Pastoring a small church, like driving a subcompact, can make you feel inferior.
You’re buffeted by passing eighteen-wheelers, the turbulence making control difficult. Luxury cars cut you off, and their drivers never look back. You feel fragile, unnoticed, insignificant-until you start looking around. Then you realize how many smaller models there are. They’re everywhere.
Small churches, too, are actually a majority. Well over half the churches in the United States are ecclesiastical subcompacts. Of United Methodist churches, 69 percent have an average Sunday morning attendance of less than 100. The Assemblies of God, perhaps the fastest growing denomination, reports a full 70 percent of their churches with membership of less than 100. Southern Baptists report that 59 percent of their churches have a Sunday school enrollment of less than 150.
Despite lip service to “small is beautiful,” the unique struggles and joys of small-church ministry don’t get much attention. Larger churches often claim that they “maintain the small-church feel,” and they’re referring, of course, to a warm sense of belonging, intimacy, and acceptance. Is that an accurate picture? Or a stereotype?
What are the things small-church pastors think about?
LEADERSHIP assigned assistant editor Marshall Shelley to find out. Initial contacts came from the LEADERSHIP subscription list, but as Marshall phoned readers to ask, “What small churches in your area are doing a good job?” the list quickly grew. Then Marshall and his wife, Susan, spent ten days in New York and Vermont visiting a dozen of the pastors recommended. Each of the churches has an average attendance of less than one hundred.
Here’s his report.
Garden City, New York, has one problem other cities wish they had. It’s rich. But that doesn’t make pastoring any easier for George Vanderpoel. His congregation, The Church in the Garden, faces a situation familiar to many small churches in far less affluent areas-it has been unable to grow. During the twelve years Vanderpoel, a retired Navy chaplain, has been with the Long Island congregation, Sunday morning attendance has held steady around thirty.
In some ways, Garden City’s wealth adds to the problem. According to a national women’s magazine, Garden City is among the ten most desirable places to live in the United States. Only two streets are zoned commercial. The rest are tree-lined parkways that shelter the manicured lawns and $150,000 homes of executives and academics who ride the Long Island Railroad to their offices in Brooklyn or Manhattan.
These sociological realities make church growth an uphill battle. Outreach is difficult in an affluent area. People tend to protect their privacy. Bank presidents don’t throw block parties. Door-to-door visitation is outright intrusion.
“The only people our members know are their business contacts,” said Vanderpoel. “And these contacts are made downtown-they don’t live anywhere near Garden City. And people involved in these kinds of professions don’t chat with neighbors over the back fence.”
Garden City’s population is aging, its homes priced out of reach for young families. Most of the houses that are sold are going to Italian Catholics and Jews moving away from New York City.
“A few years ago we subscribed to the list of new mortgage buyers in town,” said Vanderpoel, as we sat in the study/family room of the parsonage, sipping his homemade fruit punch. “We sent a letter to each new resident and followed that up with a phone call. That gained us no new members. But I did get a call from one of the rabbis in town saying that one of his new members had gotten our letter, and he thought it was such a good idea he wanted to borrow our list. So for the next several months, we shared the cost of the list. Eventually we pulled out because the list simply wasn’t fruitful.”
The Church in the Garden was begun in 1946, when members of the American Baptist national office, then in Brooklyn, decided Garden City needed a Baptist church, despite the largely Catholic population. The church has never been large.
When visitors do drop in, they see thirty adults, no children, and no program for young people. This usually means that young families, when they do come, come only once.
“We have a number of visitors,” said Vanderpoel, “But most come looking for a full program. Singles expect a lot of other singles; we have three. Young families expect age-graded classes. In this sense, the Sunday school movement has performed a disservice. Now everyone assumes that a fully age-graded family ministry is an essential for a church. Less and less emphasis has been put on the public worship of God, and instead people are intent on meeting social needs and educating their children.
“If the people who visited our church and went elsewhere just for that reason-I’m not talking about those who left because they couldn’t stand my preaching or something else-if those who left simply because of our size had stayed, our membership would have mushroomed.”
Achieving that critical mass necessary for growth has yet to happen at The Church in the Garden, and the vicious cycle of being unable to grow because the church is too small is a frustration.
