The big picture for small churches

If you are part of a small church you have a choice. You can choose to see the small size of the congregation as a reason to be discouraged and downhearted. Or you can choose to see the church’s smallness as a reason why you might be just the church God can use.

Where am I coming from with that last statement? Is it just foolish optimism? I don’t think it is. Here is my reasoning.

God’s thoughts are not our thoughts. He does not do things the way the world expects. One might say, with reverence, that our Father is often rather a ‘lateral’ thinker. Our God is a God who uses the lowly and despised to shame the big and glamorous and selects the weak things to shame the strong, that all the glory might go to him (1 Corinthians 1.27). Is your church small and weak? Then you might well be in just the right condition to bring most glory to God.

Think about it for a moment. Who gets the glory when someone makes a profession of faith in Christ? No one these days is surprised if someone ‘gets religion’ at a large meeting with masses of techno-hype, heaps of emotional music and a handsome preacher re-nowned for his theatricality. ‘That’s the kind of thing that happens in crowds,’ people say. They simply put it down to hysteria, or the need to belong, or the kind of psychological manipulation that can occur, consciously or unconsciously, when people gather in big numbers.

But if people are truly converted to Christ in a little chapel attended by two old ladies, a blind man and his dog, people will ask real questions! ‘What on earth is going on here?’ ‘I can’t see the attraction?’ ‘What could have possibly got into them?’ Non-Christian relatives and friends might just be astonished. They could well see such conversions as the miracle that they truly are. The glory goes to God.

Who’s counting?

It was with this philosophy about the potential usefulness of smaller churches that I entered the Christian ministry. I was a young man who had never been able to study full-time at a Bible college. (How I wish now that I had!) But I had begun to preach a little. Then, one August I was asked to go and preach at a church in the South of England. It was a day never to be forgotten for my wife and I. The congregation I preached to that day was to become the church to which God would send us. The building was unremarkable, and the people were lovely ordinary folk. I remember that the sermon I preached that morning was from 2 Samuel 24 on the foolishness of David’s numbering of Israel’s fighting men. How we love to think that strength is in numbers, when God says that it is ‘not by might nor by power, but by my Spirit’ (Zechariah 4.6). My message was straightforward. It was nothing to write home about. But somehow at the end of that day as Ann and I drove home, we knew deep in our hearts that God was calling us to that place and those people. We looked at each other in the car, and with a mixture of trepidation and elation we knew that it was there that our future would be.

It was not a very big church. The congregation was around 50 to 60, I suppose. I do not really know. Having preached on David’s mistake of head counting, I vowed I would never do it. But what I did know was that there were other very big churches in the town with hundreds of people in the congregations. Also somehow, I came to suspect that our little church was looked down upon by the bigger churches. We were despised. We were old-fashioned. It could have been a wrong perception on my part. I do not wish to lay any blame. But that was how it seemed.

Eventually, after more visits to the church, just as God had intimated on that first day, the call came to the pastorate. As someone with no previous experience, taking on the church was quite a daunting task. I do not think I would have survived except for the faithful group of elders around me. But in particular, the question of fostering a positive attitude and having faith that God could bless the church, when many people in the town gave the impression that they thought that over the years God had passed our congregation by and blessed others, was a real challenge.

Then the truth dawned on me. God is the God who gets most glory from situations that other people have written off. The depth of the darkness makes the starlight even more wonderful. The impossibility of a set of circumstances can be used by God to show his splendour. He is the God of little David versus mighty Goliath. He is the God of Ezekiel’s vision. The valley of dry bones can become a mighty army. Most significantly, though Jesus was dead and buried, God is the God who loves to raise the dead to life. He is the God who brings the light of Easter morning out of the midnight of Good Friday. As these Scripture truths bore in upon me in the early years of the ministry, faith and hope that God could and would work in and through the church was kindled and maintained. To his praise, over time, the church has grown, and another church has been planted (or replanted) as well. God uses churches that others have written off. I hope that encourages you. It encourages me.

Small beginnings

We live in a society that worships at the shrine of size. We buy our food at ‘supermarkets’ and ‘hyper-markets’. ‘Monster’ music events are promoted for the young. ‘Mega’ sales are advertised in department stores. ‘Blockbuster’ movies appear at our cinemas. In the world’s eyes, if something is not big, it does not deserve attention. It is not easy to be upbeat about a church with just a few in the congregation when we live alongside such a cultural bias. But we are called to walk by faith not by sight.

Perhaps when you saw the title of this article you thought that the choice discussed here for the small church would concern the decision whether or not to close down. But that is not the kind of agenda considered here. God can and does use small churches. It is good not only to ponder the teaching of Scripture concerning his use of small things, but it is also helpful to scan church history a little and to remember the lessons of the past. Such an exercise will encourage us to realise that the God of impossible things and little people did not stop his activity with the close of the canon.

Missionary movement

How did the modern missionary movement begin? It really started with William Carey (1761-1834), the Baptist missionary. He left his native Northamptonshire and sailed to India in 1793. His strategy of Bible translation, evangelism and church-planting, hand in hand with education and relief work, has been the basic pattern employed in world mission ever since. One biographical essay about Carey describes how he cut his teeth as a preacher by preaching in ‘the pulpit of a tiny nonconformist church, a two-hour walk from his home’. God used that small church to nurture a great champion for Christ.

In fact, as we review church history, do we not see that God always starts his works small? After all, he created the world out of nothing! The Lord Jesus Christ chose just 12 disciples and from there began the church which turned the ancient world upside down.

God’s use of small groups is not confined to the past. Looking back over the last 20 or 30 years I can think of places in many parts of the country where God has used small groups of people to plant works which have now become strong churches, centres of faith and life.

We need to realise that there is nothing wrong, per se, with being a small church. What is our attitude? Will you see your low numbers as an obstacle or as a springboard to faith that God can glorify himself through you? That is the choice to be faced.

This article is an extract from The Big Picture for Small Churches by John Benton, published by Evangelical Press at £7.95.

The big picture for small churches

Who’s counting?

Small beginnings

Missionary movement

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