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The CRC’s Congregational Size Challenge

Early in May a few of us via Twitter and my blog had a conversation about congregational size and the CRCNA. I’ll copy and paste the first lines of that blog post.

Larry Doornbos commented via Twitter on a point on the Thom Rainer post on changes in worship services. He had a bit of a conversation with church planter Dirk Van Eyk and YALT on the CRC and church size.

• Rainer’s comment was that 90% of church attendees worship in churches of 400+ which is only 10% of the churches.

Larry had a couple of interesting comments via Twitter:

• CRC is also structured for small churches; we focus on control rather than freedom that churches need to grow
• It is all of that and often a mistrust of larger churches, small is faithful; large is suspect
• CRC is small church denomination. Only 20% are over 200. We penalize larger churches in many ways

Larry posted an excellent response in the comment section which included this paragraph.

My experience in CRC’s is that our structure is one that slows down decisions, slows down movement, and is based on a lack of trust (how many committees plus council have to make the decision before it can go forward). Steven Covey in his book “The Speed of Trust” points out that when there is trust, organizations can move quickly and head to their goals. When we have no trust we build structures to control. Somewhere either we did not trust or we copied a model where people didn’t trust and so we have multiple layers that assure that the “right” decision is made. This multiple layer can be frustrating in a churches of 150-300, but because the system is small it can be dealt with. In a larger organization [th]is can cause things to grind to a halt.

My question, is the paragraph more true if we replace “culture” for “structure” and “community” for “organization”? 

(Again, to be clear, with my re-edit this paragraph comes from me, not him, so don’t shoot him for it.)

My experience in CRC’s is that our culture is one that slows down decisions, slows down movement, and is based on a lack of trust (how many committees plus council have to make the decision before it can go forward). Steven Covey in his book “The Speed of Trust” points out that when there is trust, communities can move quickly and head to their goals. When we have no trust we build cultures to control. Somewhere either we did not trust or we copied a model where people didn’t trust and so we have multiple layers that assure that the “right” decision is made. This multiple layer can be frustrating in a churches of 150-300, but because the system is small it can be dealt with. In a larger community [th]is can cause things to grind to a halt.

Over the last two days I wrote two posts about developing strong leaders and whether we have a culture of fear and conformity.

In reading all of this together I think our size challenge is more a function of our culture rather than our structure. Continue reading →