Seven Forms of the Small Church

Small churches can be wonderful, delightful, and a blessing to the world, but they're not all cut from the same cloth.  Precisely the opposite, in fact.  Unlike larger churches, which rely on replicable models and systems, little churches take forms unique to their particular local environment.  They're as unique as the fluttering variety of little finches that Darwin once marveled at as he toured the Galapagos.  Each is subtly but meaningfully different.

That said, there are notable similarities between teeny tiny Jesus gatherings, types of small church that share features with one another.   One of the best typologies I've come across in my years of serving and studying the small church was created by David R. Ray, a Congregationalist pastor, author, and scholar.  In his classic book The Indispensable Guide for Smaller Churches, Ray lays out seven different ways we can do small together.  

I've found it useful, because self-understanding is always useful, and I figure it's worth sharing.  Let's take a look at Ray's thinking about what forms little churches can take:

1) Semper Minor.  That's the motto emblazoned on the crest of a particular type of church, and it just means "Always Small."   As Ray describes it, these are the churches that have just always been the size they are, and they're completely copacetic with it.  They know who they are, and what they are is just fine.  They're not bothered by their size, and the comfort they feel in their own skin makes them tough, resilient, faithful, and effective.

2) The Remnant.  This church was once many times larger than it is now.  It tends older, and is often paired with a sanctuary or facility that it fits into the way your five year old feet fit into your mom or dad's shoes when you snuck into their room and tried them on.  They are lost in memories of what was, and wish they could bring back the day when those pews were filled and they moved powerfully in the world.   "Back in the day," they sigh, "things were better."

3)  The Startup.  Ray describes these gatherings as “Not Yet Large.” Sure, there are only twenty souls gathered, but they're only six months old.  They've been planted in a mushrooming ‘burb by a charismatic leader with a good plan to tap local energies.  They've got a strong online presence, often have connections to an existing ministry that understands evangelism, and all the trappings of a big church in microcosm.  They'll either blossom or wither on the vine, but growth is their goal and big is their aim.

4) Small on Purpose.  These are the Christian gatherings that Ray calls "intentionally small."   They're not unfriendly, but they have a very disciplined and particular way of life, with high thresholds for entry and a demanding set of commitments for continuing participation.  Monastic/Neomonastic communities and collectivist intentional communities where goods are shared inhabit this category.  They're authentic, intense, and by design they ain't for everyone.

5) Islas Etnicas.  These "ethnic islands" provide a home away from home for displaced people, and as immigrant, refugee, or expatriate gatherings, they offer a place of welcome and cultural familiarity.  They are particular blessings to Christians who are FOB (fresh off the boat), as they offer a safe place in which a new arrival can find their bearings.  Unlike most other forms of small congregation, they're not representative of the larger community in which they find themselves.

6) The Clan. These churches tend to form in rural areas, and have their pews filled by the extended bloodlines of one or two families who live nearby.  Although they can be perfectly friendly to folks visiting, and can do good work in the surrounding community, the only way you really become a member is through birth, marriage, or intimate relationship.  They're as robust as the families that comprise them.  Or as dysfunctional.  

7) The Schismatics.  These churches are defined by their constant state of conflict, driven by power-oriented leaders who prevent growth to maintain control.  Who are they in conflict with?  Their denominations.  The other side in the Culture Wars.  Anyone who crosses the pastor or his wife.  They can be strangely attractive to people who hunger for drama in their lives.  Ever see the Knives Out movie Wake Up Dead Man?  There are really churches like that one.  Well, maybe not quite that bad, but close.

Obviously, some of these categories are more inherently healthy of soul than others.  Schismatics are driven by the energies of conflict, and aren't generally healthy places to spend time.  Each of the others has a purpose, and some share paradoxical similarities.  A Remnant church can often be as separate from the life of the community around it as an Isla Etnica, for example.

If we are collectively sentient enough to shape the communities in which we live, I tend to think that we should work our little gatherings so's they have all the best features of Size 1 churches and Size 4 churches.   Combine a sense of Gospel purpose and integrating intent with a comfortable, confident resilience, and you've got quite a blessing.

If you're interested in more of David Ray's writing and thinking, definitely give his Indispensable Guide a look.

The Tiny Gospel Radio Hour

That first Sunday after my little church hunkered down to weather the COVID epidemic, we did worship differently.  We went online.  We'd not scaled up for professional level livestreaming, so what this frazzled and slightly overmatched pastor managed to pull off was the best I could manage at the time.

For a couple of months, I'd knit together bits and bobs of audio and video on an old repurposed gaming laptop, cobbling together something that was one part worship, and one part podcast.  

That effort needed a name, and so...as it was intended to serve my small congregation...I decided to call it The Tiny Gospel Radio Hour.   

