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?