It’s Time to Release Churches from the Myth of Infinite Expansion

Phew! I almost believed that the declaration from church growth “experts” that a healthy church grows by at least 5% a year was mathematically possible-NOT!

It is mathematically possible. Some churches exceed 5% by quite a bit for years.

… and then plateau.

I suppose that’s the part the CG gurus don’t mention much. I don’t really know. I’ve never paid a lot of attention to them. What I do know is that a local church is a community thing, and the fact it has a community context means it’s going to have some built-in constraints. Even if believers have no other options in the area and the church does everything right, there are only so many people within x miles.

This is more of a factor out in the small towns, but even in big city suburbs, there’s only so many people within a reasonable driving distance. That might be a million people in a near suburb. But a “community” isn’t precisely the same thing as “the number of people within reasonable driving distance” either. Within large urban areas, smaller “communities” are still a thing.

Sure, you can multisite, but is that really one local church anymore? I remain skeptical of that. At some point, you’re so spread out and adapted to the local setting that you’re really another church with close ties to several others.

Sure, you can multisite, but is that really one local church anymore? I remain skeptical of that.

If I recall correctly, you were pretty adamant during COVID that a church did not have to all meet at the same time and same place to be a church. Why is this different?

Why can a church meet at, say 8am and 10:30am in the same location and be one local church but you are skeptical that a church can meet at 8am and 10:30am in different locations and be one local church?

If I recall correctly, you were pretty adamant during COVID that a church did not have to all meet at the same time and same place to be a church. Why is this different?

It’s different in several ways. First, a reality of ordinary local churches in ordinary times: A regular, non-multisite church during a non-crisis period is rarely—if ever—100% of the people in one place at one time.

If a church has to be 100% of the people in the same place at the same time, there are not really any churches.

With that, the differences between multisite and smaller groups during a pandemic…

• Multisite church: the people are intentionally separated into distinct groups all the time, with no plan to merge.
• Local church in a crisis: the people are temporarily separated into smaller groups to avoid the spread of disease (or manage whatever the crisis is), with every intention of returning to normal afterwards
• Multisite church: the people are in different geographies, with some overlap, but mostly too far from each other to meet in one place at one time
• Local church in a crisis: the people are in one “community,” but unable to be together all at once due to temporary circumstances
• Multisite church: some (most?) of them have local permanent staff, including pastors and/or elders.
• Local church in a crisis: the church does not appoint permanent staff to lead subgroups.
• Multisite church: meeting separately in different places is part of its church growth strategy.
• Local church in a crisis: meeting separately in different (or the same) places is a method of adapting to exigencies.

I might think of more if I keep chewing on it, but that about covers it. The core question is “what makes a church a church?” and a temporary aberration from normal gathering patterns doesn’t make it stop being a church—nor does consistently being <100% of the people gathered all at once in one place.

From what I’ve observed, even churches that have multiple morning services struggle to remain one church, but they have a lot more going for them in that goal—mainly shared geography and shared local leadership. They are not automatically two churches just because half of them usually gather at 11AM instead of 9AM or whatever.

The core question is “what makes a church a church?”

This answer is better than the previous ones, IMO. However, it still falls short of where it should be. The “100% attendance” is a straw man. No one argues for that position. So to raise that as an objection hardly seems meaningful or useful. In the end, I think we need a good deal more thought to go into this.

Sure, you can multisite, but is that really one local church anymore?

So how were things done in the first century? In Titus 1:5, we are told that Titus was left in Crete to appoint an elder in every town. Did all the believers in each town meet together in one place to be the local church with that elder in that town? The next book after Titus is Philemon, which is written to Philemon and "to the church that meets in your home." From what I understand, Philemon was a member of the church at Colossae, since Colossians 4:9 mentions Onesimus as being "a faithful and beloved brother, who is one of you." So did all the believers in the Colossian church meet in Philemon's home, or were there other homes in Colossae that had a church in their home and were each of those homes considered by Paul to be a separate local church or were they all multisite parts of the "local to Colossae" local church?

It seems likely to me that there were multiple local churches in Colossae and multiple local churches on Crete.

Going back to Larry’s question, if you don’t have to have 100% all in one place at one time, what % can be meeting at another time and another place and still be a church? My point with the “it’s never 100%” observation is that the definition of a local church clearly can’t be based on “everybody at once in one place” alone.

