On Leadership and Church Size Dynamics (Pastors Talk, Ep. 256)
- How Does Church Size Affect Leadership?
- How Does Church Size Affect Church Culture?
- How Does Church Size Affect Elders and Members?
- 10 Trends of a Large Church
Related Resources:
Books: How to Build a Healthy Church, Elders in the Life of the Church, Revitalize
Podcast: On Lay Elders, Part 1 (with Klon Kitchen), On Lay Elders, Part 2 (with Klon Kitchen)
Journal: The Pastor and his Staff, Part 1, The Pastor and his Staff, Part 2, Lay Elders: A User’s Guide – Part 1
Articles: Leadership and Church Size Dynamics by Tim Keller
Subscribe and listen to this episode on Spotify and Apple Podcast
Transcript
The following is a lightly edited transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.
Jonathan Leeman:
This is Jonathan Leeman.
Mark Dever:
Really?
Jonathan Leeman:
I’m serious.
Mark Dever:
Again.
Jonathan Leeman:
One more time.
Mark Dever:
We have to stop meeting like this.
Jonathan Leeman:
We’re back.
Mark Dever:
How long can two guys keep talking about the same stuff?
Jonathan Leeman:
You know, I just learned that Ask Pastor John has over 2,000 episodes. We’re down in the 200s.
Mark Dever:
Well, but that’s people asking John questions about the entire Bible.
Jonathan Leeman:
The entire world. Yeah, no, that’s true. But if he’s at 2,000 something, it seems like we can…
Mark Dever:
Okay.
Jonathan Leeman:
Get a little bit more.
Mark Dever:
All right. All right. All right.
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, if you didn’t know, this is 9Mark Dever’s Pastors Talk, learn more.
Mark Dever:
Is that pastors talk like…
Jonathan Leeman:
We did this last time.
Mark Dever:
This is sponsored by churches?
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, we need churches to sponsor us. And if you want to know how and put us into your mission budget or something like that, go to 9Marks.org, learn more about us, figure out how to donate , and so forth. That’s true.
Mark Dever:
That’d be great. I think our church does.
Jonathan Leeman:
Or if you’ve been blessed, so does mine. If you’ve been blessed by this ministry, consider that. Mark, I want to invite a friend to our conversation. I want to introduce Tim Keller. He’s here in the form of an article, an old article he wrote.
Mark Dever:
The Lord called him home last year, but he’s given us his written remains.
Jonathan Leeman:
And he continues to give through this article. And it seems like this article is raised…
Mark Dever:
It gets cited more than anything else from Tim, I think, in my experience.
How Does Church Size Affect Leadership?
Jonathan Leeman:
Really? Well, where I hear about it is in conversations we have with your interns, conversations with other pastors, and groups of pastors we’re a part of, it comes up again and again. And certainly, the topic comes up again and again, even if the article is not referenced.
And the article is, you can Google it. Leadership and Church Size Dynamics. Maybe we should put this in our internship and have them read it and discuss it. I think it might be useful. And what I want to do today is I’m going to play the part of Tim and just read excerpts here and there and get you to respond and have a conversation, whether in agreement or disagreement.
Mark Dever:
Sure. Great.
Jonathan Leeman:
In this first paragraph, let me tell you how you’re going to absorb this first paragraph. You’re going to have to ignore the adverbs. Okay. The adverbs are a bit much. One of the most common reasons for pastoral leadership mistakes is blindness to the significance of church size.
Size has an enormous impact. Get rid of enormous. Has an impact on how a church functions. There is a size culture that he says profoundly affects. Let’s just say affects. Affects how decisions are made, how relationships flow, how effectiveness is evaluated, and what ministers, staff, and lay leaders do agree or disagree.
Mark Dever:
That’s self-evidently true. You and I were in a conversation earlier today with pastors of churches of various sizes, anywhere from 15 members to 15,000.
Jonathan Leeman:
That was striking.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, but they were all in the same conversation. But undoubtedly, how they were hearing things, and what they needed to do tomorrow with their time was heavily affected by how many members they had.
How Does the Size of a Church Affect its Function?
Jonathan Leeman:
Now he goes on to say the difference between how churches of 100, and 1000 function may be greater than the difference between a Presbyterian and a Baptist church of the same size. Do you agree with that?
Mark Dever:
Well, kind of. I mean, I think I know what he means. And yeah, there are going to be similarities between the way our church functions and say…
Jonathan Leeman:
Your thousand-member church versus…
Mark Dever:
Yeah, Fourth Presbyterian of Bethesda or Falls Church Anglican out in Falls Church.
