Edward, we could not disagree more about the viability of small churches in the 20 to 30 to 50 person range. Rev. Greco is right in what he said about stats on small churches being the norm.
That describes the typical evangelical church in rural America. They usually own their own buildings, usually with any mortgage paid off decades ago (or maybe in the 1800s), and have no paid pastor, or the pastor might occasionally get a "love offering" or a Christmas gift. It works, and since the pastors are typically community leaders -- examples in our community include teachers, school superintendents, city department heads, business owners, and even our former state representative -- a good case can be made that they are a lot more effective in outreach than a young pastor right out of seminary who comes to a small church for his first pastorate, spends only a few years in the community, and his goal is to move to a larger church when one calls him.
It's not as if I'm unfamiliar with large churches. I was baptized in First Park Congregational Church of Grand Rapids. My mother, after being told that as a member of the church choir that she was expected to sing "The Age of Aquarius" at a flag burning being organized by the new youth pastor during the 1960s -- no, I am not kidding -- she transferred with me to Mayflower Congregational Church, a politically conservative and theologically (by Congregational standards) moderate church in a wealthy Grand Rapids suburb where a lot of important Republican politicians attended. For context, my father was head of the Republican Party in Kent County (basically metro Grand Rapids), and while he was a lapsed Catholic and no longer attended church -- my mother had joined that Congregational church to get me baptized since my father refused to take the baptismal vows to raise me in the Catholic faith that would be required to get me baptized as a Catholic -- there were significant advantages to being a member of a large mainline church where attendance was rarely under a thousand and sometimes in excess of two thousand people.
Give me a small church any day that follows the Bible, with a pastor who deeply cares about pastoring and does his work out of passion rather than for pay, over a large "big steeple" mainline church.
You will correctly point out that we have more than just those two choices of large liberal mainliners and small struggling evangelical churches. I agree.
Remember that I grew up in Grand Rapids where (back then) the Dutch Reformed world thought a church with less than 40 families -- and that means FAMILIES, not counting widows, adult singles, or college students, which means an attendance well over a hundred -- was considered to be eligible for help from the CRC's "Fund for Needy Churches," and churches with less than 20 families were usually shut down as nonviable.
Try shutting down all PCA churches with fewer than 20 families as nonviable, by the CRC's definition of "family" being a married couple, not counting widows, singles, or college students living apart from their parents. Will that mean closure of a third of the denomination's non-urban churches? Half? More than that?
Let's deal with a hard truth. "Viability" is closely tied to the pastor's salary.
If the pastor has an outside job, viability is not going to be a problem for most small churches unless there is some sort of major structural failure in the building that the congregation can't afford to fix.
We can say that tentmaking is not ideal. Fine. You won't hear me disagreeing.
But for large parts of the United States, no other model will work in church planting.
We need to face facts. If we want Reformed churches, we need to change the failed model that wrecked Reformed church planting on the frontier in the 1800s and led to not just many but most Scots-Irish settlers becoming Methodists or Baptists because the Presbyterians couldn't provide pastors.
Small churches that start small have a tendency to become big churches. A lot of "First Baptist" churches in small towns in the early-to-mid 1800s are now very large "First Baptist" churches in small towns that became big cities. Later on, Reformed and Presbyterian people had to come in late and play catch-up because the people who had wanted a Presbyterian church years earlier, sometimes decades earlier, couldn't get a pastor.
Right here in my community, our local United Methodist Church was started by a Presbyterian elder who organized a church many years before the Civil War that included most of the leaders of the community and met in the county courthouse. He rode hundreds of miles on horseback all over Missouri trying to get a Presbyterian pastor to consider a call to the church he had started. The only pastors willing to come were Methodists so the church became Methodist. Our county never got a Presbyterian church until after the Civil War, decades too late, and by that time the Baptists and Methodists had taken over the field.
That story and ones like it got repeated not just hundreds but thousands of times all over the frontier. Put bluntly, it's our own fault as Reformed people that other people did the work we didn't do.
