The Strategically Small Church: Intimate, Nimble, Authentic, and Effective

Half Title Page

THE

STRATEGICALLY

SMALL CHURCH

Title Page

REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION

THE

STRATEGICALLY

SMALL CHURCH

Intimate, Nimble,

Authentic, and Effective

BRANDON J. O’BRIEN

KBaker Academic logo: a division of Baker Publishing Group, Grand Rapids, Michigan

Copyright Page

© 2010, 2025 by Brandon J. O’Brien

Published by Baker Academic

a division of Baker Publishing Group

Grand Rapids, Michigan

BakerAcademic.com

Previously published in 2010 by Bethany House

Ebook edition created 2025

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 9781540969118 (paperback) | ISBN 9781540969125 (casebound) | ISBN 9781493449859 (ebook) | ISBN 9781493449866 (pdf)

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Dedication

For Amy,

a gracious partner

and passionate minister of the gospel

Contents

Defining the Strategically Small Church    1

1. See for Yourself: Reimagining Ministry Success    9

2. The Future Is Small: Four Ministries Shrink for the Kingdom’s Sake    25

3. All Church Is Local: The Authentic Church    41

4. Keeping It Lean: The Nimble Church    57

5. The Work of the People: The Empowering Church    77

6. New Focus on the Family: The Intergenerational Church    95

7. A Sacrifice of Praise: The Worshiping Church    113

8. Catch the Vision    127

Acknowledgments for the First Edition    139

Defining the

Strategically Small Church

Nearly every word in the title of this book—strategically, small, church—requires explanation. I’ve elaborated on the key terms in reverse order and then reassembled them below.

Church

The word church refers throughout this book to a group of Christians that organizes regularly for worship, formation, and mission. This is a minimally viable ecclesiology. It is the very least one can say church is or should do. When it comes to worship, for example, every Christian denomination, tradition, network, or movement has particular convictions about who is qualified to preach or teach, how many sacraments (or ordinances) there are, what they signify, who is eligible for baptism (for example), and whether the eligible person must be sprinkled or dunked, and by whom, and so on. There is great diversity, too, in how churches understand their relationship to the broader society, which has implications for what kind of community formation and mission they prioritize.

These particulars are significant, and I would be happy to argue about them under different circumstances. For our purposes here, a minimally viable ecclesiology allows us to consider examples from churches with male and female pastors; who conduct their services in traditional, liturgical, and contemporary worship styles; that meet in homes, storefronts, rented school auditoriums, and historic buildings; and that have a range of priorities when it comes to spiritual formation and interacting with neighbors who are not Christians. What they have in common is a commitment to the ministry of the word and sacrament (worship), ministry to one another (community and formation), and ministry to the world (mission).

Small

Pastors will compete over anything. Tell a minister about a church of one hundred and he just might say, "That’s not a small church. There are only twenty-five people in my congregation. Now that’s a small church."

Which is to say that small is a contested term.

This book defines a small church as one that has fewer than two hundred in regular attendance. I know, I know. Later chapters will present statistics that may make this decision make sense. Do know that it pains me to pick a number at all, because defining small in numerical terms homogenizes a great deal of diversity. Churches can be small for different reasons, at different seasons in their congregational life, and for different lengths of time. New churches (church plants) start small but may grow. This kind of small church likely meets in someone’s home or a rented facility and is full of young single people or young couples, who may eventually have babies so that the church grows biologically. Older churches may have been large at some point in the past and declined in attendance. This kind of small church may meet in a historic building that is now half full on a Sunday morning and costs more to maintain than the congregation can afford. It may have been full of families a generation ago but now is attended primarily by people in late middle age and older. Each of these reasons or seasons of smallness represents a unique set of limitations and opportunities.

Furthermore, small churches gather and minister in a variety of community types. A great many books about ministry in small churches feature white-steepled country meeting houses on their covers. Don’t let that fool you. There are churches with fewer than two hundred in attendance in rural places, small towns, suburbs, and densely populated urban centers. Each of these ministry contexts presents particular challenges and opportunities. These differences are more interesting to me than the ecclesiological differences mentioned above. In fact, these differences represent the thing I love most about small churches: their particularity. A case could be made that larger churches are more similar to one another than small churches are to one another. Each small church is different. Isn’t that interesting!

