(RNS) — Among American churchgoers, roughly half are concentrated within a small fraction — less than 10% — of the nation’s churches, according to data reported earlier this year on church attendance and size. The other half of America’s churchgoers are most likely to attend one of the 70% of U.S. churches that have 100 or fewer people in their weekly services. That’s a lot of small churches dotted across our country.
In my lifetime I’ve belonged to churches of just about every size that exists. I vividly remember one Easter morning in my childhood encountering the biggest crowd I’d ever seen at the tiny church my family attended in Maine: 40 people! I couldn’t believe it. As a younger adult, I was part of a house church, and later in life I attended a well-established church in a downtown location. It had seen better days but was still full of life, with a few hundred in attendance over Sunday’s three morning services.
I ended up at a megachurch — a story in itself, but a story for another day — and for a while I was out of church, just one more statistic in the long de-churching of America, where 40 million of my fellow citizens and counting have left religious institutions in the past 25 years.
I hadn’t given up on church, though. I was waiting patiently for the Lord to lead me in his time. I had come, through hard experience, a closer walk with Jesus and the counsel of the Holy Spirit, to a better understanding of what is good and true and beautiful in church life. But I was sure it would take a miracle to find a church that answered the specific petitions I had made to the Lord, based on these hard-won lessons.
Then the miracle happened. The church I found myself in is very small. It is not new, nor a church plant, nor a home church, not young or splashy. I couldn’t begin to count the times I drove past it without even noticing it during the two and a half decades I’ve lived in my area. Most congregants have been members for years, some for decades. The worship service is ordered, regular and elegant in its simplicity. The “programs” are nearly nonexistent.
Yet the first time I attended, and every time thereafter, I was and am reminded of what church is for: It is for the gathering of God’s people to worship him through the teaching of his word, to remember our salvation through his son and to be sent back out into the world to do good works that glorify him. Indeed, the good works that this little band of faithful does in the community is astonishing! That so few help so many is a perfect picture of Jesus working wonders with a small boy’s humble offering of a few loaves and fishes.
Small churches aren’t likely to offer something different for every age group, or the chance to play your instrument in an orchestra every week, or have a school for your kids or an entry-level job opportunity waiting for you. It is fine, perhaps, for a church to have all these things. But these trappings are not, as I’ve argued previously, what church is for.
All the world over, across land and time, there are infinite ways of doing church. I’m not here to say any one of them is right or wrong in and of itself. Sin and shortcomings are to be found in churches of every size. Abuse happens in country churches and megachurches. A lone pastor can cover up wrongdoing as well as a whole board of trustees can.
My experience tells me, however, that supersizing is not the likeliest route to good health, physically or spiritually. In a culture nursed far too long by the teats of celebrity and spectacle, we might need reminding that small is faithful, too. Indeed, perhaps smallness requires, or at least cultivates, faithfulness more.
I am reentering church life slowly for all these reasons and more, more clear-eyed and less naïve than before. Many have experienced church hurt far deeper and more devastating than mine. Healing and reintegration into the church community is best done in the Lord’s time and in his direction than according to human plans.
Still, we can plan our ways, knowing the Lord directs our steps. One possible plan for those who yearn for a church home — whether for the first time or for a long time — is to consider the small, quiet congregations that have been there in your community all along. You might be blessed to join them. And they will be blessed by your presence.
Perhaps that — being a blessing to the faithful, persevering saints in our midst — is what it means to be the church.