Is Your Church Stuck Or Just Small?

I spent a lot of years trying to unstick a church that wasn’t stuck.

I thought it was stuck because it wasn’t getting bigger. And I’d been told in virtually every church leadership conference and book that if my church wasn’t growing numerically, we were stuck.

I didn’t want to pastor a stuck church.

I still don’t.

So I went to all the conferences on how to get unstuck. I read all the books. I applied all the principles.

None of them worked.

Pastors of fast-growing churches are always writing helpful blog posts with lists of all the things churches must be doing wrong if we’re not experiencing numerical growth. So I read a ton of blog posts listing 10 Ways to Get Your Church Unstuck, then applied those principles to my church.

They didn’t work either.

So I prayed longer and harder.

Nada.

Then I starting wreading stories of pastors and churches that stopped trying to grow, but just implemented the principles of church health. As soon as they did that, without trying to help God grow the church—boom!—the church starteord growing like crazy.

So I relaxed and stopped worrying about church growth. Our church worked on getting healthy instead and...

Nah, that didn’t grow the church either.

Finally, I left the modern church-growth movement behind and went back to the source. I read, re-read, preached and taught about the growth of the church in the book of Acts.

Still nothing. Read More

SermonCentral does not identify the author of this post. However, the content and style of the article point to Karl Vaters. While I was unable to confirm it, I believe that I may have posted a link to it either on Pivot or NewSmallChurch.Com, Karl's two blogs.  In any case it is a helpful reminder that the size of a church is not a reliable indicator of the health of a church. A church can be small and healthy as well as small and unhealthy. It can also be large and unhealthy as well as large and healthy. It can be reassuring to a pastor learn that while his church is small, its smallness is not necessarily an indicator of poor spiritual health. On the other hand, we need to not let articles like this one make us complacent about our church's spiritual health. Some churches are both small and spiritually unhealthy and their smallness is tied to their poor spiritual health.