COUNTERING THE ‘SMALL CHURCHES ARE BORING’ EXCUSE

An excuse Cranmer’s Curate has heard for Christians commuting away from the small local churches where they live is that we are ‘boring’.

This prompts cc to offer some reflections for his own ministry and hopefully for the benefit of any members of the youth group in a similar situation:

• We must resist the temptation to compete. That is likely to lead to discouragement and ineffectiveness in serving Christ in our contexts. The reason large gathered churches and their homogeneous church plants are attracting commuters is in fact not necessarily because the preaching is superior quality. What these churches can offer that we often can't is music in a contemporary form and that is undoubtedly a draw in the pop culture. As a friend of cc observed who visited a Conservative Evangelical church plant in our region, we are all post-charismatic now. And they can also offer peer group on a scale that we can't. These are facts of life - we just have to live with them, not get discouraged by them and get on with evangelism in the power of the Holy Spirit.

• We in the smaller churches need to operate on the ‘little and often’ principle in feeding our congregations with God's wonderful Word – sermons of no more than 20 minutes that are geared towards ministering God's Word in digestible form to people who have probably not had much biblical teaching. Their edification in Christ needs to be at the front of our minds, not what may impress our absent peers from the preaching conference.

• We should try to be creative with the limited resources that we have – interviews with members of the congregation, children involvement, introducing new musical items, teaching verses. Things that introduce variation into our services.

• We should hold our nerve in maintaining a mix of traditional hymns and the more modern choruses (provided in our settings they can be played on the organ and/or with the limited range of musical instruments at our disposal). Good traditional hymns really can reinforce the biblical message we are trying to introduce to a small congregation in a way that some of the repetitious modern choruses can’t.

Small churches are actually very exciting places to be; the living Christ is at work as his Word is proclaimed. We mustn’t allow ourselves to be bounced off the ball by the arrogance of the ‘you’re boring’ accusation but at the same time work hard to ensure that there is no justification for such a fundamentally consumerist rationalisation for driving past the door of a small church where God is at work.