“I’d say the key to the survival of this congregation is attracting lapsed Catholics,” said Vanderpoel. “Many are unhappy with the Catholic church over such issues as divorce and birth control. If we could get five families from a Catholic background, we’d get a bunch more because they’re around. Getting those first five, however, is tough. But if we don’t, I don’t know how long the church will survive. … “
What keeps a pastor motivated in a church that hasn’t reached critical mass, that’s hanging on for survival? What keeps him going when for twelve years there’s been no numerical growth?
“I’m a Calvinist,” says Vanderpoel. “I believe in God’s sovereignty and that I must wait on the Lord. I must faithfully teach the Word until he brings the increase.
“But on a more human level, I remind myself that good things happen in small groups. In 1943 I was student body president at Westminster Seminary when, because of the war, we had only twenty-one students. It seemed like an insignificant number for a seminary. Yet I was personally tutored by such professors as John Murray; I gained things in a class of five that you can’t get in larger classes. I saw how Westminster hung on and now is recognized as one of the leading seminaries in the country. I’m committed to small-group ministry; I’m obligated to personally tutor those who want to learn, just as I was tutored.
“More important, you never know who you’ll touch, even in a small ministry. As a Navy chaplain, I was on Okinawa in 1957 ministering to the Third Marine Division. Our week-night Bible study of Romans had maybe fifteen regular attenders. It didn’t seem like much, but one of them was a fellow named Charles Swindoll. Recently I heard Swindoll say over the radio that it was a Bible study in Romans while he was in the Marines where he first sensed a call to the ministry. You never know what God will do-even in a small group.”
* * *
Four hours north of New York City on Interstate 87-the “Northway,” as residents call it-is the town of Glens Falls, named for a picturesque waterfall on the Hudson River. It’s also the site of Cooper’s Cave, a location made famous in James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans. Just over the ridge is Lake George, 32 miles long and still boasting water clean enough to drink.
Like many rural counties throughout the nation, Warren County is depressed, hit by unemployment, but Glens Falls itself has remained largely unaffected. Its retirees still venture to Florida in the winter, and the pulp mills along the Hudson still roll out products for giants like Scott and International paper companies.
When Dick Bird accepted the pastorate of Bay Road United Presbyterian Church, five miles north of Glens Falls, he and his wife, Shirley, knew the people would be like folks in other small churches-slow to change, fearful of anything drastically new.
Two years ago, Bay Road had twenty-one active members when the Birds were called.
“Basically it was one extended family,” said Dick. “Everyone seemed to be related, at least by marriage. We knew that an influx of new people would be a major adjustment.”
Dick had been minister of Christian education at another church in Glens Falls and left following a transition of senior pastors. He and Shirley opened a Christian counseling practice in Glens Falls and continued to lead small-group Bible study and prayer cells until the call came from Bay Road.
“We were careful not to try to pull people away from the church where we’d been previously,” said Bird. “I wouldn’t want to do that, but at the same time, Shirley and I were realistic enough to know that some of the people from our small groups would wind up following us to the new church.”
Any small church can find new members threatening, especially when people have become used to a comfortable routine. Some people choose a small church precisely because of its smallness, its familiarity, its steady rhythms. Dick and Shirley, who earn pocket change by selling cabbages and tomatoes from their garden to a local deli, realized some careful cultivation would be needed to prepare the Bay Road soil for potential growth. Even though members might think they’re welcoming visitors, the slightest hesitation, any subconscious reluctance will be communicated, and newcomers will know they’re not really wanted.
“From our counseling background,” said Dick, who still sees clients since he’s only three-quarter time at the church, “we knew that any change can be traumatic. Not recognizing all the faces at the worship service-having to learn new names-can be frustrating. Knowing everyone at the coffee hour is a different experience from being jammed elbow-to-elbow with newcomers.
“With twenty people who are family, you know what to talk about. There’s a sense of belonging. As new people come in, suddenly you have to start from ground zero in your conversations. That can be threatening for people unaccustomed to making friends quickly.”
Even before they accepted the call, Dick and Shirley began preparing the people at Bay Road for these changes at least intellectually. They asked, more than once and in as many ways as they could think of, “Are you ready to have new people join this church?” The people agreed that, yes, they were ready; they wanted to grow.