Eventually, lay-folk with more innate talent for such things were able to gather what was needed for a better livestream, the pastor was relieved of that duty, and The Tiny Gospel Radio Hour name was set aside.

Still, it seemed like that name could serve another purpose.  Like there was more for it to do.

As I've gotten close to wrapping up work on a book about the blessings of life in little churches, the idea kept coming back to me.  "Do something with this," said a little voice, poking and nudging and as insistent as my dog when he really really wants to go outside and chase chipmunks.

What I don't want to do is just have me blabbering into a mic about all my bright small church ideas.  Not that my little church isn't a life-changing blessing, but ours is only one little light.

Out there in America, there are thousands upon thousands of small congregations. 

They ain't fancy.  They're fifty souls in a small suburban sanctuary, twenty five folks in a small town storefront, twelve souls in an old clapboard church in a valley, six folks singing together in the living room of a doublewide, three souls sitting in a bar and talking life and Jesus all the way through to closing time.

Some go back hundreds of years, and some just came into being.  These churches are human scale, intimate and personal and real, and every single one of those gatherings has a story.

So I figured, why not go looking for those stories?  Find the places where church folk are living on a human scale, where they love what they're doing and have found beloved community together, and let them tell the Good News of what that looks like?

I'd also like to share the wisdom of the human beings who've come to love the unique blessings of intimate communities, and who've chosen to spend their lives caring for and supporting them.

Take all those stories, make sure they're witnessed to and remembered, and share 'em with folks who might need a little dose of humble church courage and insight.

So I'm trying that, over on Substack.  Give a listen as you'd like.  Subscribe, and it'll come your way for free whenever I encounter something new to offer you.

And if you've got a story of Gospel goodness you'd like to share, or a little gathering that's been a blessing to you, let's talk.

Peace and Blessings,

David

Adapting Together

I’m not sure how many churches have Tibetan Buddhist Trader Joe’s Delivery Time as part of their Sunday ritual, but one of the spiritual gifts of little congregations is our idiosyncrasy. The small church can be delightfully, beautifully weird.

from a piece in The Presbyterian Outlook, highlighting the unique loveliness of my little congregation.

Our Many Ulterior Motives

I'm doing a whole bunch more thinking, writing, and reading around small church vitality these days, as my publishing Magic Eight Ball goes from "Reply hazy, try again" to a consistent "Signs Point to Yes."

Having served tiny fellowships for the entirety of my ministry, of the most strikingly consistent features of small congregations is that they aren't organizations, not really.  Some of the structure of institutional life filters through, but they're networks of human relationship first and foremost, with all of the idiosyncrasy and organic complexity that this entails.  Those relationships are...if healthy...a great source of congregational strength, as members of a community share life together in all of its joys and sorrows.

The character of those relationships is shaped by the core purpose of the community, which is...church being church and all...following Jesus and living as he would have us live.  That shared purpose is the common goal around which any church forms, and the closeness of fellowship in an intimate community is one of the collateral benefits of journeying along that Way with others.

Meditating on this recently while puttering about in my garden, I found myself thinking about what happens when we make the category error of seeking one of those collateral benefits instead of the thing itself.  

Like, say if your stated motive is "growth."  Growth is a collateral benefit of faithful labor and mutual discipleship, some of the time.  When and if it arrives, it is a blessing, albeit one orders of magnitude less important than deep and sustained human relationship.  But if growth becomes the emphasis rather than viewed as a side benefit, that focus skews how we view our purpose, and tends to become something less than Good News.  We all know what that looks like.  It looks like business models, marketing, and manipulation.  It looks like you've confused Mammon with Jesus, and I'm talkin' to you, Kenneth Max Copeland.

But focusing on numerical growth isn't the only way we can wander astray, because big churches and churches that strive for the gold ring aren't the only ones that wander astray.  What about relationships, then, that great strength of intimate community?  Can that become a blight?

Of course.

Let's talk about a soul we've all known (or been) who had "being in a relationship" as their goal.  Whether from the clawing void of loneliness, fitting in, hungering for intimacy both physical and personal, or any one of the many reptiles of our minds that whisper our inadequacy to us in our isolation, all that matters is being with someone.  Anyone.  The actual person doesn't matter, and Lord, does that never, ever, end well.  It's something that fails over and over again, as that benighted soul makes terrible choice after terrible choice, just so they won't have to be alone.

What about relationships that give a sense of power?  Where you enter a relationship because it can satisfy your need for dominance and control, where you can be in charge, where those around you are dependent on and submissive to your every whim?  Where everyone loves you and despairs?  I've seen what that looks like in large churches and small.  The little congregations with a patriarch or matriarch who has discovered the sweet taste of power, reigning unchallenged and unquestioned?  These are the farthest thing from a blessing. 

