Five Encouragements for Small Church Pastors

Small church is a phrase somebody handed us. Clifton's claim, recording with Mark Hallock at the SBC annual meeting, is that Southern Baptist writing from the 1920s and 30s barely used it. Most churches were under 150, so there was nothing to compare them against. The category arrived with the church growth movement, and the comparison arrived with it. His substitute is normative size.

Most churches in the Baptist Convention of Iowa have spent decades measuring themselves against a yardstick invented in the 1970s and treating the result as arithmetic.

The strongest material comes earlier, and Clifton tells it against himself. After two decades of easy wins as a planter he took a church of a couple dozen elderly people in a sanctuary built for hundreds, and nothing in his toolkit worked. He wanted new people. What he got instead was several years of learning to love the ones already there, and his account of it is that God grew him first and grew the church after.

If you have been waiting on a different congregation before the real work starts, this episode is about you.

It belongs next to the numbers we posted Thursday. Those told us the 70-person church is the normal church. This one tells us what to do on the inside of it.