Church: Does Size Matter?

Is Big (or Small) Really Better?

Photo by Siora Photography on Unsplash

Over the last few years I’ve been thinking about, and writing about, the realities of being a small church pastor. Or should it be, the pastor of a small church. At 6ft 2in, a friend told me I don’t qualify as a small church pastor! However, in some of the questions and comments back and forth I’ve had a list of questions that are all around one thing:

How big should a church be?

It is an understandable question. I realise that churches need ‘enough’ people in their context to sustain ministry, to develop leaders, to care for one another, and to reach their communities. But the question we struggle with is how much is enough. At the same time, most of us have seen congregations become so large that members slip anonymously through the cracks, or so small that every person leaving feels like an existential crisis. Somewhere between those two realities, we imagine, there must be a sweet spot, the right church size. The difficulty is that the New Testament never seems particularly interested in helping us find it.

Reading the book of Acts we encounter astonishing numerical growth. Three thousand are added at Pentecost. Thousands more come to faith in the weeks that follow. Churches spread across cities and eventually throughout the Roman Empire. Yet Luke never pauses to tell us that Jerusalem became the model every church should aspire to imitate. Instead, almost as as he records the growth, he turns his attention to the difficulties it creates. Widows are overlooked. New leaders must be appointed. Cultural tensions emerge between Hebrew and Greek-speaking believers. People compete to look good by selling property and get struck down dead. You know, serious stuff! The emphasis is never simply on getting bigger but on preserving the health and unity of Christ’s body as it expands. Indeed, when persecution comes, it could be said that this is a good thing for the spread of the Gospel. Spread seems to matter more than uni-locational growth.

If we’re honest, our first instinct is often to reverse those priorities. We may say that faithfulness and Gospel advance matters most, but our imagination is frequently drawn by growth. Our evangelical culture seems to applaud increasing numbers more instinctively than increasing maturity. Funding follows growth also - which is a huge challenge for seeing churches established in ‘hard’ places. Of course, we should long to see more men and women come to know Christ. The Gospel is good news for the nations, and every conversion is a reason for rejoicing. The problem arises when numerical growth becomes our primary measure of success. Perhaps that is less a theological instinct than a cultural one as we are encouraged to evaluate significance by followers, impressions and engagement. In such a culture it becomes surprisingly easy to assume that churches should be assessed in much the same way. The larger the congregation, the stronger the ministry. The more visible the church, the greater its faithfulness. Few of us would state this quite so bluntly, yet it’s there.

That is one reason Tim Keller’s essay Leadership and Church Size Dynamics written in 2002, remains so perceptive even many years later. Keller’s central observation is not that larger churches are better or worse than smaller ones, but that size is never neutral. A church of forty, a church of one hundred and forty, and a church of one thousand are not simply the same congregation with different attendance figures. Each has, and develops, its own culture. Relationships function differently. Leadership changes. Communication changes. Expectations change. In Keller’s opinion, a church does not just grow larger, it becomes a different kind of community. That simple insight explains an enormous amount of pastoral frustration.

Big vs Small

This is where many conversations about church size become unnecessarily polarised and antagonistic. Advocates of small churches (like me!) are sometimes tempted to romanticise intimacy, as though genuine discipleship naturally follows from everyone knowing one another’s names. Defenders of larger churches can be equally guilty of romanticising scale, as though bigger budgets, more ministry programs and more staffing automatically produce healthier churches. Neither assumption survives the scrutiny of reality for very long. And we all have our terms to apply to one another in an offhanded way to cast aspersions on the size and faithfulness of the other. Shame on us!

Lyle Schaller argued for years that the small church should not be viewed as an unsuccessful version of a larger one. A small congregation can be wonderfully rich in personal relationships but it can also become so tightly woven relationally that newcomers struggle to find a place within it. It is a distinct kind of congregation with its own strengths and its own vulnerabilities. That remains an important corrective, particularly in places like rural Ireland where a faithful congregation of 25 believers may represent decades of patient Gospel witness rather than missiological failure.

At the same time, a growing church often discovers that growth introduces complexities that they hadn’t really anticipated. Sociological studies have shown that somewhere around one hundred to two hundred people, informal relationships begin to give way to systems, whether those systems are consciously developed or not. Expectations change. Members who once assumed the pastor would know everyone personally begin to realise that such expectations are no longer realistic. Richard Bretherton has suggested that Robin Dunbar’s work on human social limits may help explain why churches often experience relational strain around this point. Whether or not Dunbar’s famous figure of roughly 150 represents a fixed limit, it serves as a helpful reminder that human relationships are not infinitely expandable. Scripture does not teach Dunbar’s number, of course, but it does recognise that wise leadership adapts to changing circumstances rather than pretending limits do not exist. There is a reason why the modern missionary movement seemed to focus on this growing, equipping, sending pattern. Once we settle, organise and systematise, it’s harder to avoid inertia.

Perhaps, then, we have been asking the wrong question all along. The issue is not whether one church is larger than another, but whether its structures, leadership and expectations have grown alongside the people God has entrusted to its care. Churches rarely suffer simply because they are too small or too large. More often they struggle because they continue trying to live as though they were a different church from the one they have actually become.

If every size of church carries particular gifts, it also carries particular temptations. The challenge is not to eliminate those tensions but to recognise them honestly enough that they do not shape our understanding of success.

