Can a Pro-Growth Pastor Love a No-Growth Church?

“The best advice I can give pastors in small, traditional churches,” said the speaker, “is to move. Such churches won’t accept a pastor who trains others to minister instead of doing all the ministry himself. Plant your own churches. You’ll never change one that already exists.”

I know the feeling. Every year disillusioned pastors committed to growth leave small churches–after trying but failing to bring about change.

It’s true: many characteristics of small churches frustrate growth. In general, small churches are interested in preserving relationships and, thus, status quo. Introduce too much change and people respond with a negative, moral judgment: “Things aren’t right here anymore.”

I have found, however, that small-church pastors can implement growth principles–with some modification. The following four principles are especially important for growing (and surviving as a leader) in a smaller congregation.

REDEFINE WHAT IT MEANS TO STRETCH

I was inspired by a speaker who said, “Churches don’t grow if their pastors aren’t growing. A pastor who is afraid to stretch and take risks goes nowhere.” This stirs the blood of pastors who want to accomplish something for God.

Such speakers, however, usually define stretching as leading churches through the necessary, painful changes that bring numerical growth. The implication: If you are not doing that, you’re stagnant.

But which requires you to stretch more:

* Learning to love the old guard that blocks change, or leading a group where you call the shots?

* Seeking what God has done and is doing in the lives of your people, or implementing ideas from the latest seminar in your “closed and hopeless system?”

* Believing that Christ’s Church is triumphant even when membership has decreased, or leading a 500-member church in a $1.5 million fund drive?

Clearly, pastors can stretch in small churches and in megachurches, only in different ways.

BE SATISFIED WITH SMALL STEPS

We admire missionaries who labor in hard fields. If a missionary serves five years in a Muslim nation and reports a half-dozen converts, we celebrate progress in a “closed” situation. We don’t encourage that person to leave the field.

Many small churches are hard, almost closed fields. Better to celebrate the small steps than bemoan that “nothing is happening”?

Maybe you haven’t been able to organize the congregation into cell groups, but have you formed a women’s prayer breakfast or an adult Bible class, where sharing and prayer take place?

Maybe your worship service is still traditional, but has the congregation learned a new chorus or enjoyed worshiping in a fresh way? Perhaps no one will mistake your service for a megachurch’s, but is it now more inviting than last year?

Small steps may indicate the Lord is using your ministry according to the timetable of hard fields.

ASSUME GOD WAS THERE BEFORE YOU ARRIVED

Many insist pastors are the ones who “cast a vision.” Pastors must ask, “What can this church be that no other church in the community can be?” And then, when they can answer, pastors must move the church in that direction.

Could it be that sometimes God’s answer is “This church should just be itself”? Maybe, just maybe, God was already at work building the kind of church he wanted before Super Leader appeared on the scene.

If your congregation is primarily older people, why not concentrate on reaching senior citizens and let other churches focus on Baby Boomers?

I served as part-time pastor for a small congregation of mostly senior citizens. They had hoped a young pastor would attract young families, but they couldn’t make the necessary improvements (find teachers for Sunday school classes for all ages, for example).

Most newcomers to our church were friends and family of the members, middle-aged people with grown children. Even with these additions, at board meetings a nagging sense of sadness prevailed because “we’re not getting any young people.”

Since I left, the church has hired a semi-retired pastor and has continued to grow slowly by being what it is–a warm, welcoming, caring family of older believers.

If the congregation is comprised of a few extended families, why not focus on its strength, training people to reach family and friends who do not already attend?

That was our aim with “The Cobblestone Commission,” our congregation’s three-year plan for outreach, in which we (1) held our first “Friend Day,” (2) called quarterly prayer days specifically for unchurched people we know, (3) sponsored a video seminar on parenting (having discovered this was the hot topic on our friends’ minds), and (4) planned a two-day Friendship Evangelism Workshop.

Some experts tell pastors to “make sure your church is the one you would attend if you were ‘church-shopping’ in your community.” Doesn’t this suggest that the Lord wasn’t doing much of anything except waiting for you and your new direction to arrive? Pastors too often seek to remake their churches into congregations similar to the ones they grew up in, served on staff for, learned about in a seminar, or attended while in seminary.

Maybe God was at work here before I arrived. Maybe I should discover where he’s leading, and not just ask him to bless my work.

Successful missionaries help people discover what church looks like in the native culture. A missionary to Africa who expects worship services and programs to start and end “on time” receives a rude awakening.

Just as missionaries are not on the field to establish churches for themselves, American pastors are not on the field to create churches their way, but rather churches that fit the people.

PATIENCE AND PERSISTENCE

Many speakers urge pastors to see themselves as strong, take-charge leaders. But such leaders often alienate small churches.

Instead of seeing themselves as CEOs, perhaps pastors should view themselves as secret agents.

After all I’ve said about honoring the church as it is, there are times when change is required. And we must act like a fifth column subversive against the status quo, dropping subtle hints here, recommending a good book there, putting a few seemingly harmless lines in the church newsletter. We must become one of the gang, while at the same time working to make it God’s gang.

Small congregations are skeptical about ideas that come from outside. We must work undercover to plant ideas that will seem to sprout within the congregation itself.

After we arrived at Cobblestone, my wife and I hosted “Listening Dinners” twice a week for three months with every person on the church phone list who would come. I regularly informed the board what people were saying. We also printed comments from the dinners in our monthly newsletters, highlighting the things I felt would contribute to church growth.

Eventually we created “The Cobblestone Commission” as a summary paper and outreach plan. Cobblestone has been able to do a great deal in evangelism in less than a year because I was able to say, “Many of our members would love to see us doing something for growth.” Since members and leadership had already seen these suggestions in the newsletter and had been updated in board meetings, I did not have to say, “As your new pastor, I believe we need to be doing thus-and-so.”

This, of course, takes time. Some urge pastors to push their congregations quickly through growth barriers. Lyle Schaller, in Net Results, has another perspective: “For many congregations the issue is not evangelism or numerical growth, but rather a long-range strategy of planned change. Often that is neither simple nor easy!”

In many smaller congregations, pastors need to view themselves as long-term change agents.

I have decided, however, that my highest goal is to be a spiritual leader. If I can help men and women love God more deeply and serve him more fully, whether the congregation grows numerically or not, my ministry will be a success.

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Steve Bierly is pastor of Cobblestone Reformed Church in Schenectady, New York.