Seven advantages of
starting out in a Small church
I’m
getting to the part of my senior course where I urge ministerial students to start out their ministry
in small churches. It is a hard sell. At IWU
we have more than 400 students in our religion division. The median church they come from is
about 700. Really! Half of my students come
from churches larger than 700 and the other half from “smaller” churches under
700. The first thing I have to do is define what I mean by “small church.” I don’t mean a church of 300, but one of 40 or 50 up to 75.
Some are astonished at the idea but I give my ten minute
pep talk anyway to my seniors. Here is
what I say are the advantages of small churches:
1. Small churches are forgiving.
You
can make a lot of mistakes in most small churches and
get away with it. They are used to mistakes and they forgive them
easily—especially if you’re young and know how to
apologize. On the other hand, if you make three serious mistakes while on a
large church staff you’re dead meat.
2. Small churches are grateful.
Most
of them think they don’t deserve a bright energetic
young minister right out of college and they assume they’ll lose you as soon as
someone else discovers you. They’ll shower you with
appreciation hoping you’ll stay another year. They’ll
even praise a bad sermon if you’re a good person. Large church staffs pay better but they
expect you to perform better too. Small churches know they have to pay you
affirmation, support and gratitude to keep you around another year.
3. Small churches give you a chance to do everything.
In
one year at a small church you’ll get to do 25 times
the things you’ll get to do on a large church staff. Weddings, baptisms,
funerals, hospital visitation, budgeting, preaching, prayer meetings, leading
board meetings, and a hundred other things are normal for a year’s work in a
small church. On a large church staff you may serve
ten years before you get to do 90% of a minister’s ordinary work. Plus, in a small church your ministry impact is directly
measurable—you can see the effect quicker driving a small craft instead of
working on a huge aircraft carrier.
4. Small churches are good laboratories for relational ministry
Students
are always telling me they want a different model of the church—“doing life
together.” They want church to be a place where people know and love each
other, care for each other, pitch in and help each other, and eat together
often. This is the ordinary life of a small church. Huge sprawling churches
spend lots of their time trying to “program” to recapture these things. You
want the church to be like a loving family? Small
churches run exactly like an extended family—sometimes they are actually
a few related families! So try out your theories there. You complain about big
businesslike churches that run more like cold-hearted businesses than the loving
people of God—well try a small church where the live and love together. In a
small church you can test your commitment to “All
ages doing life together in love.” I worry sometimes when young idealistic
graduates with relational values go into huge churches that operate more like
businesses than families—I get their disillusioned emails as they question the
nature of a “real church.” Smaller churches give a chance for these
hyper-relational experiments.
5. Small churches will develop you.
Most
students want to go to church where”‘the senior
pastor will take time to mentor and develop me.” Forget it,
it seldom happens. Large churches use you –to
do a job. They figure if you want mentored you ought to pay tuition and go to
college where the professors get paid to mentor you.
Large churches expect you to “produce.” The laity in small churches, however,
will actually take the time to mentor you—they’ll
encourage, urge, correct, rebuke and guide you as you grow and develop.
6. Small churches will let you preach.
You
might be able to land a job on staff at a church of 1000 or more right out of
college—many of our graduates do. But, don’t expect to
get many chances to preach to those 1000 people. Your audience in a large church will often be
about the size of.. yeah, a
small church. In a small church they’ll be happy if
you preach every single Sunday, maybe Sunday nights and in some you can even preach
on Prayer Meeting night! In one year you may preach
100-150 times in a small church. If you plan it right
you can do a lot of developing while preaching 100 sermons a year. Where do you
think great preachers like Steve Deneff learned to
preach? Right! He learned while serving in unknown
places in a small church.
7. Small churches are generous.
While
they pay less than staff positions in larger churches
they are more generous otherwise. In
small churches people bring you pies, and bushel
baskets of apples, and they slip $20 bills into your hand when shaking hands at
the door. Small churches have people who will go shopping with you and pay for
your new “funeral suit” and they’ll collect more money for your Christmas gift
than any large church board-set Christmas gift policy that comes through in
your “payroll check.” Indeed in many small churches
they will be happy if you even get a part time job elsewhere so that combining
this with free housing and their salary you may actually even earn more per
year than you’d get in a large church.
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I
admit that some small churches have carnal self-centered church bosses who can
make your life miserable. But large churches have
carnal self-centered senior pastors and executive pastors who can make your
life miserable. In large churches the senior pastor
fires you. In small churches the laity have to get together to fire you—getting fired happens both places. However, here’s the twist: When you get fired in a large church
people consider you a failure, but if you get fired from a small church
people simple consider the church as carnal! (ROTFLMHO!) It
may not be fair but it is true! But, keeping from getting fired is not the best
reason for starting out in a small church—it is that your chances of surviving
the 20’s is higher and it is because of some of the things I’ve mentioned
above.
So,
every semester I urge some of my students start out in their ministry as a “general
practitioner” in a small church. I say this every semester but usually they all
ignore it. Few actually take my advice. yet I keep giving it because I keep getting emails from
students who got burned out or burned up in large churches and they all tell me
to keep telling my students what I’ve been telling them. So
I keep doing it.
So
what’s your take on this. What advice would you give my students—list it
in the comments and I’ll give it to them this year.
So what do you think?
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