4 Bad Assumptions About Church Size

“What’s your church’s weekly attendance?” Depending on your answer—and depending on the church size of the person asking you—this question may fill you with pride or shame.

And that’s because you didn’t go into ministry to be ineffective or to make only a small impact. It’s just that sometimes we have a funny idea of what constitutes effective church leadership. Mix in our unhealthy tendency to compare our ministry “success” with the success of others, and we can get all jacked up about the numbers. 

To be sure, numbers aren’t nothing. However, we certainly shouldn’t let them define us in a way that causes us to be boastful on the one end or ashamed on the other. 

Here are four bad assumptions we tend to make when it comes to church size. 

1. ‘Healthy Things Always Grow.’

When advocating for strategies that will better help a church reach its community and increase its weekly attendance, pastors and church leaders often repeat the refrain, “Healthy things grow.” 

And that’s true enough. As a father with toddlers, I always remark and celebrate when my sons grow physically, mentally, or emotionally. While their physical growth often means that I need to purchase larger pajamas for them and place my valuables a little further back on the countertop to elude their clutches, growth is a good thing. If my boys weren’t constantly growing at this stage of their lives, both their pediatrician and I would quickly grow concerned. 

So healthy things do grow. But they aren’t always growing at the same rate of speed or to a size that exceeds the healthy limits of their capacity. In fact, the rare disorders of Gigantism and Acromegaly cause children and adults to grow beyond what is healthy. These conditions are serious, painful, and even deadly. 

Not every church and its leadership has the same capacity for growth, or even has the same capacity in every season. There may be times in the life of a church when it experiences rapid growth spurts, and there may be other times when its growth is slowed or stopped. 

While the call of the church is to live on mission until the return of Jesus, there may come a point when a particular local expression of the church has reached its capacity for growth and, while healthy, will not experience much more substantial net increase by way of membership numbers. 

This does not diminish the call for that church to live missionally, but it also does not mean that a church is necessarily unhealthy because it is no longer doubling or tripling in size over a given span of time. 

2. ‘Megachurches Don’t Disciple Their People.’

To be sure, I would rather be part of a church with 50 people who are being deeply formed in their faith through intentional discipleship than a church with 5,000 people who are simply attending a worship service two or three times a month but whose faith is having no real impact on their lives.