Stop Complicating Ministry: The Smaller The Church, The Simpler We Need To Keep It

Ministry will never be easy, but it doesn’t have to be as complicated as we make it.

So, you pastor a small, struggling church.

You’re trying to help it become less small and less struggling, but all the “can’t miss” answers from the latest church growth conferences never seem to work for you.

You don’t have a big worship team singing new songs, a dynamic small group ministry, a trendy youth group, maybe not even a building of your own to meet in.

That’s okay, you don’t need any of that to have a vibrant, healthy, effective church ministry.

We make church way more complicated than it needs to be. Some of that comes from (mis)reading and listening to pastors of big churches. We see them with professional-grade musicians, lighting, graphics and self-designed curriculum and we think we need to do that, too.

But we don’t.

Big churches didn’t become big by having cool new stuff, they added that stuff when it became the best way to manage the size of the crowd. Parking attendants with matching shirts didn’t cause their growth, it was a byproduct of their growth. Read More