“Of course,” said Dick, “knowing intellectually that you’re ready and being ready emotionally are two different things.”
That’s why Dick and Shirley began taking some low-key, practical steps as soon as the new faces began to appear.
Their large home became an open house where they frequently would have small groups of people over for meals-two or three of the original congregation together with two or three newcomers.
“Mixing them in our home gave us a head start toward blending at church,” said Shirley.
In individual conversations, Dick and Shirley also tried to engender an appreciation for the “other” group.
“With the people from our small group, we’d point out that the folks at Bay Road haven’t had the same opportunity to meet lots of new people. We were sure to express how grateful we were that they’d invited us to come to Bay Road,” said Dick.
“On the other hand, with the original Bay Road folks, we made sure to affirm their history, to point out how we appreciated their strong Sunday school program, for instance, and how it was great to be able to build on a solid foundation.”
Publicly, the Birds haven’t made an issue of the changing makeup of the congregation: no sermons on integrating the two groups, no prayer-requests for unity, no pleas from the pulpit to beware of cliquishness. What they have done is more subtle: each Sunday morning includes time when Dick asks, “Are there any joys you have to share?”
As people tell about the excitement of Grandma’s visit or the birth of a niece, there’s a growing acceptance of one another as individuals.
No, the struggle to adjust hasn’t been easy, nor is it over after two years.
“Back before we came, the weekly offering was about $8,” said Shirley. “And the Women’s Association would have a monthly project to raise funds to keep the church open. Now that we have seventy members and a $30,000 budget, the Women’s Association is feeling left out.”
Dick admits the church still has traces of being “closed in on ourselves.” People are still uneasy about evangelism or giving to overseas missions.
Recently the Birds’ son David, who is preparing to work with Wycliffe Bible Translators, wanted to go door-to-door, inviting people in the community to the church. When the idea was presented to the session, it was turned down.
“People felt that ‘we know our neighbors, and they know the churches,’ ” said Dick. “They didn’t want to be associated with the Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses. So we backed off on this approach.”
Instead, the church does visit new residents and take food to needy families contacted through a woman member who works in the school district. And recently the church voted to support Youth for Christ, a development Bird sees as a major step forward.
“I pray we will dream God’s dream for us, both individually and as a church. He didn’t create us to be comfortable, but to love people,” said Dick. “Part of counseling, as I see it, is to get people into a healing community. That’s my goal for our body-to be a healing community, and the church has all the resources to be exactly that.”
* * *
Pastors of large churches sometimes long for the simple joys of a small church-knowing everyone by name, dealing with individuals instead of committees, not having a complex budget, and on and on.
Those “simple joys” nearly caused Dennis Marquardt a breakdown. Yes, there are advantages to small-church ministry, but the hidden pressures can be devastating. The worst is over for Marquardt now; he no longer spends hours wondering if he should leave the ministry, but he still endures a migraine headache that hasn’t let up in four years.
In 1978 Marquardt was youth pastor of the 700-member Assembly of God in Arlington, Virginia, when he began thinking about planting a new church. Two young couples from his ministry were moving to Vermont to work in an IBM plant near Burlington. Since they would be eighteen miles from the nearest Assembly of God, they asked Dennis and Bevie Jo Marquardt if they would help them start a church closer to home. After consulting with the denomination’s Northern New England District, the Marquardts agreed.
“We left the security of the large church without really knowing what we were getting in for,” said Marquardt. “But we knew we’d have to live by faith.”
Together with the denomination, the core group decided to plant the church in Vergennes, twenty miles south of Burlington, an area dotted with dairy farms and roadside stands selling pure Vermont maple syrup.
Vergennes claims the title of “smallest city in America”-1.8 square miles-a distinction earned largely because the dreams of Vermont’s legendary hero Ethan Allen never materialized. Allen envisioned a bustling metropolis on the shores of Lake Champlain and established the city charter in 1788. The metropolis (“Thank heaven,” say the locals) never came about.
Now the city of 2,300 is home for Simmons Precision, which makes instrument panels for the Defense Department, and Kennedy Brothers wood products, a regular stop for the busloads of tourists heading to the Green Mountains.
