Ministering Where No One Cares
Being A Small Church in a Big World
In today’s world we don’t quite know what to do with small. There is the temptation to crave the huge. Bigger buildings. Bigger numbers.
Big translates as accomplishment. Leaders need to see growth. When church leaders aren’t racking up statistics in their own denomination, they begin to stress ecumenical dialog. They have to achieve something somewhere even if their years of work don’t mean a thing.
The ELCA worked at this long and hard with the Episcopal Church. We finally achieved “full communion.”
This achievement means absolutely nothing to lay people. Nothing. But lay people footed the bill for all the meetings, talk and time spent by our leaders.
The achievement is a symptom of desperation. With this little shot in the arm, church leaders now have more potential pulpits to fill and a broader field from which to recruit candidates to fill our seminaries.
Even that doesn’t seem to be working very well.
We’ve sacrificed our autonomy for very little indeed. Why would anyone interested in Lutheran ministry care or want to submit their credentials to the Episcopal Church for approval?
All of this created an illusion of influence.
While all this dialog was going on, small churches in both denominations were struggling to find their way in the world of big. They were doing it pretty much alone.
Increasingly, no pastors wanted to serve them. The work was too hard. The professional recognition wasn’t what they sought.
This is frustrating to dedicated small church pastors. They often adopt a “just leave me alone to do my ministry” attitude. They don’t have much to worry about. The regional body is likely to leave them alone until they need the small congregation’s assets.
Most churches — a healthy majority, something like 80% — are small communities. Only about one or two percent are mega churches. Not many more are corporate churches. Regional bodies, who rely on congregational support for their existence, are happy when congregations can report memberships in the thousands. It means more for them!
But the body of churches who created these hierarchies consisted mostly of congregations with a few hundred members. They created these governing bodies to support them, not ignore them.
It’s funny how quickly our priorities shifted. Large churches simply didn’t exist a century ago. This modern phenomenon was a result of post-war America population boom and affluence. So much of our lives began to revolve around the car and parking lot.
It’s too soon to tell, but the large church’s role in the timeline of church history might be a cameo. Large churches are struggling, too. The last ten years have seen many of them decline by a third or half. It’s too soon to say they won’t revive, but the downward trend is a decade old now.
We are all struggling and so the attention tends to go to the larger churches. Large church ministries are applauded and noticed. They are successful at doing the same things smaller churches have always done but in plusher surroundings and with less struggles to pay the basic bills of life and with more professional services available.
Even with all this going for them, they are not cauldrons of innovation.
Meanwhile, small churches get the scraps of hierarchical attention. That’s a mistake.
The greatest potential for innovation is in the small churches. They are beehives of activity. Small churches will experiment and brainstorm our way into the future. Because we know we have to.
We are likely to do this without being noticed and with little more than condescending support from the church bodies.
Keep at it small churches. Share your ideas. Talk about your successes and don’t forget to share your failures. Failure in an important ingredient in the recipe for success.
We are going to have to support and inspire one another.
This, of course, would be made all the easier if regional bodies did not interpret incremental failures amid broader success as justifying land and asset grabs.
Fortunately, the ELCA forbids this. 