Mega not so much. . .

I grew up in a very small parish in the middle of a cornfield in Northeastern Nebraska. It was never large and had no heyday to look back to.  The most it ever had was probably 100 members and yet in some of those years attendance was 80 or so.  Now, not so much.  The age of the farmers has increased by decades and the numbers of children in that county has dropped significantly.  It is a wood clapboard building that is distinguishable for nothing.  It has a traditional quarter sawn oak tall altar with the carved Lamb of God and a raised pulpit coming out of the wall and the obligatory copy of the Thorvaldsen Christ statue and an ancient pipe organ.  It did not have a fellowship hall until the last twenty or thirty years and prior to that only a basement which doubled for fellowship and Sunday school.  But it did produce a harvest of church workers of which I am one.

Now you might think that the bigger churches supply the bigger number of church workers but you would be wrong.  The large congregations do not do their fair share.  They are failing as incubators of church work vocations.  Even my own parish with some 5 sons in the ministry and a half dozen or so as teachers and DCEs has not kept pace with the little Nebraska church I called home.  We have now about 10 times the number of people in worship weekly but we have not done an equal job in recruiting church workers.  Those who think that the future of our church lives in the mega churches or large congregations is missing something important.  We need smaller churches because they supply the lion's share of the church workers for our Synod.  I suspect that this is how it has always been and how it will always be.

The next time you look down your nose at the country parish which opens its doors to 20 or fewer, ask them how many sons and daughters of that congregation have become church workers.  I'll be you will be surprised.  So before we say that these little congregations need to go away and we need to replace them with larger ones, maybe we ought to deal with the elephant in the room.  Large congregations supply fewer church workers for the work of the Kingdom than small ones.  So do yourself a favor and offer up a prayer of thanksgiving for this thing that smaller congregations do so much better than larger ones.  I do every day.