Not all small churches are created equal. Sure, some are small because the leadership doesn’t have a strong vision for reaching their community. But Karl Vaters believes that the pressure to raise numbers has kept many small churches from becoming the best small church they can be. For the past 20 years, Karl has served as pastor of Cornerstone Christian Fellowship in Fountain Valley, California, and in that time his church has grown—and shrunk—and finally settled into its mission to be the best small church it can be. He blogs about the ways small churches can be better small churches at NewSmallChurch.com and wrote a book called The Grasshopper Myth (NewSmallChurch.com, 2013) to challenge small church leaders to think bigger by thinking smaller. He spoke with BuildingChurchLeaders.com managing editor Laura Leonard about how small churches can find their niche and become the small church God has called them to be.
How did you come to see yourself as a “small church pastor”?
I started in ministry in the early 1980s, just when church-growth teaching was beginning to take root. I was an associate pastor for five or six years, and then I pastored my own small church that we were able to get strong and healthy, and from there we went to another church that was dysfunctional. We left before it started hurting our family too badly. For the last 21 years, I have been at Cornerstone Christian Fellowship. When we showed up, it was about 35 people who were just about ready to close the doors. We were able to work together to get the church healthy and strong, running about 75 or 80 for quite awhile.
When The Purpose Driven Church came out in the mid-90s, I had all of our leadership couples read it. It changed the way we did everything, and we grew to 200-250 or so. I realized we were at the 200 barrier, so I started reading, studying, and going to conferences to try to figure out how to break through the 200 barrier. We made it to about 400 people for a little while, and we were in a rented facility at that time.
After about a year at that level, things started going really south, really quickly. We started losing people, we lost the facility we were in and couldn’t find another place to rent, and we ended up back in our original building. We shrank so much it wasn’t fun anymore, and I stopped counting—we were probably in the low 100s. I was in a bad place spiritually and emotionally, just trying to figure out was going on. I followed all the rules, and it didn’t work.
A former pastor who is now a counselor walked me through that long season. He said, “Karl, you’ve got to figure out how to redefine success.” When he said that, I wanted to punch him in the nose. I thought what he meant was, You’ve been trying to jump a 10-foot bar but you’re only jumping 9 feet, so lower the bar to 9 feet and call it a success. I couldn’t do that. But he said, “Forget about jumping a bar. If the bar is to your left, success is to your right.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked. And he said, “You have to redefine success. It’s not about jumping the bar anymore. Success for you is going to look different than butts in the seats. You’ve got to figure out what it is.” It took me awhile to take that in. But once I did, I realized he was right. God had given us a small church, and the amount of work that it was going to take to become a big church was going to be (1) outside my gifting, and (2) maybe not where God was taking us. And if we were going to be a small church, we should be the best small church we possibly could. That’s what success looks like for us. I don’t think you’ll find a church of our size anywhere that does ministry—that does missions, that does outreach, that does worship—any better than we do.
Should numbers ever be a goal for a church?
I don’t think numbers are a good goal. Numbers can often help in assessment, but they’re not the only assessment tool. If you look around, 80 percent of the churches in the world are under 100 people, and 90 percent are under 200 people. What if that’s part of a strategy God wants to use, rather than a problem God wants to fix?
I’m very slow to say that God calls some churches to be small, because this ministry of mine celebrating small churches can still sound like settling: This is all we’re meant to be. But there is a different set of skills that are needed over the 200 barrier than under the 200 barrier. What if your leadership style is more shepherd and less rancher? More pastor and less administrator? That’s the case for me. When we grew to 400, I spent two-thirds of my ministry time doing things that I hate and am not gifted for. I spent my time on budgets, on staff meetings, on fundraising, on looking for new buildings. I tried to hide it on Sundays, but the fact of the matter was, when we were a church of 400, I was thrilled with the numbers, but I wasn’t happy with myself and the different kind of ministry I had to do.
It’s not that I don’t think that ministry needs to be done—it does need to be done at those levels. But I’m not called or gifted to do that. And I think the vast majority of pastors aren’t. Most of us are shepherds at heart and we’re being told we must become ranchers—but if we’re not a good rancher, what do we do?
Talk to me about the term “small church.” What does it mean to you?
I spent a lot of time debating the term that I wanted to use. I experimented with everything from “microchurch” to “neighborhood church” to “family church.” And I stuck with “small church” for a couple reasons. One, because it’s accurate. There are people who say, “There are no small churches.” Well, yeah, there are. Look around. There are tons of them. And then they say, “What I mean by that is, there are no insignificant churches.” That’s true! But small is not insignificant. Those two words are not synonyms. We have taken the word small, and in our head we transpose it to mean “less than.” And that just isn’t the case. A rose bush is smaller than a redwood. And a rose bush will always be smaller than a redwood. But that doesn’t make roses less valuable than redwoods. They have different purposes.
