Decline & Renewal, 21: Jeff Childers Guest Column

Editor's note: Here’s the second in our series of guest columns on church renewal. In the coming weeks, you'll read insightful articles from great thinkers and pioneer church leaders like Mark Love, Ben Ries, Mike Cope, Chris Flanders, Stan Granberg, John York, Jarrod Robinson and more.

The author of this column on renewal is Jeff Childers, a native of Bakersfield, California. Jeff is a biblical scholar who teaches Bible and church history at Abilene Christian University. Through his studies at Oxford University and in subsequent research about the ancient church, Jeff has come to important conclusions about the needs of our contemporary, Western church.

Go Big or Go Home?

"Go big or go home!" It's the American way. We like doing things big. The North American continent is massive and we have acquired a taste for big. We like big cities, big stadiums, big cars, big-budget movies, big trends. And yes—big churches. Big churches, with big buildings, big budgets, big programs, big-name preachers, and big influence.  We tend to shy away from anything that makes us feel small, but big feels good. Big feels right. When our churches are big, and getting bigger, we take that as a sign that we must be doing something right, because surely, bigger is always better. Our culture teaches us to chase big, and we’re quick learners.

But all this obsession with big creates problems for today’s followers of Jesus, because so much of what Jesus teaches and shows us is concerned about what happens on a smaller scale: attitudes of the heart, how we handle our possessions, learning to forgive, getting free of our addictions and idolatries, the nature of our trust and commitments, and so on. Jesus had big ideas and big dreams, to be sure—as big as his Father’s purposes to redeem the cosmos. But he went about his mission in surprisingly small ways, gathering small groups, touching the little people, focusing on deep problems in areas that might seem small-scale, such as how we treat one another, tending to a sick or needy individual, and working on personal speech habits. Big seems powerful, and sometimes it is. But when the basic unit of Christian community is so large that you can’t even see it all at once without going a mile up into outer space, the impressive view from a distance can lead us to lose sight of the fact that the Lord's main work is meant to happen on the small scale, in up-close and personal ways. Big churches are not necessarily in a better situation to do that work, and they are often less adept at it.

Thérèse of Lisieux was a young woman with a big appetite for Jesus. She wanted to serve him in big, impressive ways. She exclaims, "I want to be a warrior, a priest, an apostle, a doctor of the Church, a martyr! I would like to perform the most heroic deeds!" Her passion for Christ and serving the world were enormous. She couldn't help but dream how wonderful it would be if she could do something truly great for God. She was only 24 years old when she died of tuberculosis in 1897, so she never got to see those big dreams fulfilled. Yet along the way, even as an impetuous youth, she learned something important about her true calling. Wrestling with her own frustrations over unfulfilled ambitions, she came to a realization: "At last I have found my vocation. My vocation is love! I will be love." She realized that her true calling in Christ had nothing to do with being on the big stage or making a big impact; it was simply to be an agent of God’s love wherever she was, to whatever extent God enabled her. She decided she could be content as a "little flower" in God’s garden: "I saw that all the flowers He has created are lovely. The splendor of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not rob the little violet of its scent nor the daisy of its simple charm."

In much the same way, churches of all kinds need to return to their basic vocation—loving God and living faithfully with him, loving others in the name of Jesus, and yielding themselves to the Lord's mission of reconciling everything, piece by piece, in all the little corners of the world.

The culture teaches us that big is automatically more successful, but this is based on a false economy. Those tiny, fledgling 1st-century churches situated in the large and important major cities of the Roman Empire—Antioch, Ephesus, Rome—could not have let the ambition of big be what determined their sense of identity or governed their daily activities. That would have been preposterous. Their vitality was based on something else. They were so small. Although they knew they had been called into a mission as large as the whole world, the notion of being big could not play much into how they understood who they were and what they were doing every day. First-century disciples in the intimate and vulnerable house churches of great cities like Rome and Antioch might be puzzled to see how dissatisfied many of us in small churches are that we aren't better at doing big. In what sense is a big, bustling church organization, with a big footprint in a prominent part of town automatically better situated to do the work of Jesus on the scale it has to be done—person-by-person, heart-by-heart?

Too many smaller churches see their small size as a limitation or burden, instead of recognizing it as the gift and opportunity it truly is. Big churches can be marvelous witnesses to Christ. But for big churches, the main struggle is that it takes so much energy to maintain a big, thriving organization, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that many of the things you do to get big, and stay big, have little to do with the mission of personal transformation to which Jesus has called us. Big churches can get in the habit of being satisfied only with what they can do by their own power, instead of recognizing that God's real purposes are deeper than any human organization can manage, no matter how big and impressive it becomes. Being in a place where everybody knows your name is not always a liability. Big programs and bustling activity can keep us occupied, but they don't always translate into personal transformation, or equipping for mission. Unfortunately, smaller churches often covet what big churches have, chasing them and trying to imitate them, without realizing the cost and the risk, distracted and discouraged by the cultural obsession with big.

Jesus' example and the story of the early church show that you don't have to be a big church to be part of something important. This isn't just a way of excusing a lack of growth or consoling ourselves for being small. The truth is, small churches have been gifted by God with the resources, capacities, and opportunities to do precisely what God wants churches to do. This is not to say that any congregation is perfect; in fact, the smaller church is often quicker to recognize their need for God. But they don't need to be doing things big in order to do what God wants. The Lord has already given even small churches the resources they need for forming a community of disciples, enjoying rich and transformative relationships, and discovering opportunities to love, serve, and proclaim Good News in redemptive ways. When they do this as a small and seemingly insignificant group of people in a large world, outsiders are often mystified by the surprising power of it, since the world equates important with big, and yet Jesus' economy tends to move in the opposite direction. Maybe this is why many church planters and missionaries today are intentionally trying to build more clusters of smaller churches, rather than fewer churches that are big.

This is hopeful. Rather than craving the glitz and bustle of being big, small churches will find a healthier life by, 1) being attentive to their own unique contexts, 2) exploring their own capacities and gifts as the Lord's body in those places, 3) recognizing that they already have what they need to pursue God's purposes in their communities, and 4) continually yielding themselves to those purposes in their corners of the world. So much of what God wants Christians to do in the world happens at the small scale, on a personal level. That is why the size of a church or its programs has little bearing on the effectiveness of its mission.

           
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Bio:
Jeff Childers is Professor of Bible and Church History in the Graduate School of Theology at Abilene Christian University, Abilene, Texas. Jeff's special research interests include Eastern Christianity, New Testament textual criticism, Patristics, early hagiography, and the history of Bible interpretation. As a teacher, his focus recently has been on the integration of scholarship and ministry in the classroom and on the use of case studies in pastoral education. Recent publications include articles in Biblia Patristica, New Testament Studies, Oriens Christianus, Le Museon, and Encyclopedia of Early Christianity. Along the way Jeff has ministered in churches and considers his academic work of teaching and research to be an expression of ministry. In addition to other interests, Jeff is fascinated by J.R.R. Tolkien and has shared this love with his three kids (two young ladies and a lad) and with his wife—who prefers gardening to Tolkien, but lovingly tolerates Jeff's obsession.