Why Small Churches Tend to Stay Small (Part 1)

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(This is part 1 of a two-part article, the first 5 of 10 reasons on why small churches usually do not grow. Click here for part 2)

First, an explanation or two, then a definition.

I know more about getting smaller churches to grow than larger ones. I pastored three of them, and only the first of the three did not grow. I was fresh out of college, untrained, inexperienced, and clueless about what I was doing. The next two grew well, and even though I remained at each only some three years, one almost doubled and the other nearly tripled in attendance and ministries.

By using the word “grow,” I do not mean numbers for numbers sake. I do not subscribe to the fallacy that bigness is good and small churches are failures. What I mean by “grow” is reaching people with the gospel of Jesus Christ. If you reach them and start new churches, your local church may not expand numerically, but it is most definitely “growing.” If you are located in a town that is losing population and your church manages to stay the same size, you’re probably “growing” (i.e., reaching new people for the Lord).

There are not “ten reasons” why small churches tend to remain small. They do tend to stay that way, you’ve probably noticed. But there must be hundreds of reasons for this, and no two churches are alike.

This is simply my observations as to why stagnant, ungrowing churches tend to stay that way. I send it forth hoping to plant some seed in the imagination of a pastor or other leader who will be used of the Lord to do great things in a small church.

I have frequently quoted Francis Schaeffer who said, “There are no small churches and no big preachers.” I like that. But it’s not entirely true. We’ve seen churches made up of just a few people and stymied by lack of vision and a devotion to the status quo. And here and there, we may encounter a preacher with the world on his heart and the wisdom of the ages on his lips; that for my money is a “big preacher.”

But this is not about being such a preacher. We’re concerned with not being one of those churches.

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Joy in Mudville

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New Orleans is beside itself with joy this morning. People are walking around with a grin on their faces and a quickness to their step.

The New Orleans Saints are going to the Super Bowl.

The (Jackson, MS) Clarion-Ledger cartoonist Marshall Ramsey says on his Facebook page that the King Edward Hotel is reopening there after 40 years, Massachusetts has elected a Republican to fill the Kennedy seat in the U.S. Senate, and the New Orleans Saints are in the Super Bowl. Can the Apocalypse be far behind?

Last night as soon as the Saints kicker knocked the ball 40 yards downfield through the uprights, a cheer ascended heavenward from this part of the world as one voice. I walked out the front door of my house just to see if anyone else was coming outside. After all, we need to share our joy and express it with those of like minds.

Up and down the block they were flowing into the street, some yelling that odd Saints cry of “Who Dat!” You could hear fireworks popping from every direction.

After 43 years, our team has won the NFC Championship and earned a spot in the Super Bowl to be played in Miami on February 7. How sweet it is.

I hope the joy lasts a long time. But I’m also a realist.

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Pastor, Make Us Think

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“…and in that law he meditates day and night.” (Psalm 1:2)

One writer says that word “meditates” reminds him of something he saw his dog do in the Northwest woods where they were living. One day his dog dragged a huge bone up to the house. Clearly, it came from the carcass of an elk or moose, he said, and that little dog had certainly not brought the animal down. But that pup sure did enjoy that bone.

What he did was to gnaw on it day after day, eating it away little by little. Sometimes, the canine would bury the bone under leaves and later dig it out and resume its worrisome process of ingesting that huge bone. Eventually, he had consumed the entire thing.

That is what the believer is to do with the word, the writer said. Think about it, consider it from every angle, take in all he can today, then lay it aside for the moment, only to bring it out later and gnaw on it again until it has become his.

In every church a pastor will quickly find two groups: those who enjoy being prodded into thinking by his sermons and those who refuse to think and insist that their spiritual food be predigested so it goes down smoothly.

My observation is that only the first group will grow spiritually. The unthinking group is content to be spiritual infants and to remain that way.

The unthinking member demands simple sermons, easy lessons, no gray areas, all Scripture interpretation to be neat and orderly with no room for differences of interpretation, and no challenges to his beliefs, his position, his world.

The unthinking has a difficult time with Jesus. He refuses to abide by their demands, just as He did with every group He ministered to in the First Century.

The pastor’s challenge is to move members of the fallow group into the first category–to show them the delights of reflecting on God’s Word, thinking about His message, studying their Sunday School lessons, and examining most everything else in lives, and then to incorporate God’s truths into their lives.

Consider this example.

“Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. Jesus answered, ‘Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered that way?'”