Jonathan Leeman:
Similar sized.
Mark Dever:
As opposed to the way your Baptist church with a hundred members functions. Now there will also be some similarities that we will have between our churches that we don’t share with the Presbyterian Anglican or elder rule Church.
Jonathan Leeman:
What this article goes on to do is help people recognize what some of those similarities would be across mid-size similarities, even if denominational differences. He says a large church is not simply a bigger version of a small church, the difference in communication, community formation, and decision-making processes are so great, that the leadership skills required in each are almost of completely different orders.
Have you had to exercise different leadership skills? Tell us the smallest church you’ve pastored and the biggest church you’ve pastored.
Mark Dever:
The smallest church would have been New Meadows Baptist Church in Topsfield, Massachusetts in 1985, starting out with 30 members, and 35 members.
Jonathan Leeman:
And it grew in your time there too?
Mark Dever:
I was just there a little over a year ago. I mean, we would maybe have up to 70 or 80 attending.
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay. And then Eden, when you were in Cambridge.
Mark Dever:
We probably had about 300 and some odd members.
Jonathan Leeman:
And so that falls in kind of his medium size.
Mark Dever:
But attendance would have been more like 400.
Jonathan Leeman:
When you first arrived at Capitol Hill, it was how many members?
Mark Dever:
Oh, a good number of members, but attendance was about 130.
Jonathan Leeman:
130.
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
And it peaked out at?
Mark Dever:
1,050.
Jonathan Leeman:
And that took about how long? About 20 years?
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
15.
Mark Dever:
No, no, no, the 1050, about 20 years.
Jonathan Leeman:
No, 95. And then probably about 2010, 12, 2015.
Mark Dever:
Okay. Maybe 15, or 17 years. Yeah. Anyway.
Jonathan Leeman:
So you have had to exercise different leadership skills across different sizes.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. Although I guess I would say from 1050 to where we are right now, about 300, less than that. 750, 780. It feels the same. There feels no difference.
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay, but let’s go back to New Meadows.
Mark Dever:
If our functioning congregation on Sunday morning is like 900 people, and that’s not counting children and people working with kids, I’m just talking in the assembly, then we’re talking about roughly the same size church for the last 10 years here, 10 or 15 years here.
But in the first 15 years, it changed a lot. It was like from 130 to, you fill in every number between there and 1,000. And yeah, we had a year or a month in which that was the size church we were.
Jonathan Leeman:
Did that make different kinds of demands on you as a pastor, leadership demands?
Mark Dever:
I think it did. I think my attention necessarily shifted from the membership as a whole to the leadership, both the elders and then the church staff.
Jonathan Leeman:
And the follow-up question is, did that come with various objections from members expecting you to act? Well, let me read a little bit more.
How Does Church Size Affect Church Culture?
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
And then you comment. He says every church has a culture that goes with its size and which must be accepted. Most people tend to prefer a certain size culture, and unfortunately, many give their favorite size culture a moral status and treat other size categories as spiritually inferior.
Mark Dever:
That’s so true. I say this kind of stuff to people all the time. In the book of Acts, there is no virtue in the large church or virtue in the small church. It’s like the cell church is the real deal or like…
The bigger the hall of Tyrannus was the better. It’s just, no brothers, it’s just, it’s not like that. There are really good big churches and really bad big churches in life and the world.
There are really good small churches and really bad small churches in life and the world. So if you think size is the golden key to evangelization or edification or discipling culture or missions, then I think you’re thinking something that the New Testament does not teach us.
Jonathan Leeman:
He gives a couple of examples of members of a church of 2,000 who feel like they should be able to get the senior pastor personally on the phone without much difficulty. They are insisting on a certain kind of pastoral care that a church of under 200 provides. It’s going to be a programmatic.
Mark Dever:
I remember when we had a member who was very disgruntled and wanted to see me. We had about 400 members or 350 members. He, you know, I met with him and he just said, look, I want the senior pastor to be one of my best friends.
I’ve never been over to your house for dinner. And I said, listen, if you came over once a year, would you think you were one of my best friends? He said, no. I said, but you realize if we had every member of this church over once a year, we would not have any dinners just with our family alone.
All of our dinners would only be with different members of this church. And I said I don’t think that’s a good idea. So I’m not saying that what you want, I said to this member, is necessarily bad. I’m saying I think you probably want to be in a small church.
