Smaller than a Mega Church
This post will highlight one of the strengths of a church that is small in attendance relative to a mega church. There seems to be a ton of criticism of mega churches these days. Why? I really don’t know for sure but I have a guess. There have been churches housing thousands of members every week for decades. I remember attending a Baptist church in Houston in the mid 80s that must have had upwards of a thousand or more in attendance in a regular Sunday morning service. My guess on why current mega churches are getting so much heat is because they are changing more lives faster. The way things happen after these lives get changed (saved) can get a little interesting in a mega church. My observations, experiences, and theory on that subject is not the real purpose of this post though. I will post on that later.
I want to qualify my experience on the subject of this post before I proceed. I am defining a smaller church as roughly 100 or less attending Sunday service on a regular basis. Pastor Geoff from my church just wrote of a church about this size who was looking for a pastor. That is the size of church that I have the most experience with. I have been attending what some would call a mega multisite church for almost five years. As with many members of my current mega multisite church I grew up in a church where the members of my family equated to about 10% of the membership of the church. I attended the same Baptist church regularly for the first 15 years of my life. I even have a nine-year perfect attendance pin for Sunday School. I would have got 14 years straight if I had not been hospitalized at six to get my tonsils taken out. I was the kid usually standing in as the preacher on youth Sunday. I know the people in my church and they knew me and my family.
What do smaller churches do a really good job at? My last sentence in the paragraph above leads into my answer. I think that the staff in small churches know and look after their members and attendees better. When a crisis strikes in a family in a small church the pastor is almost always there from my experience. I see large churches with thousands of members have a difficult time addressing this concern of being there for fmailies in a crisis. A mega church can have an awesome pastor to member ratio that may be even better than that of a typical small church, but it can be difficult 
to replicate the relationships that are build in a small church. Mega churches move staff around and members move between groups, services, and campuses that cause them to fall under different leadership from time to time. I really don’t see this small church strength as a problem to the mega church, but rather I see it as a natural challenge given the dynamics of a large number of attendees with so may service time and location choices.
I like my mega multisite church meeting arrangements, but I also play by the rules. I have plenty of churches to choose from here in Charleston, SC also known as the Holy City. My church Seacoast met the challenge when my family had a crisis. We spent two months in the hospital with our second child Caden. He went through open-heart surgery at six days old. It got so bad that day that the doctors had to go back in and open up Caden’s chest a few hours after the surgery. One cardiologist spoke to us in a conference room while this procedure was going on. A short time later the surgeon came out and told us that he had done all he could do to save our son and we would just have to wait to see how he responded to the emergency procedure that had just been performed. Needless to say my wife and I were a puddle of tears in the hallway after that conversation. The Lord carried our son through that night. The enemy did a pretty good job of planting fear in us that night too. We were wide open at that point to question and challenge God over this situation.
It was no more than an hour after the talk with the surgeon that we had two couples from our small group that came to our rescue due to my phone call to the leaders of the group. They offered to call a pastor, and I told them to use their judgement. That night we did not have a pastor or staff member from our church at the hospital. It was because the system of small groups worked. One of the couples who came to the hospital that night have since become elders in our church. Their handling of the situation was right on the mark that night. By the way, Pastor Geoff’s wife Pastor Sherry was at the hospital with us the day Caden was born and she keep very close tabs on us and visited along with other staff members several times during our hospital stay.
Yes, a small church pastor would have probably been there that night. A pastor was not needed in this case for a couple of reasons. The main reason was that we were involved in a small group as our pastor recommended. The second reason was because we had an awesome couple as small group leaders. A small church does not normally require this small group element to stay in touch with members.
My concern for the mega churches on this subject is that people can slip through the cracks. The primary reason is because they are not participating in a small group. If a new member in a mega church comes from a small church where they are used to Sunday school and other programs they might linger for a while before joining a small group. A worse scenario is that they end up in a group with weak leadership.
Most small churches are a hard act to follow in this area. Small non-mega churches don’t have to worry about staff and members moving between different services, small groups, and campuses. Small church pastors generally get pretty tightly knitted into their members’ lives. That can be a big deal when it comes to a family in a crisis situation.