The Lord proceeded to answer his rhetorical question with a “No, but unless you repent, you too will all perish,” but clearly, He wanted them to think about this.

“Do you think?”

Then, stressing the point, Jesus called to their mind a similar tragedy with an identical truth. “Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them–do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem?” (Luke 13:1-5)

Well, Lord, pardon me, but…well, you see…we don’t actually like to think about these things. Can you just lay it out there in black and white and we’ll simply quote you and run along.

Sorry. He refuses to play into our laziness, to cater to our inertia.

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Faith: The Most Ubiquitous Force in the Universe (I Peter 1:8-9)

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“Though you have not seen Him, you love Him; and even though you do not see Him now, you believe in Him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.” (I Peter 1:8-9)

A few years ago, a group of scientists were given the most prestigious award in the world, the Nobel Prize for science, for discovering that all around us, all around them, and throughout every cubic foot of the universe is reverberating tiny echoes of the original Big Bang, Creation itself. They called it something like a “humming,” which everyone heard to the point that they had quit questioning it.

You see the same wallpaper every day and eventually you quit noticing it. When the scientists decided to analyze the mysterious hum, they found echoes of the Beginning.

Faith is like that. It’s everywhere, everyone uses it, lives by it, orders their lives by it and around it, but rarely give it a thought.

The funny thing is how some dispute that they believe in faith or use it in any way. As they do so, they draw their breath by faith, stand on their spot of terrain by faith, and plan their next act by faith.

Defining faith is a little tricky. Everyone tries his hand at it.

The writer of Hebrews–whoever he or she was–introduces the well-beloved 11th chapter, the Faith Chapter in our New Testament, with a definition:

“Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” (Heb. 11:1 NIV)

Some kid said it’s believing what you know isn’t true.

Here’s my definition:

“Faith is a conviction that a certain thing is true and real and solid on the basis of evidence even though some evidence is still missing.”

We are all celestial Sherlock Holmeses in a way–studying the evidence, coming to conclusions on the basis of that evidence, but all the while wishing we had the missing parts of the puzzle. Divine sleuths.

The disciple of Jesus Christ goes forward by faith. The Jew, the Taoist, the Muslim all live by faith. The Hindu, the Buddhist, the animist, and the voodoo practitioner get up every morning and go forth by faith.

The atheist lives by faith. The skeptic and agnostic are faith practitioners, just as much as Oral Roberts or Jerry Falwell or Billy Graham or Mother Teresa ever were.

This is true for the simple reason that we on this planet have tons of evidence for belief and a great deal for unbelief. We find loads of evidence for confidence our house will still be standing on the ground it occupies this morning and likewise reason to fear it won’t. Ask any Haitian about that.

The insurance company, the Fortune 500 conglomerate, and the bakery that opened in the strip mall near my house, all roll the dice and take their chances.

We live by faith every day. Get used to it.

Faith is only as good as its object. Here is where the disciple of Jesus Christ shines.

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The Oldest Question in the World (I Peter 1:6-7)

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When Katrina devastated this part of the world, two-thirds of the preachers in this land climbed into the pulpits the following Sunday to address the question on everyone’s mind: “Why suffering?”

It’s variously stated as “Why does God allow suffering?” and “Why do bad things happen to good people?” or “If God is all-loving and all-powerful, why doesn’t He end suffering?”

With the earthquake that wrought unbelievable death and suffering in Haiti, all those old questions have resurfaced.

What amazes Bible students and pastors is that the theology of Job’s friends, which the Word goes to such lengths to discredit, is still alive and well and being spread by many who claim to be Christians.

It’s what’s called in the logic classroom a “syllogism” and it looks like this:

The righteous do not suffer.

You are suffering.

Therefore, you are not righteous.

I did not hear Pat Robertson’s inflammatory comment last week in which he is said to have suggested (or actually made, I’m not sure) that Haiti’s constant poverty and suffering and now this earthquake which has taken the lives of 100,000 people is the result of an old voodoo pact the Haitians made with the devil.

If he said it and believes it, he believes in voodoo more than he should.

Anyone who believes that God is judging that sad little nation in this way ought to be ashamed of themselves. The poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, and God picks on them! What kind of tyrant do people think we worship?!

The Apostle Peter was writing to some people who were puzzled about their own suffering. Scholars are confident, to my knowledge, that the epistle was penned in the decade of the 60’s A.D. This would put it smack-dab in the middle of Nero’s time, that despot who burned Rome and blamed it on Christians.