The slower pace of the small city, however, didn’t translate into time to relax. If anything, the deliberate nature of Vermonters made Marquardt’s work harder.
When Dennis, Bevie Jo, and two-year-old Christel arrived in Vergennes with their U-Haul in October, 1978, they stayed with the Adamses, one of the two couples who’d urged them to come, for two months until they found a house.
While they were still house hunting, another young couple from Arlington, Steve and Helen Markiss, decided they too would move to Vermont to help plant the new church. Steve, a carpenter, figured he could find enough work to live on. So for over a month, three families-the Adamses, the Markisses, and the Marquardts-lived under one roof amid two truckloads of boxes.
“We were sure the Vermonters suspected we were a cult,” said Marquardt. “Here we were, nine people with Virginia license plates, two of us with beards, trying to start a church.”
Early in November, Marquardt secured permission to use Vergennes Elementary School for Sunday services. Even though the school board charged nothing, the new congregation voted to pay $25 a month for use of the building.
Services began the Sunday after Thanksgiving, with three locals attending besides the nine transplanted Virginians. Within nine months the church grew to thirty-five, slipped down to eighteen after a year and a half, and by March, 1983, had reached fifty. The uncertainty about attendance was a constant source of stress.
“You always worry about someone not showing up,” said Marquardt. “If the person responsible for the nursery suddenly isn’t in the mood to come, you’re stuck. That’s a problem in a small church we never had to face in Arlington.
“Our spirits rode up and down with the weekly attendance. I know you’re not supposed to be numbers conscious, but numbers do represent people. And when we were ministering to people, we felt our sacrifice was paying off; when no one was there, I wondered if it all was a waste and asked myself where I would go after I failed here.”
The sheer number of details that fall on a pastor in a small church also began to weigh on him.
“All I wanted to do was teach and preach (and play the piano if I couldn’t find anyone else),” said Marquardt. “But I continually had to decide on things like what to use for a pulpit, who had the songbooks, how many chairs to set up-would forty be too many or not enough?-and who would lead what.”
Finances were another source of tension. The denominational district set Marquardt’s salary at $100 a week plus whatever the church could do. As a step of faith the initial three couples pledged to give an additional $100 a week.
“Amazingly enough,” said Marquardt, “they never missed a check. But, of course, I didn’t know if the money would be there or not. There were times when I had to calm Bevie Jo’s fears about our personal finances. It began to get me down.
“Even my sermon preparation was suffering,” he said. “When you go from preaching to seven hundred, as I’d done in Virginia, to preaching to seven, you wonder if the hours of study are worth it. And when four or five daydream through the service, your motivation vanishes.”
The following year a glimmer of hope appeared. At the town’s ecumenical Good Friday service, Dennis was asked to speak. “That invitation gave us our public acceptance,” said Marquardt. “With the other clergy in town accepting me, people finally realized we weren’t a cult. But we still didn’t have a building of our own, and among Vermonters, a church without a building is suspect. People keep wondering, How long will these guys be around? I knew we wouldn’t grow much larger until we had a building to show we were permanent.”
A few months later, Dennis began to get headaches. Soon they were an everyday occurrence. Doctors treated him for allergies and hay fever, without success. Dennis compensated by working harder, not taking a vacation, and using powerful prescription pain pills to control the headaches, up to twenty-four pills a day.
“One day the pharmacist handed me my pills and said, ‘Reverend, if you took this bottle out on the street, you could be a rich man.’ I told him, ‘Don’t worry, I need these things.’ “
Eventually, with the help of the denomination, the church was able to buy ten acres north of Vergennes, and with much of the labor provided by members, the Assembly of God Christian Center began worshiping in its own building in March, 1983. Attendance quickly rose to ninety, then one hundred. But Dennis Marquardt was exhausted.
In May, he finally checked into a headache clinic in Boston that specialized in undiagnosed causes. It wasn’t long before they identified the problem as emotional burnout.
“I’d been sweeping the floor, typing bulletins, cutting stencils, everything-it was easier to do them myself than to try to get someone else to do them. Plus I was internalizing the people problems I dealt with-there really weren’t other ministers around for me to open up to,” he said.