But sure, that’s a bit like the fallacy of the beard—which reasons, “You can’t tell me how many whiskers constitute a beard, therefore there is no such thing as a beard.”

Most of the time, it’s obvious whether it’s a church or not. But in the edge cases, it can be more difficult. During COVID, some thought that meeting in smaller groups at different times meant the church was no longer a church (therefore, civil disobedience justified). And with multisite, you have all the long term, leadership factors. So it’s harder to answer in those cases.

I personally think it’s clearly still a single church if you temporarily meet 1/3 at a time or something, or simultaneously but in different places. Make it permanent, though… that’s a bunch of churches.

To Kevin’s point, we still have the Church, regardless of how many local churches, and maybe there can be a sense in which there is a regional Church made of many local churches…. like we might say something like “The Church in the U.S.” in some contexts. Likewise the church at Crete or Colossae.

In both Greek and English, I think. Despite the "local church only" adherents, their desperate attempts to make ekklesia mean a "local assembly only all the time" in then New Testament speaks to its ambiguity. Most of the time in the NT I think you can take it quite unambiguously to refer to a local assembly, but not all the time.

And clearly, in English usage, "church" means more than a local assembly.

On the question, what makes a church a church, could you argue that once a church reaches a certain size, it ceases to conform to whatever we mean by a local church in the sense of the New Testament. My wife and I were members of a church in SC with attendance of around 2500 and membership of around 4000 (hard to keep membership rolls unpruned). It was to my mind in every sense truly a local church, where pastors knew the people and were involved with them in discipleship and ministry. But at some point, say it grew to four or five thousand in attendance, or more, would it lose something of the meaning of a local church? (Even if only single site)

In my thinking a church is about it’s relationships. I agree with Don there’s some ambiguity in “church.”

Members have relationships with members

Who do the people live in relationships with? In some ways only small groups or age groups might have a high level relationship with one another. Some small group intensive churches view their small groups as truly the life of the church.

Members have relationships with leaders (deacons and elders).

And leaders have relationships with one another.

If you’re living in a town in the east end of Crete and I’m living in a town on the west end of Crete, are we in the same church?

From a member-member relationship standpoint, we might say no. Or not often. But we might know there’s a relationship of work and mutual submission that our elders have. So in that sense, we are both submitting to the same group of elders.

Given that we see passages early in Acts that mention 3000 souls and 5000 men among early converts, we know the early church at Jerusalem was a mega church even by our definitions (even if the 5000 included many of the 3000), and they met house-to-house, which certainly couldn’t include the whole church. Maybe they did occasionally have outdoor meetings of as many of the assembly as could attend.

I’ve heard the argument that the Jerusalem church was no more typical of churches today than apostolic ministry was typical of today, but even if that’s true, they still had to solve the problem of large numbers of converts/members from the local area in the first church and how to meet, which is not that different from today. Though it’s a guess, I figure the house-to-house meeting would be analogous to small groups from a large church today, more than separate churches.

However, whether they practically had multiple churches, it was still referred to as the church at Jerusalem, so they undoubtedly had close fellowship even between various house “churches.”

One example of a multi-site church that I visited did have the main pastor preach by video, but after the sermon, the video was turned off and the pastor/head elder of the local branch, along with other local elders and deacons handled the invitation, follow up with those who wanted to talk, etc. Now, maybe it would just make sense to split off and have the local group be simply a separate local church, and not do video at all. But in day to day living, and in the practical sense of the local elders working with the local members, I’m not sure either model would really make a large difference.

Looking at narrative, deriving norms is complex… and not always possible. But there are clues, to be sure.

For example, we also know the early church had “all things in common” and redistributed property according to need. There seems to be a pretty strong consensus that there were reasons for that then that don’t usually apply to our present day church settings.

A lot of things were special in the beginning, and some things were not, as evidenced by the epistles.

One of the questions I think we need to keep asking—in reference to how we do things today—is why? Why should a church be mega? Why shouldn’t it be several smaller ones? It’s fair to flip, too, why should it be several smaller ones?

One factor that comes to mind is personnel. If there are not enough adequately skilled pastors/elders, there’s lots of historical precedent for sharing those among multiple local congregations. But I think we should acknowledge that a higher elders-to-nonelders ratio is preferable, whenever that can be achieved.

One of my concerns about the multisite and mega phenomena is that they seem to reinforce the celebrity pastor trend. Are we really short on suitable men for leadership or are we attaching too much value to a highly talented few?