Big church, little church and cultural fit

Recently I happened to be talking with one of my bishops and we  both noted how smaller churches tend to show up in studies as being better at making disciples than big churches. This Psephizo post, by implication, tells us why, and re-tells us the advantages of large churches. Interestingly, of course, the downsides of big churches are to be addressed in the post by also giving them a small church dimension. This is the top-down version of things. Of course, it might be worth noting that the NT seems if anything to have a bottom-up version where lots of small churches are locally linked. That may be simply expediency; what number can you get in someone's front room. Big church only becomes possible when Christians are able to have big public buildings without attracting adverse attention. 

What we don't get in scripture is any instructions about sizes of gatherings or congregations. I find this interesting -some other religions do tend to have regs about such things. Jewish minyan, for example and Islam has instructions for people to shove up into proper neat rows to fill from the front at prayers. But Christianity has very little that isn't just general and arguably about local custom and making-do. So if you don't buy the Catholic Tradition thing, there is plenty of scope for adaptation and that includes church size.

I don't have any 'primary' theological objections to large churches (but I do have 'secondary problematisations'). But I do question them. As mentioned above, they would seem to be less good, proportionally, at making disciples. This is probably because they can carry way more 'passengers' -and this means that in effect they may be more likely to evade the priesthood of all believers and have a 'priesthood' of the specially talented (I could say more about that because 'talent' is more circumstantial than sometimes implied). As the blogpost says, "It always seems odd to me that the excellence of a cathedral choir is lauded as enabling encounter with the transcendence of God, but an excellent band set-up with professional lighting and sound is sniffed at" -that is a well-made point with which I agree: I can't really see anything but taste differentiating the two kinds of worship referenced. However, that may miss the point: it's still a small group of 'stars' and the question may be as to how far we want to ape or promote a kind of celebrity culture with its attendant disabling of more 'ordinary' ministry. 

The obverse of that is also the promotion of certain kinds of ministry to a status that can also restrict the imagination and valuation of 'ordinary' Christians with regard to their own gifts and callings. A salutary lesson in this being the change at the Reformation from having 'a pope in Rome to a pope in the pulpit' -the result being that we still had a passive followership. Today perhaps it has become a 'magisterium on the stage' -as if musical talent or a good voice gave moral authority? (And that goes for both scenarios).

What really got me writing this post was the following in the Psephizo post:

It is easy, then, to miss the virtues of scale that large churches represent. It is much easier for one person to invest the time, energy and resources to offer a really engaging sermon that digs deep into the Scriptures and draws out, with relevant application, the lessons for living in contemporary for 400 people, than for eight preachers to do this for people meeting in groups of 50. In a church will feels pressed for resources, the efficiency of large churches is not to be sniffed at.  

And I agree at one level but want to dig behind this more. I want to ask whether it might not be even better that there might be 8 preachers learning their craft and offering a more realistic role model? Might it not be better for several groups of 50 to have more opportunity between them to craft responses that work in their local contexts than 400 de-contextualised and un-neighbourly largely avoiding that or doing hit-and-run projects?

Now I realise that I'm playing with ideal-types and stereotypes here, but if we are going to think about such things, can we recognise that there is nuance? And could we not bow to the god of 'efficiency' quite so promptly? -We might want to think of efficiency less in industrial terms and more in terms of individual people growing in capacity to grow the kingdom -and smaller churches probably do have the edge in that. 

When it comes to big churches needing to cultivate a small church dimension, I recognise this is vital as a corrective to the big church disbenefits. However, we might want to note that it is a top-down sort of thing. That has a further downside: it tends to squeeze out the smaller experiments that don't fit the ethos or apparent 'values' of the big entity and yet which might be vital engagements in mission. 

That said, I think I'd end up arguing for a mixed economy. Perhaps the term 'resourcing church' has it right. By all means leverage some of the advantages of 'economies of scale' but make sure they are geared as an engine to a wholistic growth of the church in a region -and I mean growth in grace, ministry and discipleship as much (if not more) than numbers. I believe in obliquity: if we seek first the right things, disciples will be made. If we seek converts, we will end up with religious consumers and a religious veneer on wider culture.