At that point, the congregation held a business meeting without Marquardt present. As one of the elders there said, “We’ve got to do something for our pastor. We’ve got to get him well.”
That was when the people took virtually full responsibility for administering the church ministries. “Essentially they freed me to do nothing but prepare sermons,” said Marquardt. “It’s been healthy not only for me, but for the church, too. Now the elders are doing a good job of leading worship, and when our family vacations this summer, they’ll preach, too.”
The headache remains, though he’s down from twenty-four to six pills a day. “I’m learning to live with the headache and not let it affect me,” he says. “I don’t remember what normal feels like. But the five years of building this church have been worth it all. At last, now I’m able to sit back and begin to enjoy the fruit of all that labor.”
* * *
Appearances in Woodstock, Vermont, can be deceiving. It looks like a Currier and Ives woodcut come to life. The classic New England atmosphere in the mountain town is no accident; the town fathers work hard to maintain its quaint brick shops with the small signs outside done in gold-leaf British pub lettering. Its covered bridges are authentic, dating back to days when their builders worried about skittish horses refusing to cross rickety open bridges.
Though the town caters to tourists, no garish billboards assault your eyes with directions to the nearest miniature golf course or trinket shop.
No, the town square is reserved, dignified, aloof. An outsider naturally assumes the people are stereo-typically New Englandish also-just as reserved and aloof as the eighteenth-century brick. But David Waugh has found that reserved exteriors often house people eager to be loved. People have responded to his warm, unassuming ministry.
Waugh’s church, Woodstock Baptist Fellowship, meets just west of town in a renovated Grange hall, where eighty to one hundred people attend each Sunday. The congregation includes dairy farmers, shopkeepers, young people working summer jobs at Woodstock Inn to support their winter ski habit, and men released from the nearby state correctional facility.
“Recently we had a guest speaker who preached on the need to love the unlovely,” said Waugh. “He didn’t know our congregation very well, and he asked rhetorically, ‘What would you do if a convicted rapist or murderer visited this service?’ What he didn’t know was that he had both sitting in the pews before him. They’d been given passes to attend regularly.”
Like the tidy looks of Woodstock, the makeup of Waugh’s congregation is no accident. Waugh consciously works to create an atmosphere where everyone, no matter how unlikely a churchgoer, can feel welcome. His effort requires a different set of tools than most pastors use.
“One of the unique features of small-town ministry is that you’re called not just for spiritual needs,” he said. As he spoke he brushed his hair into place after taking off his motorcycle helmet. He’d loaned his car to college students working with the community’s youth for the summer, and now he was commuting on two wheels between church and home. “I’ve been called to help shingle a roof, to dig up a septic tank, and to watch someone’s kids while Mom’s in labor. Preacher-boys who don’t get their hands dirty will never make it in a small town.”
While doing visitation, Waugh has found himself walking through manure on a dairy farm and wrestling with pipes, wrenches, and clogged drains in someone’s kitchen. It’s his style of pastoring.
“Even in a small town, people are busy,” he said. “They can’t just stop what they’re doing to talk to the preacher. So when I arrive, I tell people not to stop what they’re doing. I’ll help.”
That means that Waugh’s wardrobe isn’t all coat and tie. If he’s visiting someone in town, he’ll wear his tie, but if he’s seeing a farmer, he wears jeans so he can be ready to pick up a hoe, paintbrush, or help with the milking machine.
David’s wife, Becky, enjoys telling about the day he was leaving home dressed in blue jeans, sport coat, and tie. “What are you doing?” she asked. His reply: “Today I’m prepared for anything.”
His car, when not loaned out, always carries overalls, a spare shirt, old shoes, a hammer, and a carpenter’s apron.
“One of the greatest compliments I ever heard a pastor receive was given to a seminary prof of mine down in Kentucky,” Waugh said. “A farmer in his congregation described him by saying, ‘He doesn’t mind getting manure on his shoes.’ He knew what it took in a small town.”
Waugh’s commitment to identify with people has at times been stretched, but it has proven effective.
