The Rise of the Micro-Church

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The logic of what I have called “Small Church Thinking” is not intended to delegitimize the large church. I am not particularly arguing that churches ought to be small. I am arguing, though, for a way of thinking about ministry that is not fixated on growth. I understand that stepping away from our growth obsession, and the self-justification that comes with it, is hard. During COVID I stopped paying attention to our Sunday attendance statistics. But since I’m not blind I can see on a Sunday morning how many seats are empty, and I inevitably measure my self worth accordingly. The idea of growth has us all hooked.

Even the best framed approaches to ministry reveal the depth of our addiction. We’ve all been counseled to focus on church health. But then the well is poisoned with the well-meaning but toxic motivational argument that “healthy churches grow.” Church health becomes just another growth strategy. We can’t escape.

The logic of growth turns everything into a growth strategy. Seeing that Jesus devoted himself to twelve men over three years leads us to conclude that if we invest in twelve guys who then invest in another twelve, suddenly there are 144. After a few iterations we will have filled an arena with followers of Jesus. Our obsession with strategy and growth takes a ministry to persons and turns it into a results oriented program.

To embrace the mantra that “healthy churches grow” implies the unspoken but deeply felt inverse, that a church that is not showing growth in numbers (or - horrors! - has “plateaued”) is therefore not healthy.

A small church of which I am aware radically shifted its priorities when its pastor’s wife received a cancer diagnosis. She was launched into a multi-year struggle for her life in which their church became allies. Rides were provided, meals prepared, and finances diverted to cover necessary and unexpected pulpit supply. The pastor was given much grace and was freed to give his wife the attention she needed. The actions of this church arose from a priority of love. To judge the church as somehow defective because it is small would be a scandalous slander.

To be sure, when churches grow pastors rejoice. But when they do not grow, we too easily despair. A former pastor of the church I pastor, a healthy church which has been a profound gift to me, was tormented by his seeming inability to get the church to grow. “It was this failure in his own eyes to rise above mediocrity that contributed to his mid-life crisis and deep depression,” his son wrote after this pastor’s sudden death. He had measured his church by size and judged himself mediocre when, in fact, it was a remarkable gathering of deeply devoted disciples of Jesus flourishing in their spaces. In normalizing the idea of the big church we have communicated to thousands of faithful churches and their pastors that they are flawed failures. And that is wrong.

Small Church Thinking stands against this as a resistance movement that can learn something from the language of other resistance movements. I once encouraged my church to consider itself in league with the organic food movement. I told them that our church was “organic and locally sourced.” Sure, organic, farm-to-table produce can be more expensive, and the tomatoes may have spots and splits. The lettuce may not be as pretty as the irradiated produce from the corporate farm one buys at the local supermarket. But not only is the food healthier, purchasing it locally supports the local economy and injects the local community with just a little bit more beauty and pride. These are good things. In a similar way, the smaller, locally sourced, organic church will have its bruises and brown edges. But its members, quirky as well as lovely, will be possibly more healthy. It’s okay to not be Walmart. In fact it might be better.

Recently I suggested to the congregation that we think of ourselves not as a small church but as an intentional “micro-church.” Anheuser-Busch makes lots of beer appealing to a mass of people. As well, Folgers and Maxwell House still command major shelf space at the local grocery. But micro-brewers and micro-roasters have a legitimate place. Because they are small, they can provide for a local community what the mass producers can’t. They deliver a product that is uniquely suited to that community they inhabit, and do so with a personal touch that even Starbucks can’t touch. The virtue in the micro-brewers and roasters is not that they are small. Rather, in being small they can serve those who would not be cared for or served by the larger corporations. Such are micro-churches. They have a good and necessary place.

I’ve mentioned before the radical economist E. F. Schumacher who in 1973 questioned the growth obsession of America’s business culture. His book title says about economics what I want to say about the church: Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.^⁠¹ To frame ministry as if people mattered, even though small, is to capture something of the okayness, even the beauty, of the smaller church.

As a resistance movement, Small Church Thinking stands defiantly against the corporate mega-sensibilities of modern American church culture. I like to think it has a lot in common with a man who once was content to simply invest his life in twelve other men.

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