Big vs. Small: Which Is The Right Size For A Church?

God designed it to be and then showed us that it should be both.

How can a church be big and small at the same time?  It must be one big church of many smaller churches. 

Come again?!?

Here’s the thing…if it’s just one big church, it will lose its ability to practically live out the Kingdom in community.  If it’s just many isolated small churches, the same thing happens.

The only way you can have one big church of many small churches is if it’s structured as a network of differently-sized units. 

Upon understanding the story of the early church, this is clearly what Christ and the apostles set out to build around the world.

Here’s what Kavin Rowe, author of Thriving Communities: The Pattern Of Church Life Then and Now says about this…

To put it simply: as the book of Acts shows, the early church found networking to be indispensable for their thriving in the deepest sense — their ability to be Christians.

Their goal was to plant one big church of many small churches in each city on the planet.  Each of those would then be a part of the one worldwide Church.  This is how the Kingdom was designed to come on earth as it is in Heaven.

Christ and the Apostles network strategy

Before his death and resurrection, Christ traveled around from city to city and started preparing little pockets of followers in each location that responded to His teaching.  He also had His own little pocket He was preparing that followed Him around as well. 

While He had hundreds of people following Him around, His basic unit was small enough that He could be involved in close-knit relationships with each person that was a part of it.  But then He was also establishing many of these little communities into a bigger network both within each city and from city to city.

Once He left from his 1st body and then entered into His 2nd body (THE Church), those that were a part of it did the same thing.  The first church planters carried on the pattern.  The most basic units that were established were small groups of people that lived in face-to-face close-knit relationships. 

As they shared about the gospel of the Kingdom and more people joined, they didn’t stick with one community that kept getting bigger and bigger.  They reproduced into multiple small communities – each basic unit being its own church.

But they didn’t divide, make up their own names and operate completely autonomous.  They became a network of churches that were a part of the Church of that city.  That’s why when apostles wrote letters, they wrote them to “the church in {insert city name}.” 

Churches were identified by their locations because they were seen as one Church at the city level, but they were made up of many smaller basic church units.  Some people today call these units “cells” because they are the smallest unit of the body of Christ, just like cells are the smallest basic unit of the human body.

Living out church life practically

How small were the individual churches?  Small enough that foundational activities of church life laid out in Acts 2:42 and elsewhere could be practically lived out with one another on a daily basis. 

Here’s what that verse says…

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.

Translating that more into today’s language…

They committed to each other like a healthy family – to hang out a ton, have fun, eat together, learn about the Kingdom, and live out the Kingdom by listening to the King and doing what He desires.

God designed His Church to be a big network of small, simple, relational, family-like churches that would take over cities and display God’s rule and reign as King of Heaven and Earth.

When church functioning starts to break down

So if the basic unit of a church in a city is supposed to do that together, when does it get too big?

It’s been reported that the average size of them in the first churches the apostles planted was about 20-50 people.  Most others that have attempted to follow the biblical principles of healthy church life through the centuries have felt that as well.  It’s also been the case in my personal experience. It’s possible that some may have been a bit bigger, but it couldn’t have been by much.

When you start to get above that number, it’s hard to practically be a healthy church because the close-knit relationships in which all of the basic functions of the church happen become impossible. 

When the relationships break down, all of the other functions are negatively affected and must change from something biblical to something unbiblical.

Here’s some of the major functions that come to mind that break down when the numbers start to get over a certain point.

Participation

When the basic church unit is too big, people can hide and free load.  A healthy church involves everyone committing and participating together in different ways as they’re gifted. 

When the basic church unit gets too big, certain people start to take on more responsibility and do more work while others become passive bystanders.  In these churches, it is usually said that 20 percent of the people do 80 percent of the work.  When you feel this, it’s time to make smaller units.

Relationships

In your daily life and when you gather, you really can only be in close-knit relationships with a certain number of people.  When you get above a certain number, you’ll start to feel like you’re not interacting with everyone and aren’t a significant part of their lives. 

When this happens, the relational fabric of the church is breaking down and affects the ability for the group to operate like a close-knit healthy family. 

In bigger churches, people tend to lose the closeness of relationships as they get spread thin among too many people. 

This results in simply maintaining relationships on a surface level as opposed to growing relationships into a close-knit unit.

Oversight

Everyone needs guidance at some level, and churches need protection from things that would try and destroy them.  These things only work well in the context of close-knit relationships as people give each other permission to take on roles in each others lives and in the church because they know each other well. 

When churches get too big, guidance and protection become labeled positions and come from people you don’t know, who don’t know you, who you have to make an appointment with. They exercise “authority” on the basis of things other than knowing you well, earning your respect and being given personal permission to have an authoritative role in your life.

Serving

Good service comes from really knowing what people need.  A healthy church serves one another out of knowing each other’s needs intimately.  When you get above a certain number, service becomes tasks or deeds that people do for people they don’t know very well instead of gestures of love between brothers and sisters that know and understand each other.

Shepherding

When you’re too big, the effective discipleship of people into maturity who can then disciple others becomes impossible.  Churches that get big sometimes have no choice because if they broke down into a network of smaller churches, they wouldn’t have enough mature believers to be in each church. 

So keeping one big church because you can’t break into a network of smaller churches is actually exposing something.  It exposes a lack of development of the believers in a church.  If you don’t have people that can be entrusted with a new group of people, you need to take a step back and evaluate the discipleship process. 

Teaching

While there is a place for teachers and preachers to dispense information from a stage that will help people, this should never be the primary way people get equipped to grow.  Preaching in the early church was primary an evangelistic function of sharing the good news of the arrival of the King and His Kingdom. 

But when it comes to practical, day-to-day development, sermons or lectures are one of the least effective methods to use.  This is scientifically proven.  Keeping the basic units of churches small allows groups to practice dialogue in community, a much better method the Holy Spirit uses for people to grow together.

Different levels of interaction

Knowing this, it doesn’t mean you don’t interact with the other churches in the city and beyond.  Like I said, the Church was designed to be a big network, both within cities and from city to city.  Each unit – basic, city-wide and city-to-city – is a different level of involvement and interaction.  The basic units are the closest and then it works out from there.

Personally, I’m a part of a network like this.  While the vast majority of our time and attention is on our local basic church unit of 20-40 people at any given time, we travel among the other churches in the city and from city to city to supply help in different ways, have periodic meetings to sing and share updates, and work through issues we’re facing or will likely face.

For example, we might pull together newer believers from multiple churches to go through some sort of teaching together that’s appropriate for their level of knowledge and maturity in Christ.

So our original question on if a church should be big or small is asking the wrong question.  The question to ask is…

What forms should our church life take so that we can live out the natural, healthy functions of the church most effectively?

Christ and the apostles showed us the basic form and the pattern for expansion.