For instance, one Sunday, Charles and Gretchen visited the church. They were unmarried, cohabitating, working together as masseur and masseuse, and after recently moving to Woodstock were “just trying out every church in town.” Charles, a former lawyer, had given up law because “I was a defense attorney and I kept getting guilty people off.” He’d worked as a truck driver before meeting Gretchen and learning to give massages.
When Waugh visited Charles after their second time at Woodstock Baptist, Charles asked if he’d ever had a deep muscle massage.
“No, but I’d like to sometime.”
“How about right now?”
“Are you serious?” Waugh said, suddenly wondering if his commitment to identify was really so necessary after all. “Aw, you don’t have your equipment here at home, and I wouldn’t want you to open your shop.”
“No problem at all,” said Charles, as he quickly unfolded a portable table.
“I suppose I’ll have to take off my shirt?” Waugh asked tentatively.
“You’ll have to take off more than that,” said Charles, handing him a towel.
As Waugh recalled the episode, he said, “Here I was, wearing nothing but a towel, in the house of a stranger as he pounded and prodded my back. All I could think was What do you say to a naked preacher? It’s amazing what a person has to do in evangelism.”
Charles and Gretchen kept coming to Woodstock Baptist Fellowship, eventually committed themselves to Christ, and asked to be baptized.
“At that point, I knew it was time to confront them about their living arrangement. So we talked about it for several months. A year later I married them in their cabbage patch, and subsequently they were baptized and joined the church.”
Charles and Gretchen are now part of a group from Woodstock Baptist that’s launching a satellite church in Bridgewater Center, eight miles west.
“Small towns require a patient ministry,” said Waugh. “It takes time to get through to people, and even then, sometimes the only way you can get through is by letting them see that just because you’re a pastor, you’re really no different than they are.”
* * *
Fifteen years ago, Dean Ryder’s shoulder-length hair, beads, and sandals made him an unlikely prospect to pastor a small country church. They certainly set him apart from the clean-shaven majority at Denver Conservative Baptist Seminary.
In the years during and after seminary, Ryder directed Help House, an inner-city facility for runaways, delinquents, and those with drug problems. It was a ministry of continual crisis counseling, irregular hours, and constant financial worries.
“Many times we’d empty our pockets of change to see if we had enough to buy a package of spaghetti,” said Ryder. But he preferred the direct caring ministry to what he considered a more insulated ministry in the church.
When The Denver Post ran a feature on the halfway house, Ryder’s picture appeared above the caption “I would feel confined as a pastor.”
For the past eight years, however, Dean has been serving First Baptist Church in Newfane, New York, a community of fruit growers and small manufacturers forty-five minutes north of Buffalo.
His appearance has changed-somewhat. The hair is shorter, and the beads are gone, but the beard remains.
His attitude toward the church has changed, too, but his direct caring ministry has not. In fact, the same caring skills he developed in the halfway house have helped overcome a problem haunting many small churches: bad memories.
Memories linger in a small church. That fact is an advantage when the history is pleasant, and the recollections of births, baptisms, and special events help bond members together. But if the past has been rocky, history can be divisive and memories destructive.
“When I first came to Newfane,” said Ryder, “it seemed like every conversation included something about ‘those people who left.’ They spoke as if it happened last month. A group had split off and started another church-but it was twenty years ago!”
Ryder decided to concentrate his ministry on caring and finding creative ways to meet needs, not concentrating on past hurts. The effort has taken time, but it’s worked.
“It’s been a couple years since I’ve heard anything disparaging about the other church,” said Ryder. As attendance has gradually increased from thirty-five to nearly eighty, those who felt deserted and rejected have been able to erase their resentment.
What happened? Much of it, to be sure, is Ryder’s personality. He enjoys trying something new and doesn’t mind when people laugh at him.
“I try to preach a couple of first-person sermons each year, dressed as a character from the Bible. But I may not have the nerve again after last time,” he says with a grin.
In his last pulpit appearance in costume, the heavy-set Ryder entered the sanctuary as King Herod. A little girl, seeing the bearded man with robe and crown, whispered to her mother in a voice that carried throughout the small sanctuary: “Look, Mommy, it’s the Burger King!”