I think you want to be a 30 or 40-person church where, yeah, you can be one of the best friends of the senior pastor and that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that desire. It’s not realistic and therefore I’d say ultimately it’s not godly for you to insist on that in a congregation like this of three or 400 people. That’s not very kind to me or to whoever is in that role.
Jonathan Leeman:
That’s Tim’s next point. He says a wise pastor may have to sympathetically confront people who are just not able to handle the church’s size culture.
Mark Dever:
I have had to do that with people who need something to be larger or needed to be smaller. I’ve had to do both many times over the years and not take it personally at all. And it’s actually, I think what you understand that one of the helpful things about Tim’s article is it helps you not to take things personally. You’re saying, oh, this is typical of a 700-person church and this person is really acting like they want more 100-person church.
Jonathan Leeman:
He says new members who have just joined a smaller church after years of attending a much larger one may begin complaining about the lack of professional quality in the church and ministries and insisting that it shows a lack of spiritual excellence. Have you experienced that?
Mark Dever:
Oh, yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
And you just say, sorry, we can’t provide what you’re asking for, but that’s… What do you say?
Mark Dever:
Well, I mean, it’s getting to know what the particular area is, the better children’s ministry, more… More staff devoted to youth? Is it wanting college work? Is it wanting women’s ministry or men’s ministry of a certain kind?
Is it wanting a certain amount of programs? Is it wanting a certain amount of facilities? It just can be so many different things. They want a certain ministry that they were always part of. There are earlier churches that we just don’t have a helicopter pilot ministry here.
There’s just going to be a thousand variations of this. And that’s where you want to listen. And if the person seems to be regenerate. You want to thank God that they have good desires, but then you want to help divorce their desires of ministry in a particular form from their just desire to follow Christ and help them to mature to the point where they realize they can follow Christ without it looking exactly like this ministry they were involved in before.
How Does Church Size Affect Elders and Members?
Jonathan Leeman:
He says every church has aspects of its natural size culture that must be resisted. And I thought this was interesting. Now you’re speaking to say elders, right? Elders of large churches and then elders of small churches.
And to the elders of large churches, Tim would say, they have great difficulty keeping track of members who drop off or fall away from the faith. This should never be accepted as inevitable. Rather, large churches must continually struggle to improve pastoral care and discipleship.
He goes further, saying, large churches must use organizational techniques from the business world, but the danger of that is to become too results-oriented and focused on quantifiable outcomes rather than goals of holiness and character growth.
And this tendency should not be accepted as inevitable. Good words to large church pastors, any qualifications you’d offer there?
Mark Dever:
Well, not that must use. So no, I disagree with…
Jonathan Leeman:
You must use organizational techniques.
Mark Dever:
Not true.
Jonathan Leeman:
You may use.
Mark Dever:
Well, yeah. It depends on what assumptions Tim was making there about what shape valid and faithful pastoral ministry must take or must include. If you think it must include some kind of regular Richard Baxter-like personal visitation of elder to each member, yeah, then there’s gonna be a pretty high degree of organization needed if you’re dealing with a 7,000 or 8,000-person church.
And you’re gonna have to define, well, who can do that visitation? How many of those can you do per year? How meaningful are they if you’re doing, you know if you personally are doing 600 of these a year? It’s an average of two a day.
Okay, let me know about your work day and, you know, how you’re able to schedule this and what they’re like. And yeah, I just think at our church, we don’t perfectly cover the membership, but we are always working through our membership directory in so many ways in my personal life, my quiet time.
I encourage others to do that in our staff meetings as we pray and in our elders meetings, we pray through a certain number just alphabetically going through the list. So I don’t know if we need business practices for that but we certainly are systematic in trying to work through things and I can imagine a hundred different ways that could be done well.
Jonathan Leeman:
And I would think it does take a little bit more deliberateness.
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
The larger the church gets. You even get a sum of that in Acts 6. Where they see divisions showing up and they say, okay, we got to come up with a solution here to the fact that certain Greek-speaking widows are not getting fed. Right?
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
He then says to smaller churches, the smaller church by its nature gives immature, outspoken, opinionated, and broken members a significant degree of power over the whole body. Since everyone knows everyone else, when members of a family or a small group express strong opposition to the direction set by the pastor leaders, their misery can hold the whole church congregation hostage.
He says smaller churches have an unwritten rule that for any new initiative to be implemented, nearly everyone must be happy with it. Leaders of small churches must be brave enough to lead and confront immature members in spite of the unpleasantness involved.
