Big Church or Little Church? Yes!

So it's time for confessions. Gerry, what kind of church do you attend?

And then my daughter works at Bent Tree Fellowship, which is a huge church. They probably run five, six thousand in a weekend, and a classic megachurch if you want to think of it that way. She writes curriculum for fifth grades and under. So my wife attends there to be with the grandchildren. This explains why we're in the situation that we're in, and so I'm elder emeritus at the first church that I mentioned, and so I attend the first service at Trinity, get in my car and drive the 15 minutes or so that it takes to get to Bent Tree so I can make the second service and make lunch with my kids afterwards. So that's our church situation.

So we're actually describing a situation in which we are all participating, if I can say it that way. Running the scale in terms of size of church.

Well, let's start off by talking about megachurches. I want to start there because they're probably the more controversial, but before we get there I want to ask a basic ecclesiological question, and it goes like this: The church – a building, a people or a presence. Okay? Which of the above or a combination of the above, what are we talking about when we say church?

That's what we're trying to develop, and then we extend that kingdom presence living under the rule and reign and life of Jesus. That's where we're trying to extend from our community into the community around our fellowship.

So when you think of kingdom or Gospel or righteousness biblically, the first relationship is the relationship of God. So we have to develop that. That's the evangelistic thrust, but then we have the relationship with others. That's the community, the spirit, technically the church. We have relationship with ourselves growing as people, equate for every good work, but then we have for the rest of creation, and we're extending the goodness of God in the community like Jesus in Acts 10:38 where he went about preaching and doing good, and I think that's the same mission of the church.

When we separate living a life of Jesus as a community from living the life of Jesus into the community around us, I think we've actually truncated the Gospel.

The second thing they did was build a gym. The third thing they did was build a school, and ten years later there was an editorial in the Dallas Morning News entitled "Angels in Our Midst," and it was a testimony to the way in which churches had banded together and actually had put together a community project that was actually transforming the community. There were statistics that showed this, and they raised the question, why is it that this can be done privately through the churches, and yet desegregation was a big issue and Dallas was under desegregation orders longer than any other city in the country, and yet when it comes to dealing with these kinds of issues in our schools we do so poorly.

And the point was that sometimes churches do this better than anybody else. Same kind of thing in terms of the testimony that exists. As we suggested before, it builds a kind of credibility for the message so that when someone preaches God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life or however you introduce, you're talking about the Gospel, there's something there behind it where people can go, "Yeah, and I can see it by the way they engage the community."

Now, of course, I've way overdrawn this to make the point, but your comments. How should we think about the megachurch movement and how should we assess the different kinds of megachurches that actually are out there?

There's a huge variety of large churches and small churches. So, again, to assess them you have to come back are they faithful to the Gospel? Are they really preaching the word? Are they transforming people's lives? Are they building community spirit where the people are encouraged to grow and love Lord Jesus Christ even more? Same criteria for large or small on that.

The advantage of a large church, one of the advantages – well, you mentioned your daughter is writing curriculum for fifth grade and under because large churches can do specialized work and higher people that are just really, really super competent in an area. They can produce curriculum that then the local small church that can't afford to hire a curriculum writer can benefit from those 'cause, at least the large churches I'm working on, are very free to share their material with other churches that will use that material.

And I know people who are very theologically astute, whose major complaint about secret-oriented megachurches and megachurches in general is the idea that the church is really the nurturing place for discipleship for believers as opposed to being about evangelism. Their theory is that evangelism should be taking place throughout the community in the community outreach through its members, but the gathering time of the church is a time for believers. How do you assess that critique of large churches?

So that what you do on a Sunday morning service can be very evangelistic or very teaching oriented, but you have to do both. The question is which one goes where.

And a second thing that happens is there's a very good tight personal network between many pastors of the leading large churches in the city, and they meet together once a month to interact, pray together, let each other know what's going on in their communities, think about ways in which they can work together, that kind of thing. Very, very healthy ministers group in the old sense of the term, but cross-denominational and really very, very effective.

When we were introducing the table, for example, just getting launched, that they invited me out to speak with them, and so immediately all the pastors of many of the major churches in Dallas knew what we were doing and could even give me feedback, which was terrific in terms of what was going on, in terms of what would be helpful to them and that kind of thing, thus we're doing a topic like this. And I think that the potential there is huge in terms of what can come out of that kind of cross-community ministry.

I know of a church – in fact, I was in a church in which there was a very painful transition, if I can say it that way. A pastor for a long time was let go, and it kind of shook up the body because the minister had been there a long time, et cetera, and there was need for reflective and reconciliation work in terms of how this move had impacted the particular community.

Well, it so happened that a larger church that knew about the church had a pastor who specialized in reconciliation work. I mean they can specialize. They can hire someone whose goal is to – and he actually serves this way around the city in various kinds of situations like this.

So the smaller church contacted the larger church, and the larger church really, for lack of a better description, lent their minister to this community for about a one-year period of periodically meeting with the elders and helping them think through what's going on, drawing off his many experiences of working through these kinds of situations and really helping the church that had been a little unsettled by this experience kind of get back on its feet and get going again.

