A conversation on the Emergent Village Community Facebook Group caught me by surprise on Wednesday. Someone asked: “Does anyone know of Emergent leaning churches in the 200-600 member range?
The comments that followed were interesting. Emergent churches have no designated requirements and there are certainly no rules about size. I have been a part of a tiny emerging church community and I’ve experienced emerging worship in a congregation of several hundred.
Scripture says that where two or three are gathered, Jesus is among them.
But then again, one of the Emergent Village Community FB commenters said that a church isn’t sustainable if it stays at about 150 participants unless the congregation has no full-time staff, no building, etc. Actually, this is true for most congregations – not just emergent churches but all kinds of churches. Unless at least 150 people are committed and involved, they don’t have the capacity to hire a pastor, sustain a building, etc.
In my denomination – the PCUSA – the median church size is 95. Eight in ten congregations (80 percent) have 250 or fewer members. Half (52 percent) have 100 or fewer. So how do these congregations survive much less thrive?
Many of them use their endowments – funds donated and invested when times were different. Many of them stop maintaining or repairing their buildings. Many call a part-time pastor or share a pastor with another small church. But there is no capacity for the kind of ministry they once offered in their communities and it’s just a matter of time – unless things dramatically change – before the church closes.
The future holds an even wider variety of churches: those without buildings and professional staff, those with part-time paid leaders, those living off their assets until the well is dry, those with enough resources to continue to serve as they’ve been serving , new communities being completely different kinds of churches.
I’d love to hear about the capacity of your church to do ministry in 2012. What does your congregation have to make ministry possible? What do you need to make ministry possible?
A Church for Starving Artists 
An excellent question, Jan! Having studied micro-communities as part of my D.Min. work, I’d say: ministry can be done down to disciple-level groupings. Communities of thirty, twenty, ten, and a dozen are perfectly capable of sustaining real human-scale ministry. Once you intentionally slough off your organizational/structural expectations for “church,” and such fripperies as buildings and paid staff (gulp), real ministry in the form of service, worship, and prayer continues.
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