Pursued for its own sake or as an ulterior motive, then, "relationship" is theologically and morally meaningless.  So is "growth."  And "community."  And "political power."  All manner of things.  All of them are not why church is church.

When we gather as disciples, there is a greater purpose that defines us.

Lessons for a Small World

It was a reflection that came to me, as things often do, as I was walking.

I was musing on the seeming insanity of my devoting so much time to studying small faith communities, on what possible relevance that might have to the great wild churn of faith.  So much of what makes for viable small faith communities seems alien to the society in which I live, to success and expansion.  Think big!  Think corporate!  Think growth growth growth!

Small churches aren't that.  They're tribes and families, an old and deeply human way of being together.  But they're not reflective of the dynamism of our technological culture.  It feels out of step with both our globalism and our deepening ability to virtually surround ourselves with exactly the folks we want to be with.

If you don't like a faith community, your remedy is simple.  You just leave it.  If the pastor preaches something that isn't exactly what you think is true, or if someone does something that steps on your toes, you just go somewhere else.  Go to another church that better suits you.  Or stop going to church at all.  It's your choice.  We're all free to leave, thank the Maker.  Find the place that is exactly right for you, our society says, and so we do.

That's a good thing, on so many levels.  Being forced to remain in oppressive community is a nightmare.  Being forced to stay in a place where you cannot be yourself and authentic is a terrible thing.

And small can take work.  The work of seeking consensus, the mutual forbearance and patience necessary to sustain the life of little churches?  That can be hard, particularly if you feel passionately about X or have found your life's purpose in Y.  It is much, much easier to seek out the ideal, the community where X is everyone's passion and everyone around you believes Y.

You can't do this in healthy small churches.  You just can't.  There, kindness, patience, and forbearance must rule.  A willingness to show grace in authentic difference has to abide, or the whole thing comes apart.  Or it devolves into darker and unhealthy things, closed off and controlling, bitter and shallow and broken.

I can see the relevance of the small church to healthy family life and relationships.  It bears a strong resemblance to those things.  A willingness to live graciously with difference and not seek your own interest above your partner's life is a vital part of any marriage or relationship.  The same is true in the tribe.  Power and self-seeking tear the tribe apart.

But in the "grand scheme of things?"  I've struggled.  In my darker moments, tiny churches feel quaint, weak, and irrelevant cast against the grand bright scale of our world, where power and profit and growth and ideology rule.

Then, out of some deep recess of my subconscious, I remembered that little talk Carl gave once, about a little blue dust mote.  Oh, love him though I do, he and I aren't on the same page on a few things.  But that's OK.  We agree very, very deeply on this: all we know and everything we are exists in a tiny, limited space.



We are creatures of a small planet, just one.  And we can't leave, not yet, not in any meaningful numbers and not for any significant period of time.  When we imagine that the virtual worlds we create for ourselves are reflective of our reality, those places where we surround ourselves only with People Like Us (tm)?  We're deluding ourselves.  When we surround ourselves with like-thinkers, the hum of that echo chamber comforting in our ears?  It's a falsehood.

This world is itself a small community, a little tiny island in a vast and inhospitable ocean.  There is nowhere else for us to go.  We can't just pack up and storm off because of our passion for X or our belief that Y is the one true way.

We have to be connected, because we are.  We're stuck here together, on this tiny, tiny world.

And suddenly, the learnings about what it means to live graciously in smallness seemed relevant again.

Piloting A Tiny Church

How do you serve and support a healthy small faith community?

That's one of the core questions of my doctoral research, and I've been wrestling with it for the last month or two, as I've pored through dozens and dozens of books dealing with every form of small church life.   I've studied cell churches and house churches, storefronts and intentional communities.

I've read through book after book about tiny little old-line congregations, the families and tribes that gather in those little buildings that are scattered like wildflowers by the roadsides of America.

What I have not done, not for an instant, is look into the dynamics of "growing" these churches into huge churches.  That's the goal we're supposed to pursue, of course.  We are told that we must grow, must constantly be adding to ourselves until we're meeting in a glistening Jesus MegaCenter with a parking lot that spreads out to the far horizon.

We are to be faith-a-preneurs!  We are on the Holy Ghost CEO track!  We want to be the Amazon of the Christian world, the One Box to Rule them All, the next Rick Warren or Joel Osteen.  Our little church is like a mustard seed, we say, as is the tiny salary they pay me.  And so we study the "growth track," study the huge shiny stars, our eyes set on our radiant Jumbotron future.  We think big, we hope big, we see only big.

This is why we fail.

Trying to learn what it means to effectively serve a healthy small faith community by studying corporate Christianity is utterly pointless.