We actually have a date for that event: July 19, A.D. 64. The fire burned for 3 days and 3 nights, was stopped, and then it broke out again. We’re told that Nero had a passion for building and needed to clear off space for his next projects. Since the buildings of much of Rome were wooden and the streets were narrow, a fire could take out much of the city, as it did.

Historians do not have a smoking gun, so to speak, identifying Nero as the culprit, but even at the time, everyone knew the name of the arsonist. We’re told that people trying to put out the fires were hindered. The historian Tacitus, who was 9 when all this happened, names names and fingers Nero.

The citizens were in an uproar. Nero quickly saw he was going to need a scapegoat, someone to pin the blame on.

He chose the Christians.

Tacitus wrote: “He falsely diverted the charge on to a set of people to whom the vulgar gave the name of Chrestians, and who were detested for the abominations they perpetrated.”

Abominations? Outsiders thought they were cannibalistic from their rituals of “eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Jesus.”

Antisemitism was already rampant in those days, and since Christians were associated with Judaism, this made them doubly apt as targets.

So, a period of intense harassment, persecution, and torture was begun. We’re told a large number of Christians were rolled in pitch (that would be tar), hoisted onto posts, and set afire to light the city. Untold numbers of disciples of the Lord Jesus were martyred in this manner.

Peter writes to people for whom suffering is no abstraction. They encounter hostility and rejection, brutality and persecution, everywhere they go.

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Heaven: One Surprising Thing We’ll Do There

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I had a small reminder today of what Heaven is going to be like.

Remember, you heard it here.

I was having lunch with Pastor Michael and Jane Perry after the morning services in the First Baptist Church of Moss Point, Mississippi, where they serve. We got started talking about families or football or something, and they said Jane’s father–now in Heaven–was the biggest Alabama fan on the planet.

“He had Bear Bryant pictures all over the house,” she said. “He’s gone but they’re still there.”

That’s when I related my little tale of the 1980 game between Bama and Mississippi State. As I began talking, Michael started smiling. I said, “Have I told you this story?” He said, “No, but I remember the game. Go ahead, and I’ll tell you when you finish.”

My story went like this. We had driven from our home in Columbus, MS, to Jackson for the game. Alabama had a 17-game winning streak going and State was a perennial doormat for the Southeastern Conference. Even though we liked both teams–we were located between both universities on U.S. 82 which adjoins them–we were rooting for Bama that day.

When the game ended, the score was State 6, Bama 3.

We stopped in Starkville for supper (!) and drove on home. Pulling into the driveway, we saw people inside our garage. It was 6 or 8 of our neighbors. They were painting a large sign for my house, no doubt rubbing in the loss.

One of them ran up to the car and said, “You’re back too soon. Come back in 30 minutes.”

I let the family in the back door and went to wash the car. On my return, they had rigged up a massive sign covering the front porch of my house, complete with floodlights in the yard. The sign read: “The Bulldogs blitzed!” (that was the team’s theme) “State 6, Bama 3.” Someone had done a pretty fair drawing of the bulldog sauntering off after the victory, with me on my knees in the rear, wearing my hat with the big ‘A’. Underneath all that were two large captions:

“If my people will humble themselves….” and the other: “our land has been healed.”

It made the front of Monday’s newspaper.

I still have that folded up sign stored away in the attic somewhere.

Michael Perry laughed. “I told you Jane’s daddy was the biggest Alabama fan. After that game, they were supposed to come up to our house, near Moulton, Alabama, where I was pastoring.”

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Pastor, Ask Something Great From Us

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The reason many of us pastors keep returning to the same few quotes is that they are definitive for us. They so imbed themselves in our consciousness that they manage to define who we are.

Somewhere I read–wish I could remember where–of a friend who accompanied Abraham Lincoln to church. Afterwards, the friend asked how he had liked the sermon. The future president’s answer was something like: “He may be a good man, but he’s not a good preacher. A good preacher would have asked us to do something great, and he didn’t.”

(If I’m able to run down the exact quote, I’ll insert it here.)

Sometimes a preacher needs a comeuppance like that from a layperson–calling us back to reality, insisting we remember our calling, that we not get so caught up in the minutiae of our work that we forget to issue the clarion call to God and righteousness.

