Let’s shift from thinking of ourselves as small church leaders to being intimate church leaders. Let’s stop dwelling on size and start working with our strengths.

You may be wondering why this project is not called Small Church. It is because the size of a congregation has nothing to do with its health.

Carl F. George once asked:
Could it be that we are so accustomed to working with bonsai trees that we have lost sight of and hope for ongoing, unstunted growth? Could we church leaders, like a dynasty of oriental gardeners, be part of an ongoing tradition that twists, bruises, pinces, and clips the roots of our churches so as to prevent their being overtaken by growth? (How to Break Church Growth Barriers, pg 18)

Although I doubt that it is intentional, consider the stigma that is attached to small churches in the preceding paragraph. George believes that small size is unnatural, that it is created by “twists, bruises, pinces and clips”, that in order for a church to be healthy it must be allowed to be “overtaken” by growth. In other words, to be small is to be broken and wrong, unnaturally dwarfed.

This is an unfortunate stigma because it simply is not true. While there are certainly many small churches that are small because they have somehow been harmed or wounded, that does not mean that all small congregations are the result of this.

The stigma says small=broken, and George’s metaphor of the bonsai tree illustrates that.

The problem with this metaphor is that bonsai trees are not small because of negative influence. They are small because an artisan of great patience and insight worked diligently to craft and guide the tree to become a poem of grace written in living wood.

In the same way, an intimate congregation can be so quite intentionally, and quite beautifully.

Big is not always better.

This is why we are advocating the term intimate church rather than small church. A size designation such as small means, by default, that it is to be contrasted with something that is bigger.

Our world loves to supersize. Order a ‘regular’ sized value meal at McDonalds and you will get a 20 oz soda. Supersize it and you will get a 32 oz soda. (You will also get the caloric equivalent of a week of meals if you lived in say Ecuador.)

You cannot actually order a ‘small’ value meal. They don’t exist. And if you order and consume a Happy Meal, which is actually the meal size you should be eating, you get funny looks from everyone – both employees and customers.

Perhaps nowhere is the ‘bigger is better’ mentality more evident than the absence of a ‘small’ coffee at Starbucks. Go to Starbucks and you will notice that the smallest size you can get is a 12 oz ‘tall.’ In 1999, the company introduced their ‘venti’ 20 oz coffee and eliminated the 8 oz ‘short’ from their menu. (NOTE: You can still order a ‘short’ version of any beverage at Starbucks, and it is in their system although most employees are unaware of it.)

We assume that bigger is a better value. This is true of our thinking when it comes to meals and it is true of our thinking about churches as well. But is it true?

It is true that large churches generally do have more resources, but do those resources really translate into any type of ‘improved’ Christians? This is not a criticism of large churches, but we do need to make a serious evaluation of the thinking that says bigger is better.

Are large churches really any better at bringing people into encounters with Jesus Christ? Are large churches really any better at teaching people the teachings of Christ and the Apostles?

Since both these things are ministries of the Holy Spirit, we must answer those questions with an emphatic NO. Regardless of the size of a congregation, the Spirit of God does the saving and teaching of believers – through other believers.

And since Jesus promised he would be present wherever two or three are gathered, we must conclude that being big does not make a church better.

In reality, bigger congregation can (but not always are) more of a hindrance to the development of relationships with other believers. Large churches have scrambled to develop relational ministry for the past twenty years or so. Small group ministry was born out of the need to connect people with other believers, to prevent attrition and provide intimacy where people could learn the way of Christ.

If there is one thing that small churches have in SPADES, it is the potential for relational ministry. Small churches often have such strong relationships that they actually become challenges to the church. But used properly (and biblically), these close relationships can do organically what large churches have to do organizationally – namely, build relationships with Christ and others.

The thing that large churches have that small churches don’t is confidence. Most churches under 200 people believe they are doing something wrong by being small. The prevailing wisdom is, as the quote from Carl George at the beginning illustrates, that if you’re not ‘overtaken’ by growth, you must be doing something wrong.

Let’s strip this from our thinking. Let’s shift from thinking of ourselves as small church leaders to being intimate church leaders. Let’s stop dwelling on size and start working with our strengths.

Erik DiVietro is Senior Pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Merrimack, New Hampshire. He blogs at Intimate Church where this article first appeared. It is used with his permission. Source: http://intimatechurch.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/shifting-from-small-to-intimate/