“We just about had to end the service right there,” said Ryder. But the laughter helps create an atmosphere where malignant memories can be replaced by healthy ones.
Ryder also takes advantage of the small-town opportunities. He coaches a boys’ baseball team each summer and serves as chaplain at Boy Scout camp each year. He and the other five pastors in town arranged with Newfane Intercommunity Hospital to get the name and religious background of every person who’s admitted, and they make sure everyone is visited. He invests time in individuals.
“There’s more program at a large church,” said Ryder. “But there’s more pastoring at a small church.”
Ryder’s pastoral style is patient, unhurried. One woman asked Ryder to talk with her husband. “He needs to go to the doctor for his prostate problem, but he pretends there’s nothing wrong,” she said.
Ryder dropped by that week and eventually turned the conversation around to Ray’s health.
“When’s the last time you went to the doctor, Ray?”
Ray admitted it had been years and agreed he ought to set an appointment. But a week later, when Ryder checked, Ray hadn’t called. Ryder gave him another chance, but when Ray still didn’t act, Ryder found out the doctor’s name, made an appointment, and arranged a time when Ray could come right in, rather than enduring a long sit in the waiting room. Then Ryder called Ray.
“I happened to be in the doctor’s office,” he said. “And I set up an appointment for you. And don’t worry, he’ll see you as soon as you arrive.”
The day of the appointment, Ryder stopped by Ray’s home to make sure he kept the appointment. Ray had his suitcase packed; he knew the condition was serious. Ryder drove him to the hospital. Within a week Ray had surgery, and the problem was taken care of.
“In a large church, I wouldn’t have time to invest in individuals like that,” said Ryder. “But in a small church I can, and that kind of caring is contagious.
Recently we had a man hospitalized, and he got 125 cards from our church! Some people sent three or four. He was overwhelmed.”
Despite his earlier feelings, Ryder has not found the pastorate confining. “I spend three nights a week with my family and go to Scout camp with my son. With a small church, it’s easier to keep those family priorities straight.
“I couldn’t be happier than I am here,” he said. “You couldn’t get me to take a larger church with all the hassles. The only way I’d pastor a large church is if First Baptist grows into one.”
Reflections
These are only five stories of small churches. They could be multiplied thousands of times, for they represent some of the struggles faced by little churches everywhere.
But many stories remain untold. Many questions remain unanswered, such as these asked by other small-church pastors:
“How can you have a youth ministry when there are only three teens in the church?”
“What can you do when everyone in the church works for the same company-some in management, some in labor-and the union calls a strike? Suddenly company tensions become church tensions.”
“What does evangelism mean in a small town where everyone knows everyone else, and people have pretty much made up their minds about spiritual things?”
“In the last five years, my district superintendent has spent exactly an hour and a half with me. Where can I go for guidance with pastoral problems?”
“How do you handle one stubborn individual when he makes up 5 percent of the congregation?”
One pastor enjoys reciting a line from Alan Redpath. He says it gives him the strength to go on. “If you’re a Christian pastor, you’re always in a crisis-either in the middle of one, coming out of one, or going into one.”
No, discouragement and problems aren’t unique to small churches even though they seem to arrive there frequently. Time and time again, however, after reviewing the troubles of the church, the pastor would look at me, smile, and say, “But you know, I love these people. We may not have a youth ministry, but I went to Carla’s volleyball game last week, and I’m taking the two junior high guys camping next week. Sure small churches have problems, but you’ll never get away from those. I belong here. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”
A week after returning from the Northeast, Susan and I survived a hit-and-run accident that totaled our Datsun 210. At fifty miles an hour, we hit the rear of a pickup truck that had run a stop sign and sped directly into our path. The engine of our little 210 collapsed like an accordion, but the windshield didn’t shatter, nor was the passenger compartment penetrated. We walked away unhurt except for Susan’s bruised knees.
That experience, and the experiences of the previous week, taught us something about both small cars and small churches. They may not get much respect from the bigger models, but they manage to fit in all the necessary equipment. In a collision-whether fender to fender or person to person-they sustain a lot of damage, but the pounding can be survived. I’m impressed with their durability. Both small cars and small churches are here to stay.
Marshall Shelley is assistant editor of LEADERSHIP.
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