Granting all the possible differences between small churches—location, demographics, and life cycle being only a few of them—churches with fewer than two hundred in regular attendance share certain dynamics in common. They are often overseen by a solo pastor, who may be part-time, bi-vocational, or a volunteer. Whereas larger congregations often expect their pastor to be a strategist or visionary, smaller congregations often expect their pastor to function primarily as a shepherd. Congregants in larger churches may expect excellent sermons from the pastor. In smaller churches, congregants expect a personal relationship with the pastor. In larger churches, the core activities of worship, community, and mission are often conceived of, coordinated, and carried out by staff. In smaller churches, the responsibility for these activities often lies in the hands of the laity.¹

In small churches, either the pastor or the congregation and often both may operate from feelings of scarcity and inferiority. They may have a gnawing feeling that the small church is somehow second-rate and does not quite measure up to what it ought to be in today’s world.²

This book features stories from my own experience as a pastor in very small congregations. The smallest was made up of a single family, about six people, and the largest had about one hundred members at its high point. The church I served the longest had around twenty in regular attendance. But I will also tell stories of congregations with two hundred or more members. With only one exception that I know of, every church I highlight has fewer than three hundred regular attendees. And while I know that a church of fifty faces very different challenges than a church of 150, I believe the contents of this book are applicable to congregations of any size.

Strategically

Finally, the word strategically could give the impression that this book is full of practical advice or particular methods for leading your small church. It isn’t, though I will reference helpful books throughout that do just that. Used here, strategically refers to a way of viewing your congregation from the perspective of abundance rather than scarcity. It suggests that a pastor and congregation have identified the unique advantages of being small and of being themselves. They have come to terms with the fact that the methods that work in large churches often don’t help and may hurt small congregations. Instead of being reluctantly small or apologetically small, they are strategically small.

Putting all our key words back together, then, a strategically small church is a group of fewer than two hundred Christians that recognizes its small size not as a liability but as an advantage in its efforts to organize for worship, formation, and mission. A strategically small church realizes that it cannot operate like a large church, and so it has stopped trying. Furthermore, a strategically small church realizes it may be able to accomplish things larger churches cannot. This doesn’t make it better or godlier. It does mean it can proceed in ministry not from a sense of its deficiencies but from confidence in its strengths. Strategically small churches are strategic for the kingdom of God because they are convinced that the fulfillment of the theological purpose of the church never requires a crowd.³

Instead of prescribing steps or procedures for becoming strategically small, I tell stories of how other churches have leveraged their strengths to become more effective in their ministries. I have tried to make these stories compelling so they inspire you with a vision of what ministry in and through a small church can look like. Your job is to determine which of these ideas you can incorporate and which ones don’t make sense in your context. I’ve written with a deep conviction that every church is unique, because every church member is individually gifted by the Holy Spirit and every congregation does ministry in a different culture and context. Implementation will require imagination and experimentation. That’s the fun stuff.

In short I hope to cast a vision, rooted in the concrete experiences of actual pastors and congregations, that helps you reimagine the supposed liabilities of being small as hidden advantages.

Who Is Your Author?

I’ve spent the last twenty years deeply invested in small-church ministry in a wide range of roles. I served in vocational ministry, almost exclusively in small churches. For several years I worked as an editor for Leadership journal, which gave me a line of sight into local church ministry beyond my own experience. (It was while I served in that role that I wrote the first edition of this book.) For most of the last twenty years, my wife has served in vocational ministry in a wide range of contexts: in a western suburb of Chicago, in New York City, and in downtown Phoenix. That means I’ve been a pastor, a pastor’s spouse, and a parent in small churches for most of the past two decades. I’m familiar with the daily pressures pastors, lay leaders, and congregations face in smaller churches.

The publication of this book’s first edition fifteen years ago has afforded me the profound privilege of traveling the country to meet with pastors and denominational leaders about their ministries. These travels have ranged as far east as Greene, Maine, and as far west as Anacortes, Washington. They’ve taken me to mainline and evangelical congregations in rural, urban, and suburban environments. The cumulative result of these experiences is that I am more convinced than ever that small churches everywhere are led by deeply faithful people who are uncommonly committed to the witness and mission of the local church.

Since 2017 I’ve worked with Redeemer City to City, an organization based in Manhattan and dedicated to supporting gospel movements in global cities. The pastors we work with start and lead churches in difficult environments ranging from post-Christian to pre-Christian to Muslim-majority and more. The overwhelming majority of these churches are small. Some of them will grow large. Many of them won’t. Given the complexity of the places in which they minister and the dizzying diversity of local histories, socioeconomic situations, and ethnic and cultural backgrounds, I am thoroughly convinced that our problem is not that we have too many small churches. Our problem is that we have too few.

Ultimately I am a theorist, confidant, and champion of small churches, their pastors, and their people. I am careful in the pages that follow not to claim greater authority in these matters than I’ve earned or deserve. My confidence in the material lies in the fact that I am not the mastermind behind any of the stories I share here. I am but the chronicler and synthesizer. Lucky for me, there’s a lot of good news to report.

We hear a lot in the media about what is wrong with American churches, and there is plenty to criticize. But my roles as a pastor, pastor’s husband, friend of pastors, and intimate observer of American Christianity have given me ample opportunity to see all that is right with the church in the United States as well. Seeing great churches, most