It might even be appropriate to call Lincoln not a layperson, since that implies he’s an active member of a church other than the clergy, but an outsider. He never joined a church, claimed to have a deep reverence for God and Scripture, but always seemed to see no personal need for involvement in a local church. So when we analyze a critique of a preacher from him, it’s coming more from the outside than within the body.

But this is not about Lincoln. It’s about his comment, and his excellent statement that a good preacher calls on people to do great things.

I completely agree, and am betting most pastors would also.

Now, my opinion is that the typical pastor does not call on people to do little things in place of “great” ones. That’s not what Lincoln heard, I’m guessing. The pastor did not issue an invitation for people to sign up for janitorial work, volunteer to teach the 3rd grade boys, or bring casseroles on Wednesday nights.

Instead of being that specific, that detailed, and that minor, the preacher did something else.

He issued a broad invitation to do general things without ever making himself clear on what they ought to be doing.

One of the cardinal sins of sermons is to issue fuzzy calls for people to do nebulous things.

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My Second-Best Story of All Time

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I bemoan the death of mail-out church bulletins. The internet–and maybe the busy lives of church members–was the culprit.

Years ago, we preachers would receive as many as thirty or more bulletins from other churches every week in the mail. A secretary in each church was assigned to type up the congregational news, pastoral announcements, and such and put in the mail, usually by Wednesday or Thursday, with the assurance it would be in the mailboxes of the members no later than Saturday.

Most of us received only the mailouts from churches and pastors we knew well, or admired greatly and wanted to keep up with. A few I took because the minister or secretary (or both) could be counted on for a great story.

Back then, that was a great source of sermon illustrations. Some of us loaded our file cabinets with clippings from church bulletins.

That’s where this one came from. I read it, loved it, clipped it out (alas, without the identifying information to say which church ran it), and have used it again and again over the years.

It’s as powerful a metaphor for the state of many churches and millions of Christians as I’ve ever seen.

The date is Saturday night, December 6, 1941, the eve of “a date that will live in infamy.”

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The Best Article Ever

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“The Commission” magazine exists now only on-line but for many generations it arrived in the homes and churches of Southern Baptists all over the country. I’ve known and appreciated several of its editors and grieved when it went out of business. (It was the monthly publication of the SBC Foreign Mission Board, headquartered in Richmond.)

Two things in “The Commission” when it was a print magazine changed my life forever. They were so tiny, I’m confident that the people who dropped them in had no idea how significant they were.

The first was a tiny notice in the fall of 1976 announcing that a cartoonist was needed by the missionaries in Singapore. As a part of their urban strategy, they wanted to produce an evangelistic comic book and distribute to teens all over that island nation.

They needed someone to draw it.

I read that in my office and thought, “I could do that.” The phone rang. Margaret was calling from home. “Did you see this little note in ‘The Commission’ that they need a cartoonist to draw a comic book in Singapore? You could do this.”

That’s how it happened that in May of 1977 I traveled to Singapore and spent two weeks with missionaries Bob and Marge Wakefield. The urban strategists who had conceived the idea–Ralph and Ruthie Neighbour–had returned to Houston, but they continued working with us on this.

I worked with the Singaporean believers on developing a workable script and sketched people and places all over the city. Then, returning to my pastorate in Mississippi, I set about drawing the full-length comic book. Ralph Neighbour got the drawings transferred to acetate cels, which we–my family, my church members, my neighbors!–worked at coloring BY HAND over the next few weeks. We did it in precisely the same way the Disney studios do their hand-drawn cartoons such as “The Princess and the Frog.” We found out it was a job!

That’s one thing so fascinating about visiting the Disney display in the New Orleans Museum of Art (the exhibit runs through March 14, 2010). Here are all these cels on view that were so gorgeously done, and I know exactly how they got that way. Except in our case, we did about 30 or 40 pages (I forget the exact number) and the Disney folks turned out something like 80,000 for a full-length cartoon movie.

My church members kicked in the money to print that comic in full color and it was shipped to Singapore. Ten thousand copies. Some were sold on newsstands for only the amount needed to give the seller a profit and the others were distributed by the churches. I kept out enough to give one each to our helpers and contributors and my children. (I have one copy left, plus the acetate cels, stowed away in a drawer or box somewhere.)

That was memorable and life-changing for me–I hope it was for some Singaporeans, but we’ll have to wait for Heaven to find out–and it began with a tiny announcement in our missions magazine.

The other thing “The Commission” did that made a lasting difference for me was a small news item which I clipped out and have used in sermon after semon ever since.

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