Top Ten Quotes: De-Sizing the Church
I have a long-standing respect and admiration for Karl Vaters, the go-to voice for the smaller church in general and church health in particular.
And so I was understandably skeptical – dare I say fearful – when Karl’s latest book hit the shelves. With a title like De-sizing the Church: How Church Growth Became a Science, Then an Obsession, and What’s Next, I was prepared to get my feelings hurt, take a few on the chin, and defend why big churches are okay, too. After all, as a staff member at a larger church, everyone is waiting on my hot take, right? (That was typed in my sarcasm font, in case you missed it.)
I couldn’t have been more wrong. The realization of my wrongness started with Karl’s excellent interview on the Re:Imagine podcast with my friend Greg, where he was fair, kind, and balanced. And that realization was solidified as I read through his book over a weekend this summer, having a really hard time putting it down (it’s genuinely a great book and a page-turner).
He laid out his argument cleanly: Church growth is not the problem. Big churches are not the problem. Bigness is the problem. Bigness is an obsessive mindset.
I believe De-Sizing will become a staple resource among the church growth literature. In fact, I’m convinced it already is.
Here are my top ten favorite quotes:
- Numerical growth doesn’t impress anyone but pastors and church leaders, and lack of growth doesn’t bother anyone but us.
- We should prepare for growth. We should be ready for growth. But we should not pursue growth. We should pursue Christ, His mission, His glory, and the making of disciples.
- Fame is not evil, but it is dangerous.
- Pastors lose touch when we spend most of our pre- and post-service time in our office or green room instead of walking through the seats and hanging out in the church lobby.
- …in our pushback against stale methods, we’ve swung the pendulum too far. In many churches, the danger isn’t that we’re enamored with old models, but that we’ve become obsessed to the point of idolatry with the newest idea.
- …the smaller the church, the less helpful metrics are; the larger the church, the more helpful metrics are. No church should ever ignore metrics, and no church should base everything on them. At either end there is danger.
- [I]ntentionally small churches are not a problem to be fixed. If they minister strategically, ten churches of 50 can have a far greater impact than one church of 500.
- We have to stop asking how to fix our structures and get back to why they exist in the first place.
- …biblical pastors don’t do everything; biblical pastors equip everyone.
- We’ve treated the statistics like they’re the story. “We broke all previous church attendance records this weekend!” is a wonderful statistic, but it’s not a story. It doesn’t become a story until we de-size the statistics and hear about one of those people who came to church and gave their life to Jesus.
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