Declaring Church Size (and why it matters)
This is the first of several longer essays on church size dynamics in a Post-Covid19 world. In each, I’ll be sharing research and interacting with some growth models I think helpful.
Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash
In the last few years, nearly every church in America has seen a decline. It began with the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, with most churches quickly pivoting to online only.
"It will last till Easter" is what many leaders thought.
Easter crept into May. Pentecost was the new day to start worship in person. And slowly over the course of a year, churches began to reopen. And in that time, we saw plenty of adaption. In that year of adaptation, we also saw political controversy, racial tension, and the further ideological divergence of the western world grow.
What many churches didn't see was crowds coming back.
Phone calls among pastor friends and denominational officials happened. New standards were determined, with churches settling with 30% to 75% of previous attendance. Churches adapted and call it normal, and tried to get back to business as usual.
So where are we now?
Most churches in America are at best now recovering from the loss in attendance. They've settled on a new normal of their reduced attendance. Conversations about resources are happening. Churches learn how to operate at their new size. But many still carry expectations from before 2020. How does a church that used to be 600 act when they are now 320? How do the churches of 30 and 40 grow enough to not just get back to pre-covid size, but be able to afford a full-time pastor? How do clergy who have never had to lead through significant growth barriers understand congregational development for the first time?
This has had me asking questions.
What I wanted to know first was what people are calling church sizes now. The measuring stick of the previous era was Tim Keller's article Leadership And Church Size Dynamics. Here is Keller's categorization of church size.
House/Storefront/Country Churches 0-40
Small Churches 40- 200
Mid-Sized Churches 200 - 450
Large Churches 400 - 800
Extremely Large Churches 800+
In the article, Keller also talks about the various cultures of church size, and what must typically be in place to sustain growth. He said that a church of 80 and a church of 115, of different denominations, have more in common than two churches of the same tradition, but with a wide attendance gap. This article was THE BIBLE for folks in the church growth movement of the last 10 years. When I was planting, this was the document everything was based on. It gave tangible growth AND culture markers for churches working to reach sustainability and mission.
But it is dated.
It assumes things that no longer can be expected or held true. And as controversial of a figure as Tim Keller has grown to be in the last few years, even he writes about how much Western Culture has changed. The world he wrote this article in no longer exists, and we now are in a world that appears the same but is radically new.
In his recent article The New Very Larger Church, Thom Rainer, a Southern Baptist Leader offers these designations of church size.
Small Churches 0-50
Medium Sized Churches 51-100
Large Churches 100 - 249
Larger Churches 250+
These new categories are reactions to current church sizes, but I think they aren't nearly as good as what Keller designates. Rainer's numbers are simply sorting the median, not really digging into what church size means for those who want to understand how churches function at different sizes.
So I decided to do a survey.
Ask people how they would describe these church sizes. I pounded out a quick survey, took advantage of my social network, and ended up with nearly 200 responses. I asked people to self-describe their engagement with a church (not attending, attending, and/or working at a church) and denominational tradition. I then asked what number of people they would attach to the designations of small, medium, and large.
This is what I found.
Small churches can be anywhere from 0 - 250
Medium churches can be between 30 - 1000
Large Churches could have anywhere from 75 - 10,000
So clearly even our own ideas of what these size categories differ.
I’ll share more of the data in the future, but this is where it gets even more confusing. Depending on the church tradition, folks’ description of church size was even more divergent. People from the non-denominational and Baptist world pretty much line up their church sizes with Keller. Folks from the Mainline and Catholic traditions describe church categories as significantly smaller, with some naming large church sizes within the realm of what Keller would call small churches.
So if one tradition categorically defines churches without understanding the size culture, could that belief be affecting their ability to grow and reach new people?
Remember, Keller's understanding of church size was based on the cultural behaviors of churches. A large church acted very differently than a small church, and a church of 30 and a church of 90 are culturally very different.
This is why our understanding of church size matters.
I wanted to ask this question based on many conversations I was having with Pastors and churches. Growth has always been a sticky conversation. I’ve seen it sort pastors into “us and them” groups before. Growth is no longer an evangelical thing, but a survival thing. The post-pandemic situation many churches and denominational groups are in necessitates a growth conversation because of resources and sustainability. We need growth conversations that aren’t cookie-cutter, are clearly defined, and can be contextualized to an understanding of church size dynamics. To get away from the aversion some have to congregational growth, we need to be really pinpointed on single congregations.
The average, local church needs goalposts.
The median-sized church in America currently has 65 people in attendance. The Louisiana Conference of the United Methodist Church, of which I am an elder, is made up predominantly of churches under 100 in average worship attendance (and around 75% of our churches worship under 40). These "normal-sized" churches are full of good people, and many of them are finding it necessary to have conversations about resources, energy, and what it means to be a viable congregation. They need goalposts. Tangible, focused, and appropriate to who they are.
To find goalposts, we really need to understand and agree upon church size in a post COVID-19 world. That gives us the playing field upon which we are working on. It also helps leaders understand what really matters depending on the local context. Goalposts inform stewardship decisions. What the church of 65 might find helpful is radically different from a church of 300 which used to be 700.
I'm a fan of strategy and being deliberate. I also think the local church reaching others and bearing fruit gives glory and honor to God. For the local churches that make the intentional decision to grow and reach other people, I want to help define that playing field and put up those goalposts. That's why I am asking questions about church size dynamics AND why I want to be both sharing and resourcing others with what I am discovering.
So thanks for coming along for the ride.
I also want to make sure that this information is consistently helpful, so until the next longer article comes out, I will leave you with a few questions. These are the things that help establish a baseline of a church’s current reality.
What is your 6-week worship average?
How are you currently identifying who is engaged at your church?
What would you call a small, medium, and large church? Why?
How has your church grown in the past? Currently?
On a scale of 1 - 10, how interested is your church in growing?
Want to keep up with my church-size research and other content about congregational growth? Sign up for the email and be part of the journey.
Interested in more of the conversation? Here are a some links to both my and others’ work on the subject.
Read Tim Keller's Leadership And Church Size Dynamics
Take the Church Size survey
The Most Important Metric | Productive Pastor 51