They don’t often make national headlines, but smaller churches are a big deal.
There are roughly 350,000 Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox churches in the United States.[i] The median number of people attending these churches is 75. That means half of the churches in the US have 75 or less people attending; half have more.
Did you get that? That means there are 175,000 congregations (more or less) with 75 or less people attending on a weekly basis. And get this: churches of less than 500 make up 94% of local churches in the United States. That’s about 329,000 of the 350,000 churches in the U.S. About 34 million of the 56 million people who attend Christian worship services in a given week in the United States attend those smaller churches. (That’s still a little more than 10% of the estimated 2016 US population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.[ii])
I should give you a breather from statistics for a few moments to insert these thoughts: The emphasis on smaller churches in this article by no means diminishes the importance of larger congregations in American church life. Every local congregation has value in the economy of God’s Kingdom. It’s just that smaller churches too often forget that they, too, have value in advancing the Kingdom. They often think more in terms of what they can’t do because they lack warm bodies or cold cash or both. That’s a tragedy.
I was ordained the gospel ministry just over 36 years ago. For the first dozen years, my wife Annie and I did itinerant ministry in a wide variety of settings, doing a wide variety of things ranging from puppetry to coordinating and launching small groups to music to preaching and teaching. And we did most of it – not all of it, but most of it – in, or for, smaller churches of 500 or less.
Out of the several hundred churches we worked with, it was a rare day when the people we encountered were short on talent, enthusiasm, devotion to God, hospitality, or even resources. They often had to think creatively to raise funds or to clear their calendars. More often than not, they were the ones who designed and built some wonderfully creative sets for vacation Bible schools. Host congregations and student groups pulled themselves together to pray, to publicize, to pull permits when necessary, and to help us load equipment in early and out when we were done, usually late at night.
In other words, they had a lot going on for them. They were as connected to God as anyone else. They were gifted and talented, wired in just the right way to complement each other and carry on the very work of God in their communities.
That said, let’s be clear. There’s no way that three farming communities in southern Illinois (whose total populations would add up to roughly 5% of the main Willow Creek campus membership) can host a church community with an eight-figure budget and members numbering into the tens of thousands. The rural southern Illinois sociology won’t work that way, nor should it. But since when did sociology ever excuse the church from its mission? The church has always been called to the reality of its context, not to a platform of the ideal.
Over the years, having mostly worked alongside smaller churches and having grown up in one, I have become aware that many of the larger churches we enjoy today are built on principles their leaders learned in smaller church settings. Indeed, there’s a smaller church “vibe” that can teach us all. It emerges as smaller churches work at being the best smaller churches they can be – even if (maybe especially if) they don’t realize it at the moment. It’s not that any one of them is perfect; it’s just that they tend to work hard at being quick learners.
These days, they can’t afford to be otherwise.
Meantime, whether you’re in a house church of eight or a mega-church of 18,000: grace, peace, and a whole lotta love. Jesus wants you to have them all.
–Steve Wamberg
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[i] http://hirr.hartsem.edu/research/fastfacts/fast_facts.html. Accessed January 2016. This link will take you to a wonderfully well-sourced document that paints a quick statistical picture of churches in the US. Most of the statistical information in this article can be found in that document.
[ii]http://www.census.gov/popclock/?eml=gd&intcmp=home_pop&utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery. This is the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Clock – a fun tool to have handy.