That would be very, very hard to do if you didn't have these places where there is a combination of a wide array of skills built in one location.

So the idea of we're large because we're trying to be relevant and just dumbing down the Gospel, there are some, but there are many others that it's exactly the opposite. They're large because they're preaching Gospel with power.

Now here's the question I want to ask about this: Where in the Bible is there a description of the kind of music that we should have in the service?

Scripture never describes the worship style. I was in Amsterdam teaching at the Tyndale in Badhoevedorp a while back, and I was down at the Rijksmuseum in downtown Amsterdam, and I saw two forms of the same picture. The second form of the picture got the artist almost killed, and I was looking at the two. I had to look for a bit and figure out that the thing that got the artist killed was he drew a picture of a church with an organ in it, and having an organ in a church was heresy 300 years ago.

The thing that I hate to see is to kind of watch a church get locked in and kind of just slowly grow old because it's locked into that style, making no effort to connect to younger people by how they engage and worship, and in the process they're cutting off their future.

I now fellowship in a church and preach in a church. Most of the people there, I don't even know their names. You know, there are six-hundred people there. I can't possibly know all their names, but what happens, being a traditionalist, I always sit pretty much in the same spot so we have a fellowship of the left side forward that we all kind of know each other.

Well, of course, in a small church you learn all those things. You get to know people at that kind of detailed level in terms of what their preferences are, who their kids are, what they like, what they're involved in, et cetera. Whereas in a large church, unless you move to some type of small group involvement you're not going to find that very, very easily.

It is a little harder to hide in a small church because there are only 118 people there and everybody knows each other, and if you're there doing nothing, it's really obvious to the whole group right there.

Let's talk a little bit about pastoral leadership and leadership style because, obviously, another advantage of a small church is that in some senses it's easier to get involved at one level in the sense of the needs are usually pretty obvious and people can step in. Whereas in large churches you say you can get lost, and isn't that large churches discourage involvement. I know a lot of churches that promote involvement. That's not the problem, but it's easy to be overwhelmed in a big church. It certainly is not so easy in a smaller church to be as overwhelmed.

And in a small church there will only be a few opportunities for service, and if that isn't what I'm really gifted and passionate about, I might find a place where I'm really going to thrive, in a larger church I might have more opportunities to really clip into what I'm connected with, and I might try even the larger church. So, again, it's not a one size fits all.

Seems to me that the New Testament model of leadership is a shared leadership of team-diverse people, and my inclination very much to see the Acts 4 APEST, the apostles, prophet, evangelist, shepherd and teacher as different types of skills that need to be represented in that leadership team. So I think that's what should happen. The team should be a leader, and you should have different kinds of people on there, and in the mutuality of those different kinds of people you'll have an enriching and sometimes frustrating mix of leadership.

I'm going to raise something else here that our culture brings into the equation to a certain degree because you have certain models in which the authority is top down, a kind of hierarchical structure, but you also have church structures and denominations that are built around the idea that the membership has a major hand in how the church operates. More congregational kind of emphasis, if you will. How do we sort through that biblically, that kind of attention?

I think all four of those can be legitimate. The least legitimate of the bunch I would say would be the pastor rule or it's the authorities vested in a single person. Unfortunately, that's too common because it fits our corporate culture of a CEO that has a board of advisers, but makes the decisions, and also our football teams where there's a coach who makes those decisions, and when he's bad you fire him and go get a new one.

Another distinction that I despise is the idea that the pastor does the Lord's work because he's hired by the church, but the guy who's an HR director in a corporation isn't doing the Lord's work. I couldn't disagree more. They're both doing the Lord's work, just in different ways, and what we can't do is let people think that it's sacred if the church pays my salary and it's secular if somebody else pays my salaries or I don't get paid.

We're all doing Lord's work. Think of Abraham. What was he doing? He was an agri business. What about David? He was into politics. What was Paul doing? Well, his job was construction, small house construction. Yes, you're doing the Lord's work wherever you are because the church is people doing God's business in God's place, and God's place is the whole world in a building that we gather in on Sunday morning.

I've done a thing here at the seminary, some short curriculum on that. There are a lot of those things, but the pastors, I think the biggest thing for the pastor is they need to actually get out and be involved in people in the so-called workplace. Go to school with their students, go to the work with their people who do work, go to home schooling and be involved with the lives of the people and remember that the Lord's work is more than just what happens inside the building on Sunday morning, and then preach to that, teach to that, equip to that.

Now that, actually, is a very significant piece of work that he is doing, and I wrote him after the report came out and said how proud I was of him that here he had all these choices as a lawyer as to what he could do and be as a lawyer, and he's chosen to give his time and his energy to this kind of concern.

I think that's a very concrete illustration of work that matters and thinking about the choices that you make it work that matter.

Do you have a final thought for us about how we should think about churches and our engagement with them?