What do you think it will take to change the connotation of the term “small church”?
Those leading small churches have to recognize that as a valid ministry all its own. That was step number one for me. I got to the point of despising my church and myself, and being angry at God, because the church stayed small. Then, when I started redefining success, I wondered, Why am I mad at God for giving me a wonderful, healthy, vibrant small church? That’s a valid thing to be.
Second, we need to spread that word outside of the small churches. Everyone needs to recognize there are certain things that small churches can do that bigger churches can’t. Some people are blessed and encouraged by going to a big church because it reminds them that their faith is a part of something big, but there are a whole lot of people for whom a big church is just intimidating. It pushes them away. And they need a smaller, more intimate place to worship. It’s not because they’re selfish, or don’t want to reach out, or aren’t interested in evangelism, or don’t want to invite their friends. It’s because the way they worship fits better in smaller, more intimate settings. If we only push for churches to get bigger, we will lose the people whose worship heart is drawn to more intimate settings.
Your book is called The Grasshopper Myth—what is that myth? Why is it harmful to small churches?
The book of Numbers talks about the Hebrews going into the land of Israel—they send in the 12 spies, and when the spies come back, 10 of the 12 say, “We saw the Nephilim there … we seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them” (Num. 13:33). The grasshopper myth begins when I look at myself and say, “I’m not as big, therefore I’m not as good. I’m just a grasshopper.”
I don’t believe that my megachurch pastor friends are trying to make me feel inferior when they talk about the church that grew from 50 to 2,000 in three years. If I don’t see a grasshopper in my own mirror, I will celebrate the growth of that church rather than feel jealous of the growth of that church. But if I see a grasshopper in my mirror, I will be jealous of another church that’s growing. And I should never be jealous of another church that’s growing, because if they’re growing, on conversion growth especially, that is souls that are being plucked out of hell and into heaven for eternity. And we should all celebrate that, no matter which pastor they’re sitting in front of on Sunday morning.
So if a small church pastor can recognize their own value and not see a grasshopper in the mirror anymore, that is the beginning of small churches becoming vibrant, healthy, innovative, outward-reaching, and a powerful force in the kingdom of God.
You write about the importance of innovative small churches. Why is it important?
In the church, too often we have a one-size-fits-all attitude. One pastor or one group of leaders or one church decides that they like a certain size, a certain style of music, a certain type of lighting, and that becomes the definition of excellence. And that’s fine, but there are a bunch of people who just don’t like the corporate, somewhat impersonal feel of a larger church. They want to go to a smaller church, but not one that is settling for less. They don’t want a place where the paint is peeling and where the bathroom smells and it doesn’t look like anything has been updated since 1987. They might, however, go to a bohemian-style coffee shop in downtown San Francisco, or they might go to an art studio in downtown Manhattan that hosts a church in the back. None of those churches will grow large, because they’re reaching out to a segment of people that is small. But if those people could go to a church where people look and sound like them, and were meeting in a place that has more of a resonance with their hearts, then that’s going to work. That’s part of the innovativeness that we need as church leaders: we need to start imagining church in different ways than we have traditionally done it.
What types of questions should an innovative small church be asking?
I’ll start with an example from my church. About 13 years ago, we repaved our parking lot, and all of a sudden a whole bunch of kids were showing up with skateboards. My youth pastor and I looked at each other and asked: “Do we put up ‘No Skateboarding’ signs? Or do we find some skateboard ramps?” We went and bought ramps. We now have the only skateboard park in town, and have been running it for 13 years. Those kids showed up, and they told us their need. And we said, “Okay, we can meet that need.” Now there are hundreds of kids in our town who only know us as The Skate Church. The innovation was sitting right there, and we chose ramps over signs, welcome over refusal.
That’s an important point. A question churches might ask is, How do we figure out our specific call? Sometimes the need presents itself; it’s about paying attention.
Just keep doing what you’re doing, and keep track: In what areas do you tend to do well? Every church does something well, and sometimes we just don’t pay attention to it because it doesn’t feel “churchy.” Find the thing that you tend to do well—you and your leaders and your congregation—and then do it on purpose.
What would you like to say to small church pastors?
You don’t have to become bigger to do church well. You don’t need one more dollar, you don’t need one more person, you don’t need one more square foot in your building—you don’t even need a building—in order to do right now what God is calling your church to be. Don’t wait until some future time when you have more people to pull the trigger on being innovative and outreaching. Do it now. It may look different than you thought it was going to look, but God put you where he did, he gave you the people he gave you, and he gave you everything you need right now to do what he wants you to do right now.
