Smaller is Better-A interesting Statistic

[Pastor Keith]

As a pastor of a new church plant, I have become all to familiar with all the church growth literature currently in Christendom, both from an Apostolic perspective and from what others in the larger Christian world have to say about, How to grow a church?

At times this is a very frustrating experience, for# of reasons, of which I won't list here. But I came across a specific book called Natural Church Development; the thesis is that Church Growth will happen naturally as long as people/pastors/saints don't mess with it. The key is building and facilitating 8 specific biotic (taken from nature) potentials into the church.

His research the most comprehensive done in history of the church (facts don't lie) it showed a # of amazing facts, many I won't share here but I thought I would share this one fact that his team discovered contrasting the converting power of smaller church versus the mega church. Read it for yourself.

"But couldn’t it be that the picture is different for really large churches (with more than 1000 at worship services)? While the smallest churches (with an average attendance of 51) typically won 32 new people in the last five years, the mega churches (with an average attendance of 2,856) won 112 new persons during the same time period.

In raw numbers, a single mega church won may more people than a single “mini-church.” If we remember, though, that the mega churches are 56 times the size of the “mini-churches,” then the following calculation expresses the potential of the two categories far more realistically.

If instead of a single church with 2,856 in worship we had 56 churches, each with 51 worshippers, these churches would, statistically, win 1,792 new people within five years – 16 times the number the mega church would win.
Thus we can conclude that the evangelistic effectiveness of mini-churches is statistically 1,600 percent greater than that of mega churches!"

Natural Church Development
A Guide to Eight Essential Qualities of Healthy Churches
By
Christian A. Schwarz
ChurchSmart Resources