Mark Dever:
No, no, no, no. That whole thing is problematic. You need to go back to the beginning and give it to me sentence by sentence.
Jonathan Leeman:
Seriously?
Mark Dever:
I’m dead serious.
Do Smaller Churches Give Unqualified People Power?
Jonathan Leeman:
Smaller church by their nature gives immature, outspoken, opinionated, and broken members a significant degree of power over the whole body.
Mark Dever:
Pause. I don’t think that’s true. If you’re a bad leader, that’s true.
Jonathan Leeman:
I would say there’s a temptation to do that.
Mark Dever:
Oh, there’s a problem, sure.
Jonathan Leeman:
In a way that you won’t feel in a larger church.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, that’s true. But gives, that’s way too passive for the leaders.
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay, sure.
Mark Dever:
So for example, I remember when I was here and we had very few members and we had some of these more immature members, you know, inflicting pain on the rest of us by what they stood up and how often they stood up and how long they stood up and spoke and what they said.
And I can remember other older godly or members speaking to me afterward saying like, one of them just said very tersely, you know, the people who talk a lot don’t necessarily give much. I mean, just come up to them and say that to me after the member’s meeting.
You know, when he just sat there and listed this one or two people just sort of blow for a while. And I don’t know what the members of the church give. But I appreciated that the person speaking was evidently not holding hostage anyone who knew him.
Now if we had new people who weren’t familiar with what they’re like, but the very presupposition Tim has here is that with a small church, you have this kind of power. I’ll get, well no Tim, actually with a small church, people know what each other is like. So you’re not held hostage by the crazy uncle. Because you all know he’s the crazy uncle.
Now if you all just walked into the room, and it’s 75 people who didn’t know each other and like in a jury and you’re trying to be kind to each other and respectful initially, maybe so. But if you have a history with each other, you weigh different people’s words differently and everybody knows that.
Jonathan Leeman:
That’s true, but you’re also assuming a high degree of maturity there.
Mark Dever:
Let’s suppose it’s just normal. Let’s just go for normal.
Jonathan Leeman:
Let’s go high.
Mark Dever:
Let’s go for normal.
Jonathan Leeman:
Let’s go for average.
Mark Dever:
I’m going for normal.
Jonathan Leeman:
I’m standing in a room with like… 20 other people and the immature person who we all know and love, even though we know, okay, maybe this person’s a little bit cranky at times, speaks up versus a room with 200 people or 2,000 people. My heart is going to have natural sympathies towards that person who is in the room of 20 versus the room of 200 or 2,000.
That’s going to naturally want to help me. That’s going to make me kind of want to, okay, let’s bring them along. We don’t want to antagonize them too much. I mean, I know he can be a little cranky, but he’s a good brother and let’s find a solution that everybody’s happy with versus the room of 200 and the room of 2000.
Mark Dever:
Your soul has handles on it that mine doesn’t have.
Jonathan Leeman:
I may be more like the average person.
Mark Dever:
Well, I’m just saying if we all know what this dude is like, I may not have many stores in trying to bring him along. I’m just trying to get the whole over here and I’ll deal with him as I need to.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah, see, I think your solid excellent leadership skills are speaking here. And I think I’m describing the pool that the average person, the average pastor, elder, is going to feel in a room of 20 people versus 200 and especially 2,000.
Mark Dever:
Well, I think I understand what you mean, but if you’re the pastor of the church and you know you’ve got to get it over here to point C and Harold is speaking up and everybody in the room understands what Harold is like.
Jonathan Leeman:
Cantankerous Harold.
Mark Dever:
Just lots of questions, Harold, lots of, on the other hand, Harold, lots of, you know, then we can all listen with no cost other than a little bit of time and still just go right ahead over to C. So I think Tim’s being, in that article, I would just call that maybe in English, a little too precious.
I mean, it’s just, I can imagine times when it would be that way, but to say that it’s always, or even normally that way in that situation, I don’t think so. I think the very, smallness presumes familiarity, and the familiarity gives you an ability to just let it go in one ear and out the other because that’s the way he is sometimes.
Jonathan Leeman:
I think you’re describing what one should do.
Mark Dever:
I think I’m describing what one often does just by habit like you do in your own family when you’re together over Christmas and you’re used to that person being like that. I don’t think I’m describing exceptional skills. I think I’m describing normal humanity.
