The Normal Church After COVID19
In the last half decade I have grown to appreciate the work and thought of Karl Vaters. He pastored a normal sized church for decades in California and became both the champion and one of the best critical thinkers of a style of ministry that was unrushed, honoring and honest among an ocean of different conversations. I wish I would have paid more attention to him than others at times.
Last week I came across this article by Vaters in which he brings up some of the issues the “normative sized church” faces after C19.
His conversation was important before the pandemic. And I think is voice is absolutely essential after it…especially for those pastoring churches of less than 200.
What Karl speaks about is how expectations are easy to discern in the large church. There aren’t many unwritten rules and things seem to be pretty clear. In smaller churches, all the bets are off. The power of local personalities come into play.
"If I walk into a small church—especially one of fifty or fewer—I may not be sure what’s expected of me. As people mill about in conversation before the service begins, do I walk up to random strangers and introduce myself? Do I sit in the empty chapel alone?….In big churches, those questions get answered easily by signage, a well-trained rotation of greeters, and by the guests’ understanding of how to behave as an audience. In small churches, there are many unwritten rules, and you can’t rely on the unwritten rules of one small church to guide your behavior in another small church.”
These few sentences really are remarkable as normal sized churches discern ministry in our current moment.
Vaters talks about how ideas and systems that are nearly proven in larger churches struggle in smaller, more normal sized congregations, because the individual flavor of each church peeks through. And this isn’t a bad thing. It is what makes normal sized churches effective and more distinctive. It makes them a pretty powerful force of uniqueness in our time.
Early Covid was a time of “flattening” in the church world. Nearly every church that had put off, resisted, or didn’t think streaming worship was valid nearly immediately got into it. Churches who had never wadded through the waters of online giving learned how to do it or overcame their objections to it. In 3 months, many of the things typically championed by either larger or more forward thinking ministries became the norm.
I know our church went from pre-recording video on iPhones and an older DSLR, to a streaming setup that cost under $1000 to a full featured, multi-camera system of around $13,000. And I was ideologically against live-streaming till march of 2020! What was once the leading edge of ministry quickly became a regular budget item and ministry strategy for nearly every church in the United States.
That is the flattening. The idea of Christian practice becoming the standard norm. You might use the word Generic. It’s what Vaters talks about when he says people know what to expect when they walk in a large church.
It is something I have called “hard edged churches” in the past. These are the churches with clearly defined realities. They might be cultural (your standard big baptist/non-denominational church) or denominational (thing traditional UMC, or other Mainline church…or just your smaller non super contemporary neighborhood church). To make it more simple, if you walk into any hard edged church on Sunday morning, it will probably be 90% the same practically as any other similar hard edged church in the community it has an affinity with. The larger the church, the more likely it will be remarkably similar to other similar churches regardless of distance. For example, First Methodist in Dallas and First Methodist in Houston probably look the same for the most part. And also the large quasi-baptist non-denominational church in Atlanta and Nashville will seem pretty familiar. It is what Vaters talks about in his article when he talks about expectation. And likewise your standard denominational church in any average town, especially in the mainline, will look remarkably similar in worship practice and church polity than another county (or parish) seat town down the highway.
But let me talk really quick about another idea.
Soft edged churches.
Edges are all about definition. The things we choose to mark the boundaries of our mission and activity around. I think that rather than trying to find strategies to get around some of the forms of congregational uniqueness that sometimes can be a barrier when we continue to go down the C19 generic rabbit hole, we embrace the things that are unique and that larger congregations will struggle with because of their size. What does it mean to realize that normal sized churches have the ability to drill down into their mission field? To realize that they might be able to reach a specific subculture in a community that struggles to assimilate into a more generic, hard-edged reality? That a more contextualized worship style might have a particular affinity and ability to lead people into the presence of Jesus? Those edges begin to smooth out and we can now fit into our own communities in amazing ways and reach folks for Jesus that might struggle. I heard Alan Hirsch say once that only 60% of our population will respond to typical and “normal” evangelism. The 40% of our population that won’t lives in the spaces that only soft edged churches can mold themselves into.
The unique leverage space of the normal sized church is those personalities and idiosyncrasies. If we can manage congregational change well enough, the normal sized church is significantly nimbler than larger churches. That means our missional adaptability can be measured in weeks or even days, not months and years. While I think this has always been the case, I believe our postC19 world allows this to be even faster and more focused.
Friends, while all of our congregations can benefit from some of the lessons learned in the last couple of years, and the idea of systems theory (which I actually am a MASSIVE fan of), let’s also dream dreams of the missional uniqueness that can only happen in the normal sized church.
Do you like content like this? Each week I put together a Monday Morning email where I share the articles, videos, and podcasts that I have enjoyed in the past week. I’d love to send it to you each week.