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Ministries with great capacity also foster small, high-contact ministries at the street level. Those and other small independent ministries like Emmaus tackle everyday disasters that aren't easily reached by the giants of compassion. People battered by hurricanes of schizophrenia and stds, alcoholism and family dysfunction, poverty and prejudice call for no less expertise. Indeed, they demand the kind of vision, commitment, and sheer grit that come from being part of a small, mutually supportive ministry—one small enough to be untouched by corporate-think or by the reduced expectations we sometimes call "realism." Such ministries attract and hold people who are willing to believe that the impossible can be accomplished.

Small churches, also, can serve, nurture, and rescue people in ways that only small-church intimacy can provide. Big churches have large capacity for innovation and setting trends, and they can create specialized ministries for special audiences. But there is an advantage to smallness.

In his recent book, The Great Giveaway, David Fitch addresses the knee-jerk way in which evangelicals admire and copy churches and ministries that garner large followings. He speaks of evangelicalism's "culture of numbers" and shows how it often owes more to free-market capitalism's concern for efficient production than it does to the gospel.

Is there really a virtue in smallness? Fitch thinks so. "The question is," he writes, "what kind of organization facilitates the inner workings of a local body of Christ that are necessary to properly mature new believers into followers of Christ and participants in his salvation through the body of Christ? … Once we see it is the quality of these inner workings of the body of Christ (not the quantity) that [is] necessary for the nurturance of each new convert, we no longer manage the body of Christ as if its size were irrelevant."

What are some of the things that require the high-contact context of a small church? Fitch offers this list: "As the body of Christ, we speak the truth one to another in love (Eph. 4:15), we bring things out into the light (Eph. 5:8-13), we gather together to resolve conflict and forgive one another (Matt. 18:15-17), we discern and make decisions (Matt. 18:18-20), we share the gifts of the Holy Spirit with one another for mutual upbuilding (1 Cor. 12, 14; Rom. 12:3-8; Eph. 4:11-13; 1 Peter 4:10-11), we confess our sins one to another and pray for and anoint the sick (James 5:14-16), and we gather to take part in the Lord's Supper in his special presence and worship (1 Cor. 11)."

"Activities such as these define the church as Christ's body," he writes. However, "these inner workings … rely on interpersonal community that resists larger, more efficient forms of organization."

My conversation with the leaders of Emmaus Ministries prompted me to start thinking about the ways in which Jesus said, in effect, "Small is great." Jesus talked about the kingdom of God largely in terms of small things. Consider the following, familiar comparisons.

First, the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, which, "though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches" (Matt. 13:32; cf. Mark 4:32; Luke 13:19).

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February 2006, Vol. 50, No. 2