I warm to Peter Green's comments about not ignoring small churches and I wonder what the big-is-better brigade would have to offer to a Pastor like Ian Charles at Cobar where if the entire township, dogs included, attended his church he'd still have a smaller congregation than some of our bigger churches. I can think of one really big Baptist Church in Sydney that has a bit of a reputation as being mainly interested in increasing the statistics and in doing so draws members from nearby Baptist churches (and probably other denominations as well) that do a good quiet job in a local area.
Baptists are often perforce a denomination of small churches, at least in Australia, and I'm glad that one of the seminars for 'Revive 08' focusses on helping small churches to make their worship worthwhile. We also tend to think of the USA as being comprised mainly of mega-Baptist churches when in fact most of them, like NSW, are ordinary small-to-medium congregations and that is certainly so in the UK.
Not that I'm mounting a case for small churches only - I can think of a couple that really should fold-up. But I'm wary of 'big' churches. If you want to see how history moves in that regard - visit the Archives and review some of the 'great' churches of the early-to-mid 20thC. Some don't even exist now and others are but a shell. Hillsong and Christian City Church are ginormous but I'll be interested to see what they're like five years after Brian Houston and Phil Pringle move on.
Gloria and I have moved around a bit and tended to opt (where we had an option) for mid-sized to small churches where we could be involved and know everybody (or most everybody) personally. We've invariably found such places to be rewarding and we still have friends in every one of them both in and out of Australia.
I recall Rowland Croucher once remarking that 'growth' isn't necessarily synonymous with 'numbers'. A person can 'grow' spiritually but s/he is still one person. I'm not decrying a church getting bigger in numbers but sometimes it does seem that that is the main game. And I hope that that's not what we're about.
Ron Robb, a retired Navy officer, is honorary Archivist for the NSW Baptist Archives and the NSW Baptist Historical Society.
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3 comments:
Nor is growth synonymous with health: a church can be large and fat/unhealthy; or small and malnourished!
Good discussion!
Rowland Croucher
In the first of my flurry of posts to this blog over the last 24 hrs. I noted in passing the fact that taskforce 2 is somewhat (NB the 'somewhat') unrepresentative - though that was always going to be inevitable. The task of putting together an effective and representative team of people is a toughie and looking at its members I think a fairly creditable job has been done. However, I'm glad as a pastor of a middling sort of church that Ron Robb has piped up in favour of the small church.
However, I do think numerical growth should be one of our aims under God. As Ron and Rowland have pointed out numbers are certainly not the whole story, and I would think they are not the main story either. I'd agree that 'big churches' may not be the answer - though I suspect that they do have a part to play. A previous poster on this site complained how in the past some 'successful' larger churches were made the paradigm and I'd be in agreement with that.
But I think that we must not be satisfied with the tiny proportion of folk from NSW/ACT who display an active belief in Christ as their Lord and we ought in our little outpost in the vineyard or patch of the wheat-field be seeking to bring as many of them in to active and real faith in Christ. This can be done effectively by churches and congregations of many sizes and shapes. We might dare to dream of widespread outcropping of many smaller fellowships. We might dare to dream of an army of effective church planters coming out of Morling. Maybe even a fleet of little boats, or lots of naturally grown tubs... We might dare to dream of a network of many middle sized churches across the towns of NSW/ACT who minister effectively to people of all ages. We might dare to dream of even one or two Baptist megaTabernacles which might prove to be flagships. In the end though we must not so much be caught up in dreams but plead with God that however he might do it, and work for God in whatever way he might use us to see more of his harvest come in.
We must be concerned with persons. That happens to imply numbers.
I am not sure that I made it clear enough in my previous post that I am not opposed to large churches, nor was I intending to criticise the Morling faculty of the early 80s of last century.
My concern is that the whole of Marrickville and, ultimately, of the world, should be filled with redeemed, worshipping people. And that, as Hefin Jones points out, implies numbers.
What troubled me was the seeming assumption that the larger churches were the appropriate model because their size proved that to be the case.
To an extent this means that I felt that we Baptists tend to substitute a pragmatic "whatever gets results" mentality for a truly Biblical analysis of what is required of a church. However, I think we need to steer carefully here, too. It is easy to proof text from the Bible, and we need to run psychological and sociological tests alongside our Biblical interpretation, asking, "Does this interpretation of that text really make sense?"
I am aware of the size of Paul Yonggi Cho's church; and also aware that it seems to have adopted a pattern to which I warm -- that the Sunday services are in a way analogous to our Revive convention, a coming together of the mini-congregations of which the entire church consists. This seems to be a way of having both extremes of size within the one organisation.
Whether Cho's church is the kind of answer we need to be thinking about, though, is an entirely different matter.
Let's get the focus off size -- which is only peripheral to the main issue, that we need to reinvent the church without being swayed by possibly deceptive images of success.
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