10. Benefits of a small church: We could have more churches in hard places.
There are a lot of places where big churches won’t work for a variety of reasons.
But there’s nowhere on earth where you can’t have a small church. Even in places where Christianity is illegal, small gatherings of Christians still can and do happen.
But, even where Christianity is legal, there are a lot of places where it’s getting harder to find positive responses to the gospel’s hopeful, but difficult truths.
Those hard places aren’t all in exotic, foreign lands. More often, they are going to be in our own towns and cities.
Many of them are distrustful of big organizations, including big churches. But they might be more open to the humble simplicity of a missional small church.
11. Benefits of a small church: More people might want to be pastors.
And now we address the elephant in the room. Where are all these pastors going to come from, especially in denominations that already have more churches than pastors?
I think, if we allow for a broader definition of church success, and even of what a pastor is, we’d have more people willing to step up and do the work of pastoral ministry.
Bivocational pastors have always been more common than most people realize. What if they became an expected norm? If we launched a bunch of intentionally small churches, maybe most of them could be pastored by people with pastoral hearts, but without the years of bank-breaking seminary education.
Not instead of seminary-trained theological giants. But alongside them.
Let’s not limit ourselves to one type of church, one method of church growth, or one definition of pastoring.
People who need Jesus need all kinds of churches and all kinds of pastors.
And Jesus can use them all.
This article originally appeared here.