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay. Well, let’s keep going. And I think some of these dynamics continue to come out even as you think about where leadership moves as the church grows and what he’s going to describe.
Mark Dever:
We’re thinking this is going to be a useful podcast.
Jonathan Leeman:
I think so. What do you guys think?
Mark Dever:
Keep going. If you all have been wondering why the podcasts have been so boring this year, it’s because Alberto has pulled the buttons away from Jonathan and he can’t reach them anymore. Go ahead.
10 Trends of a Large Church
Jonathan Leeman:
You can jump in. Part of the challenge, Tim says, is that people break down size categories differently. There are lots of variables. So now he’s going to be a little more nuanced. So everyone knows that a larger church becomes harder to pastor than a smaller church. But what is a larger church?
And he says, well, it depends on the number of things in the community, whether or not people’s expectations, the mobility of the church’s population, how fast the church has grown, and so on. So you need to account for all of these things, which seems fair enough. Nonetheless, he says there are several trends, general trends. He offers 10. Maybe we’ll get through all of them. Maybe we won’t.
Mark Dever:
We could do nine.
Jonathan Leeman:
Hmm. I like nine.
Mark Dever:
Trinity of trinities, you know?
Increasing in Complexity
Jonathan Leeman:
That’s right. Number one, increasing in complexity. The larger the church, the less its members have in common. More diversity in factors such as age, family status, ethnicity, and so on.
Mark Dever:
Probably true.
Shifting Lay Staff Responsibilities
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay. That obviously is going to impact how you pastor to some measure less naturally in common. Number two, shifting lay staff responsibilities. The larger the church, the more the decision-making falls to the staff rather than the whole membership or even the lay leaders.
Elder boards must increasingly deal with top-level big-picture issues. The larger the church, the more decision-making is pushed upward toward the staff and away from the congregation and lay leaders.
Mark Dever:
True. I do think that’s true. I would like to say that in a congregational church, even if you have 2,000 members, there are certain decisions that are reserved for the congregation and that the elders will cherish and burnish and protect the congregation being able to make, and they’ll understand much of their ministry, is to enable the congregation to make those decisions.
And on the other hand, if you have a healthy eldership, even only three brothers, let’s say, with a small church of 70 people or 60 or 50 people, those three brothers will be leading the church and the church will be submitting to them even when there are only 50 members and three elders.
So I think that’s a little, to me that almost feels just secular wisdom where if you’re just talking a human organization, where I’m talking about a church where there is a biblical polity. Where there’s both an eldership that should be obeyed and a congregation that has certain responsibilities.
Jonathan Leeman:
That is a final authority.
Mark Dever:
That the elders see and understand as a large part of their duty to cultivate and prepare the congregation to fulfill. So I would have ameliorating factors both on the small being democratic as he would see it and the large being episcopal or presbyterian as he would see it.
I would think, no, actually I think both are elder-led congregational. And that would have some differing pressures on both ends.
Jonathan Leeman:
Sociologically, different dynamics are at play. As you move to a larger organization sociologically, power tends to concentrate in the center or at the top. True?
Mark Dever:
True.
Jonathan Leeman:
So there are inevitabilities there as people function together. What you’re saying is, well, fine, but the Bible comes along and still makes demands on both the elders and the congregation.
Mark Dever:
Yes, and I think in prudence, I mean, in our own church, I have tried hard for decades now to… Not squander my authority as the senior pastor, but to share it and spread it so that the elders are familiar with making decisions about me or my interests in a way that they think is in the best interests of the Lord, his gospel, and the church, regardless of what they think I might think of it.
And I think that’s part of my duty to do that. So… Yeah, I would be working against what Tim may be correctly identifying as a normal, this world secular, sociological experience.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah, it’s interesting. He says, the larger the church, still on the same point of shifting lay staff responsibilities, the larger the church, the more basic pastoral ministry such as hospital visits, discipling oversight of Christian growth, and counseling is done by lay leaders rather than by professional ministers.
So in general, in small churches, policy is decided by the many and ministry is done by the few. Well, in the large church, ministry is done by the many and policy is decided by a few. We’ve kind of been talking about policy.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, I would ameliorate both of those. I understand what he’s saying. If we’re talking about secular organizations, that’s definitely true.
Jonathan Leeman:
More ministry by the many?
Mark Dever:
I would say a church staff, if it’s good, should help.
Jonathan Leeman:
Facilitate.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. In a way, one poor brother who’s pastoring 180 people may not be able to do very effectively. Whereas that staff of seven people with 530 members may actually get the lay members better involved.
