Small Congregations And The Culture Of Bigness

Some of the most interesting research I came across in the year just ended was by Mark Chaves, a Duke University sociologist, who has been running what he calls the National Congregations Study (NCS) since 1998. The early phase of this study is described in his splendid book, Congregations in America, from Harvard University Press. Chaves redid the study in 2006-7 and made it available at www.soc.duke.edu/natcong. I hope that he will get another book out of his continuing surveys, and that it will generate the kind of discussion that his first book did.

The NCS is worth considerable attention. Over 2700 congregations across the denominational spectrum in this country participated in its second venture, and they shared a staggering amount of valuable information about their inreach, outreach, and sense of identity in general. The most significant findings from this research, in my judgment, include the following:

(1) Across the theological spectrum, and not just in isolated pockets and sharply differentiated worship hours, worship practices continue to trend toward greater informality and lay participation, even as social ministries broaden in scope and intensity.

(2) The dominant theological perspective of Protestant congregations today is increasingly conservative. By way of illustrations, over 80% of the NCS congregations describe their teaching of the Bible in terms which emphasize literalism and inerrancy. Just as strikingly, only 8% of them have female clergy leadership, even though female enrollment in seminaries across the country still hovers around 30%.

(3) The number of all-white congregations is finally beginning to decline, and all indicators are that this trend will continue.

(4) As a general rule of thumb, the vitality of local congregational life is on the rise, while that of denominational infra-structures continues to be on the decline.

Visitors to these congregations are typically finding fewer printed bulletins and more and more sophisticated video projection equipment in use during worship services, along with more personal testimonies, spontaneous “amens,” jumping, shouting, dancing, hand raising, and yes, even drums. And they will discover more outreach ministries that include such things as voter registration initiatives, English as a second language classes, comparative religion study groups, community needs assessment studies, book discussions across a broad spectrum of topics both social and spiritual, and lobbying meetings. With the possible exception of a trend toward fewer choirs and longer sermons, whatever else “conservatism” is coming to mean to members of these congregations, it is clearly not the conservatism of their grandparents‘ generation.

One section of the NCR report in particular continues to give me pause. It has to do with the finding that though most congregations in this country remain small, most church members are no longer in them. In specific, the on the rolls membership of the average congregation is still around 75, a figure unchanged since the first NCS study in 1998. But more and more people are actually attending larger and larger congregations, the very largest 10% of which contains half of all churchgoers today.

The travail of small congregations in America is well known and not difficult to understand. Agribusiness, along with urbanization and suburbanization, have made rural and small town life increasingly difficult to sustain and decreasingly attractive on their own merits.With no ability to achieve the economies of scale that are open to larger congregations, whose members expect programs that titillate, scintillate, and sometimes even inspire --- from womb to tomb --- small congregations are being overwhelmed with the difficulties not of matching the expectations and programs, but of just staying open.

Much to the detriment of American religious life, in my view, these congregations are now being held captive by a dogma from corporate America: grow or die. And a tried and true principle of town and country ministry for decades --- cluster and thrive --- typically evokes responses from denominational officials which at best borders on indifference and at worst, contempt. In this respect at least, denominational structures are more part of the problem than they are of the solution.

Having pastored rural and small town churches myself, I think I am rather well insulated against romanticizing a way of church life that all too easily glosses over the grubby side of a lot of small communities and the declining churches that are striving to survive in them. All too frequently, in neither the communities nor their churches are to be found the opportunities that abound for those who choose to leave them. And yet, in both, there remain people --- the numbers are wholly irrelevant --- to whom the Light of the World has come and who both need and deserve its quelling of the darkness in which they all too often feel themselves to be shrouded. That the quelling must be made manifest by the twos and threes will be as significant to God’s plan of salvation as will be the ministrations of the thousands and the tens of thousands elsewhere.