Pulpit Envy and Other Complexes:
Pastors of smaller churches are usually hesitant to enter into the conversation about ideal sizes of church congregations. If they do speak a discouraging word to the culturally accepted idiom that bigger is better when it comes to congregation size, they end up sounding like a weekend flag football warrior criticizing the NFL as being "overrated." An old friend of mine once planted a church and often used the borrowed slogan " A church for those who don't do church". At the time I was a staff member at the nearby big box church who interestingly enough supported the new church financially. Sometimes I would tease a friend at the new plant about being
"The church for people who don't do church, paid for by the people who do do Church".
A few years later I fell into the lure of church planting myself, drummed up a lot of support from large churches and would wax eloquently about the opportunity to have a "blank page" to start out with, only to discover that rather than a blank page for my oh so cutting edge ideas, a church plant was more like a paper shredder!
But enough about me
...I have made it my practice the last three years to do extended reading by one favorite author this summer it's Eugene Peterson. I find most Peterson books are worth reading a second or third time. I'm into my 7th Eugene Book in the pre-office hours reading in my back yard , his newest , his Memoir "The Pastor".
I just made it into Chapter 18 and a referenced letter to a friend he wrote many years ago really got my attention this morning. His friend was leaving his church for a bigger opportunity, and Eugenes advice to him really resonated with things I have often wondered about but would rarely voice out loud especially from my place in a small Church. This will be my longest post ever but since 3/4 of it will be a direct quote of Eugene it's not really all that remarkable , but may fuel some remarks...
" The Pastor" Pages 156-158 : " One Tuesday as we were getting ready to break up, one of our company announced that he was leaving his congregation for another, a church of a thousand members, three times the size of where he was. He described it as "more promising." I had lunch with Phillip later that week, and he told me that he felt his gifts were being wasted where he was, that he needed more of a challenge, more opportunity to "multiply his effectiveness" (his term). He had not been one of the original members of the Company, but he had been with us for seven years. He was thoroughly familiar with the particular ethos of pastor that had been developing among us.
The more he talked that day over our plate of bread-sticks and vichyssoise, I realized that he had, despite the Company of Pastors, absorbed a concept of pastor that had far more to do with American values-competitive, impersonal, functional- than with what I had articulated as the consensus of our Company in Five Smooth Stones. That bothered me. It didn't bother me that he was changing congregations - there are many valid, urgent, and, yes, biblical reasons to change congregations. But Philips reasons seemed to be fueled by something more like adrenaline and ego and size. I made a few shy demurrals, but he wasn't listening. SO the next week I wrote him a letter.
Dear Phillip,
I've been thinking about our conversation last week and want to respond to what you anticipate in your new congregation. You mentioned its prominence in the town, a center, a kind of cathedral church that would be able to provide influence for the Christian message far beyond its walls.
Did I hear you right?
I certainly understand the appeal and feel it myself frequently. But I am also suspicious of the appeal and believe that gratifying it is destructive both to the gospel and the pastoral vocation. It is the kind of thing America specializes in, and one of the consequences is that American religion and the pastoral vocation are in a shabby state.
It is also the kind of thing for which we have abundant documentation through twenty centuries now, of debilitating both congregation and pastor. In general terms it it the devils temptation to Jesus to throw himself from the pinnacle of the temple. Every time the church's leaders depersonalize, even a little, the worshiping, loving community, the gospel is weakened. And size is the great depersonalizer. Kierkegaard's criticism is still cogent: "the more people, the less truth."
The only way the Christian life is brought to maturity is through intimacy, renunciation, and personal deepening. And the pastor is in a key position to nurture such maturity. It is true that these things can take place in the context of large congregations, but only by strenuously going against the grain. Largeness is an impediment, not a help.
Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence - religious meaning, God's meaning - a part from God as revealed in the cross of Jesus: through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs, through the ecstasy of recreational sex, through the ecstasy of crowds. Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but, at least in America, almost never against the crowds. Probably because they get so much ego benefit from the crowds.
But a crowd destroys the spirit as thoroughly as excessive drink and depersonalized sex. It takes us out of ourselves, but not to God, only away from him. The religious hunger is rooted in the unsatisfactory nature of the self. We hunger to escape the dullness, the boredom, the tiresomeness of me. We can escape upward or downward. Drugs and depersonalized sex are a false transcendence downward. A crowd is an exercise in false transcendence upward, which is why all crowds spiritually pretty much the same, whether at football games, political rallies, or at church.
So why are we pastors so unsuspicious of crowds , so naive about the false transcendence that they engender? Why are we so knowledgeable in the false transcendence of drink and sex and so unlearned in the false transcendence of crowds? There are many spiritual masters in our tradition who diagnose and warn, but they are little read today. I myself have never written what I really feel on this subject, maybe because I am not entirely sure of myself, there being so few pastors alive today who agree. Or maybe is is because I don't want to risk wholesale repudiation by friends whom I genuinely like and respect. But I really do feel that crowds are a worse danger, far worse than drink or sex, and pastors may be the only people on the planet to encourage an imagination that conceives of congregations strategically not in terms of its size but as a congenial setting for becoming mature in Christ in a community, not a crowd.
Your present congregation is close to ideal in size to employ your pastoral vocation for forming Christian maturity. You have talked about "multiplying your influence." My apprehension is that your anticipated move will diminish your vocation, not enhance it.
Can we talk more about this? I would welcome a continuing conversation.
The peace of Christ,
Eugene
So many things spun through my head as I digested those unusual words regarding church leadership, like if I got a letter like that from Eugene would I have the guts to open a second one?
Sometimes my ministry reminds me of a line from the great songwriter Bill Mallonee
the small talk of the town.
Yes, she is the silent type
But she'll buy you the next round"
Yes, she is the silent type
But she'll buy you the next round"
Eugenes words have me thinking that there is so much more to be worked out in my ideas about what the ideal sized church really is. Fortunately perhaps, my unique mix of spiritual gifted-ness, management abilities and leadership style seem to be just the perfect combination for growing a church of 100 people, so there appear to be a lot of bridges I will likely never have to wonder about crossing.
This strange idea popped into my head as well though...Joel Osteens crowd is the fastest growing one in America these days, and while we don't have the headcount recorded, one of the larger crowds Jesus ever attracted were shouting crucify him crucify him.