Increasing Intentionality
Jonathan Leeman:
Number three, the general trend number three, increasing intentionality. The larger the church, the more systematic and deliberate the assimilation of newcomers needs to be. As a church grows, newcomers are not visible to the congregation’s members.
Mark Dever:
True.
Jonathan Leeman:
The new people are not spontaneously and informally welcomed and invited in, and therefore you gotta take steps to see that they are.
Mark Dever:
I think that’s true.
Jonathan Leeman:
The larger the church, the harder it is to recruit volunteers, and a more well-organized volunteer recruitment process is required.
Mark Dever:
Well, I think if you… I think that depends on the culture you’ve built. If you’ve built a culture of, we demand these kinds of programs and we will pay for them, well then that’s true.
Jonathan Leeman:
Yeah.
Mark Dever:
But if you’ve built a, we will only do this, whether it’s music or childcare, with volunteers from our congregation, well no, then you kind of pay as you go.
Jonathan Leeman:
It reminds me of your comment when you were being interviewed by Capitol Hill, which is if you’re relying on anything other than…
Mark Dever:
I’m happy to let everything fail if it needs to. That’s dependent upon me, other than the ministry of the word.
Jonathan Leeman:
Which in a sense, you applied to every staff you hired.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, that’s right.
Jonathan Leeman:
We’re gonna facilitate, we’re gonna equip, but this ministry here finally depends on you guys.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, and I warn our staff, I don’t want you taking ministry out of the hands of the members of the church because you can do it more efficiently. No, it’s… Or maybe even better, no, your job is to help them do it better.
Jonathan Leeman:
But what’s useful about this reflection and conversation is you see and feel the inevitability, not the inevitable, the inclination to do that. Think about hiring a youth pastor. Our church is 50 and then we’re 100 and now we’re 100.
Hey, we got all these teenagers, let’s hire the youth pastor. Oh man, we got that covered now, we got the youth pastor and I’m going to back up a little bit and sit back in my seat because we got the professional now. I think there’s an inevitability to that impulse and what you’re calling people to is to say, stop.
Mark Dever:
That’s why 9Marks has been such a successful ministry: we’ve not left all the writing to you. Because we’ve told the pastors who are listening to this, listen, send in your favorite box tops from your favorite cereal. Send those in soon.
And if you send three in, we will publish your book review and we will have more and more authors represented on our website. Three box tops of your favorite cereal, specifically make sure it comes to Jonathan Leeman or Taylor Hartley.
Increasing the Redundancy of Communication
Jonathan Leeman:
Number three was increasing intentionality. Number four is increasing the redundancy of communication. The larger the church, the better communication has to be.
Mark Dever:
That’s so true.
Increasing the Quality of Production
Jonathan Leeman:
Just gotta say it more often. Number five, increasing the quality of production. The larger the church, the more planning the organization must go into events. A higher quality of production, in general, is expected in a larger church, and events cannot be just thrown together. Spontaneous last-minute events don’t work. A higher aesthetic bar must be met, he says.
Mark Dever:
I would like to say that that is often the case, but our church has certainly disproved that. I mean, if you had been at a Sunday evening service I can think of recently,
Jonathan Leeman:
Be careful. There are real people behind these stories.
Mark Dever:
I know, but I’m the one who picked the stuff there. I know what I’m talking about. I think our church really either proves the exception or proves there’s a whole other world going on than just the ones that decide we will pay money to make something better because some of us by principle don’t really want to professionalize things.
Jonathan Leeman:
You have quality music. It’s not complicated. It’s not highly orchestrated. It’s not professionally performed. But the last few times I’ve been in your church, and from what I remember when I left in 2018, it wasn’t the guy who doesn’t know how to do anything more than kind of plunk out piano chords, bam, bam, bam, bam, you know. So I would argue…
Mark Dever:
I am pleased with how many times the music goes well at our church.
Jonathan Leeman:
Praise the Lord.
Mark Dever:
Amen.
Jonathan Leeman:
I have a friend who pastors a church where they do it all a cappella because it’s so small, they simply don’t have any musicians.
Mark Dever:
We’ve had weekends like that.
Jonathan Leeman:
Here’s an interesting sentence. The larger the church, the more the music becomes an inclusion factor. What do you do with that?
Mark Dever:
Well, I mean, that is typical.
Jonathan Leeman:
That is typical.
