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“What Makes the Small Church Small?”
Well, what then is a small church? This question is often
answered by picking a number. Some would say that a small church is one which
in which the worshiping congregation is less than seventy five people. Other
writers place this number at a hundred worshipers, or at 125, or even as high
as 200. By any of these figures, the small church remains the most common form
of religious organization in America.
While the average congregation in America gathers fewer than 100 people
for worship each week, the average church attendee participates in a large
church. If this math feels fuzzy to you, imagine that I had five one gallon
buckets with two trout swimming in each one. I also have two five gallon
buckets with six trout each, and one twenty gallon bucket with 25 fish. My
average bucket would only be one gallon, but my average trout would be in the
largest bucket. You would have to ask the trout to find out which bucket was
the best. When Jesus calls us to be fishers of men, he doesn’t tell us which
size bucket to bring.
In the United Methodist
church, the average congregation has a weekly worship attendance of 51. There are approximately 3,000 United Methodist congregations with less than 25 members on
their roles. Typically these micro-sized churches will have another twenty to
thirty constituents, that is, people who consider themselves to belong to the
church even though they haven’t joined. Counting these people, one could say
that the total nurturing footprint of the smallest churches of this
denomination numbers around 150,000 people, or about the population of city
such as Tallahassee, Florida or
Springfield, Massachusetts. If all the United Methodist congregations that average less than 25 on a Sunday were to close their doors, it would be akin to seeing one of those cities disappear.
Hints for Understanding Small Churches
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