I've been living in rural America for the last thirty years, first in rural West Michigan, then a very non-Reformed part of Iowa, then Missouri, then attending churches in New Mexico and Texas, and then back to Missouri. I have watched with extreme frustration as upset Reformed people moved to the communities where I was living and not only could not find a Reformed church, but in some cases, couldn't find any evangelical church at all that was willing to accept them into membership without rebaptism, and many of those churches would not tolerate "Calvinism" in membership even if people agreed to be rebaptized.
In one state I had to drive almost two hours to the closest Reformed church, an OPC. In another, over two hours to an OPC. In another, about 45 minutes to an RPCNA. Here in Missouri, the first time I was here, I attended a PCA that was not at all Reformed and for that reason I never joined it despite attending every Sunday and getting many requests from the pastor for me to join. (To be clear, we're not talking minor issues -- two decades ago the church had an almost entirely female church council, I don't know of anyone in the church other than the pastor who knew the Westminster Standards existed or knew what the word "Calvinist" meant, and some of the church's leaders weren't aware they were in a denomination and thought the church was independent, which it might as well have been.) When I came back to Missouri the second time, I drove over an hour to a URC church plant that failed before the church went independent, joined the ARP, and is now an OPC. (I transferred out shortly before the church joined the OPC.)
This is the reality we face outside major cities.
The Reformed Baptists, put bluntly, are doing their jobs and getting people in their churches who would rather be in a church that practices infant baptism.
Good for them. Not good for us.
I love my Reformed Baptist brethren, but if we aren't going to be planting Reformed churches that practice infant baptism, we have only ourselves to blame when our people move to a community where there are no Reformed churches at all, or the only churches that are at all Reformed are Reformed Baptist churches pastored by tentmakers.
The lesson of the early 1800s should be a warning to us of what happens when we don't start churches in places that can't afford to pay a pastor.
Strong caution on this.
In large parts of rural America, the largest church in town may not have many more than 100 people in attendance on Sunday morning. (Membership can be a whole different issue than attendance, with high-commitment churches sometimes having considerably more people attending than members, and the reverse for mainline or broad evangelical churches.)
And that's the Baptist and Pentecostal/charismatic and nondenominational evangelical churches.
I can think of very few confessionally Reformed churches I've attended since moving out of West Michigan nearly three decades ago that were over 100 people in attendance or membership.
We in the Reformed world have to deal with reality. In many cases there is ZERO possibility of ever having more than 20 to 30 to 50 people who agree with us in a community of 5,000 to 10,000 people. Even in a major city (by Missouri standards) like Springfield, it was EXTREMELY difficult to get a confessionally Reformed church started. I was involved almost from the beginning -- Springfield URC/Gospel of Grace (Indep.)/Heritage ARP almost died twice. Before that, a PCA closed. During that period, an EPC closed. And the PCA tried again to come in and gave up. (The PCA is now trying again and will have a much better chance with a pastor who has outside employment.)
The Baptists know how to start small churches and keep them open, largely because they can work with tentmaking pastors of small churches. Including Reformed Baptists.
We need to follow that model or there are large parts of the United States where there will never be a Reformed church.
Which doesn't change what is needed to have a viable church.
It's always going to be easier to plant a church in an area with a dynamic population and a growth profile. DFW could easily absorb one new church a year.
And it's always going to be harder to keep a church alive in an area with a static population and a shrinking profile.
I'd have to look at Springfield to express an opinion. It has a large enough population base to support a reformed body, but growth has been slow over the last 25 years, and I don't know how dynamic the population is, so I don't know if it is a good candidate for establishing one. History suggests not. Being in the Southwest Church Planting Network should help.
There are challenges to a smaller church. I think they are accentuated if you are new to the area and don't have any connections outside of church.
But I have to disagree with Edward here. Even as a pastor of a 400-member church, I know that the average size of both PCA churches and churches in general is under 100. So not only is a sub-100 church viable, but it is also the norm.
