The Small Church Missional Advantage

Jerry Deck is a small church pastor and offers this helpful perspective on missional living from the small church context...

As a solo pastor of a small church I am well aware of the unique difficulties of leading a congregation that is few in numbers. From low esteem to burnout to frustration with not being bigger (oftentimes equated with being better), small churches (and their pastors!) can easily embrace a “woe is me” attitude. I have found myself, more often than I’d like to admit, focusing on how nice it would be to have a staff, a few more people to hear the incredible sermons I’ve prepared (please note the sarcasm) and someone other than me to shovel the snow on Sunday mornings. Moreover, in a church culture which seems to think the best leaders are always those in big churches (just take a quick look at the bio lines of most church conferences) it becomes very easy to think that we who lead smaller churches are merely followers, that we have little to add.

Yet at the same time, as I have become more deeply engaged in the missional church conversation, I have also begun to see how it is the small churches who may have a unique opportunity to lead our denomination toward becoming more missional. Not, of course, that we do not also need the support and leadership of those from larger churches, but that we truly play a key role in this process. I want to mention just a few of the advantages I think smaller churches have and I hope that other small church pastors might be encouraged to think of (and chime in on) the unique opportunities they have as well.

First, if as Alan Roxburgh has argued, only 10-15 percent of people of a group have a low resistance to change, we in small churches have much more accessibility to tapping into that small group. For instance, at the beginning of our missional church discussion we formed a task force who was charged with trying to understand what it would entail for Heritage to become more missional. At the end of our time together we had eight people who were on board with the missional church and this made up our 10-15 percent of innovators. All it took was finding eight people to accept the challenge and we had almost twenty percent of the church willing to move in this new direction. That’s not bad!

Secondly, smaller churches often are desperate for something different, especially if their survival is at stake. We at Heritage knew that if the status quo continued then we would not. This “desperation” made the congregation much more willing to risk doing something differently. Yes, the reason behind becoming missional should be theological and not for survival’s sake, but we all know that sometimes it is only when you are in the valley that you begin to look up for what God might be telling you to do. It was wonderful to not have to spend countless hours trying to convince people that things needed to change.

Thirdly, because we do not already have tons of programs being implemented and our facility is not constantly in use it has been easier to creatively ask how our time and space might be used in a more missional fashion. One of the rooms in our building was being used only once a week and so it was not difficult for us to decide that we could turn it into a computer lab that could be used by our neighbors in the apartment complex next door (we had done a survey in which they had selected computers and computer training as a high priority). In other words, it’s much easier to fill empty space (spiritually, materially, etc.) than to have to shove engrained stuff over!

There are, of course, other points I could add, but we’ll leave it at that for now. Again, I am not saying that large churches cannot become missional or that it is easy for smaller churches to make this transition, but simply that small churches may be the missional leaders we desperately need right now. Let us not focus on what we lack, but instead on the Christ who is larger than us all--- so that we will with imagination, energy, intelligence and love, lead our congregations (big and small) on the exciting journey of the mission of God.

Comments

[Christian]

Thanks for explaining the small Churches advantages I'm in search of this data form long days even though I have some basic knowledge on this but by reading your article I got total info that I never had in my mind thanks for sharing your valuable article.

[Rev. Dr. Dave Kunselman]

I felt terrible coming back to my church of 120 after visiting Rick Warren or Bob Schuller's churches and getting all the latest on "church GROWTH" (intentionally capped) until I thought: "We're serving over 300 people a day from our little church- with all kinds of community outreach. God will reward us for our faithfulness - right where we are and who we are and who we are not! Good article - missional indeed.

[Markus Watson]

Great post! I'm with you 100%! I just started at a small church last October and they are definitely ready for missional change. I sometimes hear the stories of pastors of large churches who are trying so hard to get their churches to see past their appearance of success ("Why change when we've got 1000 people here every Sunday?"). I'm so grateful that I don't have to fight that battle and can simply begin the missional change process.