Churches will be part of this same process. We can join in the process or be left behind. Right now, many churches are being left behind. They will very possibly die, as they must, but be not deceived, God will come through the fray of another generation's turmoil alive and well. What would it be good to become more authentic about? Let's start with the role of the feminine nature of God, the role of the feminine in church, spirituality, as preachers, as pastors, as elders, as heads of committees. Let's have a discussion about the "inerrancy" of scripture, an honest discussion. How is it that one set of ideas are taught in our universities where we send our children, yet we maintain a different set of ideas down the street in our churches. Could we become aware of how we are seen in the rest of the world and begin to understand the dark side of our business, politics, and economy? Can we bring these things together in a Spiritual light? Can we recognize our animal nature, our connection to the earth, and how this also is a reflection of God? Can we begin to discuss how we isolate and dislocate people in our society and our churches? Can we begin to understand how east and west differ? Can we begin to understand how our faith is based out of an eastern culture, and as a result, us Hellenistic western types are actually far from understanding what is being said at times? Could we, as generations, become aware of our shadow qualities? Can we admit to and accept our dark side, the dark side individually, collectively and as churches? The list can go on. Life is complex. Sometimes we need to make things simple, and sometimes we need to understand and grasp the complexity of it all. When will we grasp how hard marriage is, understanding that it is a powerful metaphor for our relationship with God collectively and individually? As an example, in His Needs Her Needs, a Christian therapist points out that it does not matter whether we are people of faith when it comes to our susceptibility to having an extra-marital affair. Wow! How can that be we may wonder? Indeed, we should wonder! How does this work? Why does it work this way? Could we make a difference somehow? What would it take to make a difference? Our children have witnessed the wreckage of these affairs. There is so much to work on. Does it matter whether a church is large or small. I think not. Each will have different issues, problems, leadership, and dreams. When I speak of dreams in a collective sense, I means the myths that energize a group of people. Myths are the dreams of a people. What myths underlie and energize your body of believers? I hope I have peaked your curiosity. This is a nice book, but limited in scope. It will reassure you or let you know there is a lot to be done. It is, after all, time to wake up again. Change is in the air. All opinions are those of Curtis Climer, MD Copyright 2011 |
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