92: Is Your Church Too Big?

I'm Eddie Lawrence and this is Ready for Eternity, a podcast and blog for inquisitive

Bible students. There's a number where familiarity ends and anonymity begins.

It's called Dunbar's number. Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist, hypothesizes that we have a limit of roughly 150 people we can maintain stable relationships with.

Relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how they connect to everyone else.

Beyond that number, we might recognize faces, but we can't know stories.

Churches hit this wall also. At around 150 -200 people, additional church growth becomes difficult without sustained strategic effort.

Church growth experts call it the barrier, and they've built an entire industry around breaking through it.

Bill Sullivan's book, Ten Steps to Breaking the 200 Barrier, is remarkably honest about what happens when churches push past this threshold.

He writes, A small church is not a microcosm of a large church, but a totally different kind of organization.

The church that grows beyond the 200 barrier is the church that decides to minister to its people in a comprehensive organization rather than a family -type fellowship.

Let that sink in. To grow beyond 200, you must stop being a family and become an organization.

Sullivan admits that churches resist this change naturally.

Just as you would not want to change from being the person you are to being someone else, neither does a church want to give up the family atmosphere to become an organization.

Think about that for a moment. While churches want to grow, they simultaneously don't want this kind of transformation.

Perhaps on a subconscious level, they resist it instinctively. Think this kind of strategizing is not happening in your church?

You might be surprised. It happens in leadership meetings and planning sessions that most people never see.

It's nothing nefarious. These methods are just part of the air that church leaders breathe.

And it's accepted as gospel without few people ever questioning it.

Let's be frank about what changes when churches push past 150 to 200 people.

At 150, your pastor knows everyone by name. He knows that Sarah's struggling with her teenager, that Mike just lost his job, and that the

Johnsons are caring for an aging parent. Everyone knows each other by name.

At 300 plus, pastoral care becomes delegation.

The pastor manages staff who in turn manage programs. Events replace relationships.

Community becomes attendance. And you can know lots of faces, but not very many stories.

The church growth literature admits this transformation, but treats it as necessary collateral damage.

It's the cost of doing business, if you will. And this reveals an unspoken belief.

We measure growth almost entirely by numbers. But scripture also speaks of growth in maturity, holiness, and love.

Are we really reaching more people, or are we collecting more people while actually shepherding fewer?

How does the New Testament describe church? The New Testament speaks of church as family.

Paul tells the Ephesians that they are members of the household of God in Ephesians 2 .19.

And he instructs Timothy to treat older men as fathers, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters.

That's in 1 Timothy 5, 1 and 2. This describes a family. As far as we know, every church in the

New Testament met in homes. Where families live. The church in Rome met in Priscilla and Aquila's house,

Romans 16 .5. They met in Nympha's home in Colossae, Colossians 4 .15.

And a church met in Philemon's house, Philemon verse 2. These weren't starter churches waiting to graduate to real buildings.

This was the norm. Paul told the Ephesian elders that he had spent three years admonishing everyone with tears.

Everyone. Every single person. He described his ministry in Thessalonica like this.

We were gentle among you, like a nursing mother caring for her children. We cared so deeply that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God, but our own lives as well.

That is how beloved you have become to us. 1 Thessalonians 2 verses 7 and 8.

Can you share yourself with 500 people? And can 500 people become very dear to us?

Can we have that same closeness of relationship with numbers beyond 200 people?

Jesus said, I know my own and my own know me. And he calls his sheep by name.

So here's an uncomfortable question. Can a pastor know 500 congregants by name?

At what number does shepherding become management? This isn't about limiting what

God can do, but it's asking what kind of shepherding God ordinarily calls human pastors to do well.

Sullivan describes what pastoral ministry becomes in a large church.

He calls it focusing on quality programming, developing an expansive infrastructure, and managing changing expectations.

Where in this model is the shepherd who knows his sheep? Try this test right now.

If you're a pastor, can you name every member of your church? If someone walked into your office herding, would you know their story before they told you?

If not, are you their shepherd or their CEO? Sullivan is honest about what breaking the barrier costs the pastor.

Leading a church in growth will require rising early and working late as a regular schedule.

Responding to impossible demands for ministry will require enormous amounts of energy, far more than the pastor anticipated.

He must find a way to preserve his health, to save his family, and to save his own soul, but he must persevere in pursuit of the dream.

Notice what the list demands he preserve. Health, family, soul, and pursuit of the dream.

But notice what's missing. Tending to the sheep he already has.

His sheep have become the means to achieve his dream, not the reason for his ministry.

This is the quiet tragedy of growth -driven ministries.

Pastors become so focused on gaining more people that they neglect the people

God has already entrusted to them. The sheep in front of them receive less attention than the sheep they hope to collect next.

There are pastors who labor heroically in large churches, but the question here is whether the structure itself helps or hinders that stewardship.

Here's what should haunt us. Every hour spent strategizing how to break the barrier is an hour not spent focused on the people

God has already entrusted to the pastor. What are we actually pursuing and what are we sacrificing to pursue it?

What if the barrier is actually a gift? What if the resistance that churches feel at exceeding 150 to 200 people isn't an invisible barrier, but the organism protecting what it currently is?

Maybe the body is signaling that we're about to lose something essential. What if Dunbar's number isn't a limitation to overcome, but a reality to honor?

Did God design us to thrive in communities of this size? When trying to force church size beyond the barrier, are we attempting something fundamentally unnatural?

Are we creating an abnormal mutation? Are we turning a living family into a managed organization and calling it growth?

What if congregations don't automatically grow beyond 200 people because it's not in the church's nature, its

DNA, if you will, to get bigger than that? Wanting numerical growth isn't a bad thing.

Some churches grow large in a faithful manner through intentional structures like maybe small groups, though the challenge of maintaining genuine community increases with scale.

But scriptural growth comes through evangelism and shepherding, not marketing.

It flows from witness and discipleship, not branding, programs, or strategic positioning.

Imagine a church that reaches 150 people and celebrates, not because they've given up on growth, but because they've achieved something precious.

A community small enough for everyone to know each other, but large enough to divide into two separate congregations.

Then imagine they plant a daughter church, not because they have to, but because living things reproduce.

What was one becomes two. Both remain small enough to maintain the closeness that makes the one another commands possible.

What if success looks like five churches of 100 instead of one church of 500?

Think about what that creates. Five groups of pastors who actually know their sheep.

Five communities where everyone matters. Five locations reaching five neighborhoods.

Five families, not one organization. Which model looks more like Jesus with the 12?

Which honors how God made us? And which makes the commandment to bear one another's burdens possible?

Which allows the pastors to actually be shepherds instead of CEOs?

Church growth experts have spent decades asking, how do we break the barrier?

But what if the real question is, why are we trying to? Maybe we don't need bigger churches.

Perhaps we need more churches. Maybe the barrier we keep trying to break is actually protecting something we can't afford to lose.

The possibility of being known, of mattering, and of belonging to a family instead of just joining an organization.

Faithfulness may sometimes look like slower growth, but it never looks like neglect.

This isn't meant to be a judgment on every large church, or the faithful shepherds who serve in them.

It is an invitation to examine our motives for pursuing size, and to question whether bigger is better, and whether the barrier we keep trying to break might actually be worth honoring.

Maybe God isn't calling us to break the barrier. Maybe He's calling us to honor it.