Mark Dever:
And that’s also partly the way Tim did things at Redeemer. Tim wanted professionalization because he wanted a certain aesthetic quality and standard. And I disagree with that.
Jonathan Leeman:
You don’t want to build on that.
Mark Dever:
I don’t. To me, that feels like something that the world can do better. So I would rather say I’m happy to take whatever gifts people have together and use those.
Jonathan Leeman:
And why you’ve tried to make your music…
Mark Dever:
Mere.
Jonathan Leeman:
Mere.
Increasing Openness to Change
Jonathan Leeman:
Number six, increasing openness to change. The larger the church, the more it is subject to frequent and sudden change. Why? Smaller churches tend to have a little turnover. Individual members feel powerful and necessary and so they stay put.
Second, in the larger church, as decision-making moves away from the whole congregation to leadership and staff, leadership and staff can make changes quickly. So increasing openness to change.
Mark Dever:
Not so much in our culture. We have a very strong lay eldership. The staff, all matters of policy, we try to make sure it’s the lay elders that are leading and not the staff. So I would say that’s not so true with us.
Jonathan Leeman:
Number seven, losing members because of change. And the basic idea here he says is in smaller churches, they’ll work harder to seek at all costs to avoid losing members. Whereas in a larger church, you’ll make decisions as the leaders that I know is going to cost us a few, but hey, it’s just a dozen people and we got a thousand.
Mark Dever:
So that’s probably largely true. I’d make some commentary on the edges, but that’s probably largely true.
Jonathan Leeman:
Well, has that impacted how you pastored at Capitol Hill Baptist of 150 versus 1,000?
Mark Dever:
I’ve always found people to be unpopular with, and I have often heard them speak to me and I have thanked God that every evangelical Christian in the district does not have to have me as their pastor. And I’ve done that regardless of the size of the church.
Jonathan Leeman:
So you’ve tried to be pretty consistent in that way.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. Sometimes, members can, wittingly or unwittingly, almost hold or even try to hold the pastor hostage by such a threat. I think that’s where you just immediately have to welcome their going somewhere else and thank them for serving the Lord and know that you want them to prosper and encourage them.
Jonathan Leeman:
I think the burden I would feel from that particular point is saying to churches of 150 or 150 people unless continue to do what’s right and faithful before the Lord. Obviously, you need to consider the impact of your decisions on the congregation.
You need to know how it’s going to land. You need to think through those things. It’s important for you to love every member of your church as you’re making those tough decisions.
But finally, don’t let how this is going to land be your determining factor in decision-making. But doing your best to maintain faithfulness and getting from A to C, as you put it before, is your general pattern of leadership.
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Shifting the Role of the Ministries
Jonathan Leeman:
Number eight, shifting the role of the ministers. The larger the church, the less available the main preacher is to do pastoral work.
Mark Dever:
Oh man, that just varies so much. Depending on the nature of the work, what your pastors are like that you have at that time, that just varies a lot.
Jonathan Leeman:
He says the larger the church, the more important the minister’s leadership abilities are. Preaching and pastoring are sufficient skills for pastors in smaller churches, but as churches grow, other leadership skills become critical. A large church… Not only administrative skills but vision casting and strategy design are crucial gifts in the pastoral team.
Mark Dever:
Vision casting, I’m just not a huge fan of some of this language. I mean…
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay, but let’s see. Forget the language. I still would want to maintain that you as a pastor of 50 had to grow in certain ways as you as a pastor of 500. More leadership skills were required.
Mark Dever:
I think it’s pretty true.
Jonathan Leeman:
It’s a bigger stewardship.
Mark Dever:
Well, and you’ve got different levels you’re working at. Yeah, I think it’s pretty true.
Jonathan Leeman:
The larger the church, the more ministry staff members must move from being generalists to specialists, from the senior pastor on down certain ministry areas to concentrate on.
Mark Dever:
Yeah, it’s sort of true, but I’ve also tried to resist this. I think that there’s no doubt that the level and amount of work required has certainly in our experience caused us to have an amount of specialization on the church staff. And everything from my position to a number of others. At the same time, we…
Jonathan Leeman:
Andy was responsible for missions, Dee was kind of responsible for counseling.