Larger churches, for example, are capable of extraordinary things. They often possess the resources to sustain specialist ministries, train future pastors, support missionaries across the world, provide substantial mercy ministries within their communities, and develop teams of gifted leaders whose combined strengths exceed those of any individual. Many people have come to faith, been discipled well, and been sent into fruitful ministry through churches whose size enabled opportunities that would simply not have existed elsewhere. To acknowledge that is not to embrace a pragmatic view of ministry, it is simply to recognise that God has frequently been pleased to use large congregations for the advance of his Kingdom.

Yet those strengths can often come at a cost. Complexity has a habit of becoming an issue before we actually realise it. Layers of administration appear and become inescapable. Decision-making becomes slower. The distance between elders and members can widen unless deliberate efforts are made to preserve meaningful pastoral oversight. I saw a social media post where a large church pastor offered a ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ opportunity to meet the lead pastor. I mean…what?! It also becomes increasingly possible for people to experience church primarily as an event rather than as a body to which they belong. Attendance can begin to substitute for participation, and consumers can replace members.

That is not a criticism unique to larger churches. Consumerism is one of the defining temptations of Western Christianity regardless of congregation size. Nevertheless, larger churches must work harder to resist it because the very structures that enable wider ministry can also make anonymity easier. Jonathan Leeman has repeatedly argued that the New Testament’s vision of church membership is one of accountable belonging rather than occasional attendance. That conviction becomes increasingly important as churches grow, because the question is no longer whether everyone can know everyone personally, but whether everyone is genuinely known by someone charged with their spiritual care.

This is why I find myself increasingly uneasy whenever conversations about church health drift instinctively towards attendance. Growth is something to celebrate. Churches should never become content with stagnation. Yet growth itself cannot tell us whether a congregation is more faithful. It can reveal that more people are attending. It cannot reveal whether more people are becoming mature disciples.

Church history contains examples in every direction and of churches of every size. There have been small congregations whose influence has stretched far beyond their own membership. There have also been large churches that have served their cities with remarkable humility while refusing to allow their size to inhibit the spread of the Gospel. Conversely, there have been churches of every size that have drifted from the Gospel while continuing to appear successful by almost every external measure.

Perhaps, then, the greater danger facing many of us is not that our churches are too small or too large, but that we have inherited a definition of success that Scripture itself never gives us.

To Get Big Or Not To Get Big?

That perspective also reshapes how we think about church size vs multiplication. I completely understand that there needs to be a both/and discussion around this, but I pray for an equal discussion and doing. Every growing church eventually faces the strategic question of what to do with size. Is the wisest course to continue expanding, or would the kingdom be better served by sending leaders and members to establish another congregation? There can be no easy answer as circumstances differ. Some churches possess the leadership, maturity and resources to continue growing without losing their ecclesiological integrity. Others may discover that planting another congregation enables more Gospel witness into places that remain largely unreached.

In the Irish context, I think that this question deserves far more attention than it often receives because many churches don’t feel we have the option. However, contextually some churches are larger enough to risk sending people for the planting f new churches. We recently sent a couple of families to start a new work in a nearby town, and for a church of around 40 people that was a big group to ‘lose.’ However, the opportunity was great, God led us that way, and our church has been blessed by the apostolic culture of sending. We rightly thank God for healthy city-based churches that train leaders and have the opportunity to support ministry across the country. At the same time, over a hundred towns still have little or no visible evangelical witness. The question is therefore not simply how we build larger churches, and expand budgets, but how we cultivate a richer network of faithful churches and train pioneers who are willing to leave large churches to see new churches planted. The kingdom of God is rarely strengthened by a concentration of resources alone. More often it advances through the multiplication of ordinary congregations that faithfully preach the Gospel, people and bear witness within their own communities. Perhaps that finally brings us back to where we began. (I’m sure you were hoping I was landing the plane!)

The question was never really, What is the optimal church size?

A better set of questions might sound something like this. Are people genuinely known, not necessarily by everyone, but by those responsible for shepherding them? Do our elders have the capacity to pastor rather than merely be administrators? Can newcomers enter the life of the church without spending months trying to break into relational groups? Are members encouraged to use their gifts in building up the body, or have they become spectators watching a gifted few? Do our structures reflect the church we are or have become, or are we still attempting to function according to assumptions that belonged to another season? And finally, are we willing to ‘lose’ people in order to see new churches begun. I’m often reminded of a friend who organised a church planting conference around 20 years ago. I rejoiced that there were around 200 people there interested in church planting. His response made me pause, “No - there are 200 people interested in talking about church planting.” In the last 20 years, there have been churches planted, but not the movement we had hoped. That leads us to ask these questions then, and they are more demanding because they cannot be answered by looking at numbers and spreadsheets. They require honest reflection on the life of the congregation itself, and in particular, us as leaders.

The healthiest church, I suppose, is not the one that has gathered the greatest number of people, nor the one that has deliberately remained small. It is the church whose leaders know both the opportunities and the limits that accompany the congregation God has entrusted to them. For some, that may mean growing. For others, it may mean planting. For many, it may simply mean resisting the restless assumption that somewhere else, at some larger or smaller size, faithful ministry would finally become easier.

The goal has never been to find the perfect-sized church. It has always been to become the kind of church that remains faithful, whatever size God, in his providence and grace, chooses to give us.