Special Ops

I grew up in a wonderful church. It was a vibrant congregation that in somewhere around 30 years or so had grown to have 1500 members, 900 of whom you would see in church on a typical Sunday and 500 of whom would stick around for Sunday school or Bible class. It operated a full parochial school, K-8, with about 200 students and a separate class for every grade. I cannot praise highly enough the spiritual and academic foundation I received in that school. There are hymns I know today by heart because I learned them in school. And I discovered that my grade school education at their school prepared me to excel even in the academically most rigorous public high school in that city (and indeed one of the top in a state known for its fine public school system at the time).

But there was one fault it had, a rather common fault among large churches, as I have since discovered: the members constantly made snide comments about smaller churches, especially if they happened to be struggling. When a mission—their own daughter church!—faltered as it tried to get off the ground, there was a great amount of glee, for the failure of others underscored their own success. Consequently, my home congregation really didn’t understand smaller churches and looked at them with an attitude of contempt mixed with pity.

I have been able to get a different perspective because God has called me to serve smaller churches. Small churches and huge churches have been around since the beginning of Christianity. Jerusalem, Ephesus, Corinth, and Rome were the megachurches of the first century, while most of the other first century churches were small churches. (When Ignatius of Antioch wrote his letters a century after Christ’s birth, he assumed that all Christians in a city could fit in a large room of a house where all could see the bishop presiding over the service.) More importantly, big churches and small churches operate differently from each other, occupy different niches, and must be encouraged to flourish if the Christian church is to continue to advance.


Big churches excel at offering a wide variety of programs, each of which is likely to serve at least one significant segment of their membership. They tend to be homogenous, where people share a common ethnicity, language, and economic class. Often large churches have grown up in newly settled areas, where members experience the phenomenon of being pioneers both on their block and in their church. If the large church remains in a stable community, it can flourish for many decades or even centuries. Its large size makes it fairly economical to run, its programs will be of a high caliber, and it can help the church-at-large address needs that a smaller church or even a consortium of smaller churches cannot address.

Big churches, however, have to do things in a big way. That means that the pastor and church leaders are constantly having to make big and sweeping changes, from building new sanctuaries to revamping youth ministry from the ground up. However, big changes also can quickly alienate members and lead to a steep decline. In smaller churches a big change could be ameliorated by a close relationship between the pastor and church leaders on the one hand and the ordinary lay members on the other, but the size of a large congregation will dictate that the pastor will know few people well except for key lay leaders. As long as a large congregation’s members are fairly homogenous, whatever decisions the leadership makes will probably reflect the values of the membership. However, when major demographic changes occur or controversial decisions have to be made, the longstanding members often feel that the one connection they had to the church has been lost and they move elsewhere.

The problems of small churches are rather obvious. They can be just one major building repair from closure. Moreover, it seems woefully inefficient to train a pastor and send him to preach to a few dozen people. But small churches have a degree of agility unknown to larger congregations. Because small churches value relationships among their members and because the pastor knows his members well, it is easier to introduce new programs or to be more flexible in making changes. It is here that the church is most like to cross boundaries of ethnicity, culture, and class. Moreover, small churches have historically had a much better record than large churches of bringing in people from outside the Christian church. (To the degree that evangelism work is faltering now in the U.S., it is in large part because small churches have forgotten their missionary task and left it up to large churches, which are less capable in this area. In part this is because many formerly large churches in urban and rural areas have become small churches, but are still acting as if they were large churches.)

Rather than throw stones at each other, large and small churches should see themselves as valuable partners in God’s kingdom. Large churches are very much like the regular forces of an army, while small churches are more like special ops. When trying to hold ground or establish a beachhead, as on D-Day, an army needs hundreds of infantry troops backed by artillery, air support, and all the other specialties of an armed force. But when trying to make a lightning raid or sabotage some facility of the enemy, a large army is useless and special ops are needed. In a similar way, large churches take the beachhead and hold it against the satanic foe by bringing all of their specialties to bear, while smaller churches need to use their agility to make advance strikes against the devil’s kingdom.

A few years ago the U.S. Army rethought its entire strategy as they realized they needed more than just combat troops on the ground. It is time for people in the church to realize that we need something better than the one-size-fits-all policy we have now.