A metaphor for that truth popped out of my geek-brain the other day:

You do not learn to fly an X-Wing by studying the plans for the Death Star.  You can review those schematics all day long, and you'll still be just as useless at the controls of a snub fighter.

You get good at flying an X-Wing by putting in hour after hour in your T-16, diving in and out of Beggars Canyon until you can bag Womp rats in your sleep.

You get good at doing small by doing small until you are good at it.

Does Your Church Have a Small But?

As I work towards my proposal for my D.Min. program, I'm finding myself thinking more and more about healthy small faith communities.  And so the other day as I was looking over the web presence of my own little church, I found myself encountering a sentence I've read dozens of times with slightly different eyes.

We are, or so the little blurb that pops up on Google informs you, "small but growing."    And I found myself suddenly wondering, "small but?"   Huh.   I'd never really thought about that before.  Does any church really need to have a "small but?"  Is small something that churches need to apologize for?

Oh, sure, there are plenty of things of which I could see a church needing to repent.  There are plenty of entirely justifiable "buts."

"We're emotionally manipulative and judgmental sometimes, but at least we've learned to recognize it." 

"We're a giant warehouse of a church indistinguishable from a Best Buy, but we try to build relationships in the midst of this faceless crowd." 

"We're a giant corporate church with a worship as carefully choreographed as a Cirque de Soleil show in Vegas, but we work hard to still have a human touch." 

"We're a social clique, but we've been trying to figure out how to be more welcoming." 

"We're drab, dull, and boring, but we're willing to change, or at least laugh every once in a while."

"We're as mean as a rattlesnake, but you don't have to come here."

Those things, I'd get.  Some are certainly spiritual afflictions of small faith communities.  And some churches really do stay little primarily because they have no good news to offer.

But small itself?  I'm not sure that's a thing we need to qualify.

We are small and vibrant.  We're scrappy and hardworking.  We are intimate and spiritual.  We are cute and cuddly.  Shawdey got moves!  We are a place where you can make a difference.  We are a place of belonging.

Whatever we say, it needs to be:  "We know who we are, and from that place of authenticity, we speak the Gospel into the world."

A Crisis of Expectations

What We're Looking for Often Doesn't Look the Way We'd Expect

In a recent post on her Christian Century blog, Carol Howard Merritt raised some interesting questions about the significant challenges facing younger clergy seeking congregations in our denomination.

Long and short of it?

You come out of undergrad, all bright eyed and bushy-tailed for Jesus.  You crank your way through seminary, eagerly sopping up the latest and most cutting edge scholarship while racking up three more years worth of student debt.   You heave your way through countless Committee for Preparation for Ministry meetings, take those dagflabbing Ords, retake them, and then then drop your PIF out there into the world.

You're not asking for much...just a salary sufficient to support a new small family.  Oh, and a diverse, urban congregation that reflects your passion for liberation theology and/or LBGTQ justice.  And it should be near public transportation.  And willing to try exciting new emergent-ish worship.  And able to get you a new super fast 3G smartphone as part of your reimbursables.

There are a few wonderful, perfectly-primed for seminarian-dreams churches like this.  Seminarians have no hope of getting them.  Ain't gonna happen, kids.  That church will go to someone with fifteen years of experience and a doctorate.  Ninety-nine-point-nine-seven-five percent of the time, your PIF won't even make the B pile.

Instead, you'll be tracked into Youth Ministry, because that's the place the Good Lord calls everyone under 40.  What?  Not called to Youth Ministry?  Not under 40?   Hmmm.   That could be problematic. 

It isn't that there aren't plenty of churches out there that could use a pastor.  There are plenty of vacant pulpits, churches that would be happy to have you.  But they are, for the most part, in rural and small town churches that often can't afford to support a full-time pastor.

Sort of like mine.

My church is an awesome little congregation.  It's welcoming, multigenerational, and warm.  It laughs, is supportive, and loves music.  But what it isn't is large and well-off.  We're the fifth largest church in our modest town, and our town has five churches.  Size matters not in matters of Force and the Spirit, of course, but there are implications.

It does what it can with what it has, and knows how to make do.   But I see the giving figures, which are great given the size of the community and the real impacts of our sustained economic downturn.  Even with people committing amounts that reflect their deep care for the church, a full-timer just isn't an option.  It doesn't reflect the reality on the ground. 

There are thousands of churches like this, in all of the oldline denominations.  They are not bad churches. Some are amazing.  But from the demand side, they just can't meet the expectations of most seminary graduates.   Many could support a single person, living a neomonastic life.  But a family?  No, not unless you teach the kids to photosynthesize. 

If that is the reality, scope and actuality of things, then what must change?