Mark Dever:
Yeah. Yeah. At the same time, we’ve worked hard to make sure all of us are generalists, that we all can do membership interviews, that we all can do funerals, that we all can do weddings, that we all can do counseling, that we all can preach, that we all can evangelize, that we all are interested in theology, that we all…
So we… We don’t want just a minister of music who all he knows is choral music and he’s directing a choir and we want all of us to be elders, to be pastors, even if some of us necessarily specialize in certain things. We’re all consultative-ly used as a kind of, you know, local session, local presbytery, local synod for everything from theological to pastoral personal decisions.
Jonathan Leeman:
So again, we have sociological tendencies and inevitabilities and you’re working against them and just explain why rather than assume why.
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
Explain why you want to maintain some level of generality.
Mark Dever:
Because the office is listed in the New Testament. And the office doesn’t know the degrees. It’s of its essence. It’s an understanding of the Word and how to live life.
Structuring Smaller
Jonathan Leeman:
Number nine, structuring smaller. I’m going to skip it. It’s a little complicated.
Emphasis on Vision and Strengths
Number 10 and finally, emphasis on vision and strengths. The larger the church, the more it tends to concentrate on doing a few things well. Smaller churches are generalists and need to feel to do everything.
And there are several comments I think here that are interesting. He said, the larger the church, the more a distinctive vision becomes important to its members. The reason being in a small church is related to being in a small church is relationships.
The reason for putting up with all the changes and difficulties of a larger church is to get the mission done. So people join the larger church, he says, because of that vision. And so therefore that vision needs to be really clear. What do you say to that?
Mark Dever:
Well, all of us write autobiographically and there Tim is at his most autobiographical. I mean, Tim’s writing about his own experience there and I understand what he means and I think there’s some truth in it. There are some I would actually work to resist in it. So I just mixed.
You know, it’s deliberately said in a way that’s going to surprise you to expect the opposite of the case. And that’s what brings the real Easter egg there at the last one. It’s like, well, okay, I see what you’re doing and there is some truth to that. But, you know, we don’t have a mission statement at our church and we’re okay.
We don’t use words like vision casting. We’re okay. You know, we’re just using lots of plain Christian language from the New Testament, trying to do all the same stuff we were doing when there were 150 people. So, yeah, I would resist some of what to me feels business.
Jonathan Leeman:
Mike McKinley in his book, Church Planning is for Wimps is being a little critical of mission and vision statements. And he talks about, imagining we try to come up with a mission statement for the New York Yankees. He’s a big Yankees fan. What’s the mission? Win the stinking World Series. That’s it. And in a similar way, what’s the mission of the church? Make disciples.
Mark Dever:
Amen.
Jonathan Leeman:
That’s basically it.
Mark Dever:
Well, Jonathan, it’s been so good to have this conversation. We’ve gone on a bit longer than we normally have.
Jonathan Leeman:
I know.
Mark Dever:
And the people are a little concerned. They’ve been in the car for a long time now.
Jonathan Leeman:
And then they’re wondering, is this a new era of Joe Rogan-esque?
Mark Dever:
No, it’s certainly not. The one you’re going to do with yourself is, but I think the ones you do with me, this is – Yeah, they’re ready to keep. We’ve just reached the outer limits right here.
Jonathan Leeman:
So, leadership and church size dynamics. Thank you for that word of affirmation. How strategy changes with growth by Tim Keller. We walked through it. He goes through different categories of up to 40 in attendance and some dynamics.
Mark Dever:
It’s definitely a worthwhile article to read so long as you don’t feel it’s law.
Jonathan Leeman:
Okay.
Mark Dever:
As long as it’s provocative to your thought, it’s great.
Jonathan Leeman:
There are some good sociological –
Mark Dever:
Common sense.
Jonathan Leeman:
… wisdom.
Mark Dever:
Well observed.
Jonathan Leeman:
Pay attention to it.
Mark Dever:
Yes.
Jonathan Leeman:
But when you say don’t regard it as law –
Mark Dever:
Oh, Tim says if it’s 200, it’s like this. If it’s 600, it’s like that.
Jonathan Leeman:
And plus you see some of the pragmatism showing up. He talks about multiplying.
Mark Dever:
Yeah.
Jonathan Leeman:
What we didn’t get to. He says to get past the 200, you need to offer more options, more services, and so forth.
Mark Dever:
Which we would disagree with.
Jonathan Leeman:
We’re going to disagree with some of that stuff.
Mark Dever:
Thanks, Jonathan.
Jonathan Leeman:
Thanks, man.
Mark Dever:
Great conversation. I can’t believe you can reach that far.
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A weekly conversation between Jonathan Leeman and Mark Dever about practical aspects of the Christian life and pastoral ministry.
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