Warsaw, Indiana is a vicious little pond for those of us who eek out livings as small fish. It is hard to compete with the polished and well funded churches that lumber about our neck of the woods. I know we’re not supposed to compete; we are all on the same team, serving the same Master, fighting the same fight. But the reality is that we do compete, and while we’re technically on the same team, we are still jockeying for the coveted positions on the starting line up. Some of us are the star quarterbacks, others the heavy-lifting linesmen, others still the inconsequential water boys scurrying about the sidelines passing out libation and trying not to get squashed.
Added to this friendly competition is the fact that the resource pool is rather limited in communities like ours, regardless of what we preach about God’s relationship to the cattle on a thousand hills. There seems to be a finite supply of giving units out there and we need a certain number of them to survive as a church. It takes resources to sustain a local church, all kinds of resources; money, energy, time, vision, spiritual maturity, etc. If a church doesn’t have enough resources it is impossible to grow, or even survive.
I am well acquainted with the frustrating task of resource management within small church ministry, especially in terms of money. Fiscal triage is a weekly occurrence in our ministry, as we wait nervously for the giving report from the previous Sunday, our minds fluttering around the uncomfortable questions of which must-have items will be axed this week. Will we have enough for the mortgage? The electric bill? Will I get paid?
The cold, unflinching reality of church resource management is that people bring the resources. They bring the money. They bring the talent, the vision, and the muscle. Without people, there will be no resources. Without resources, my church will dissolve. Without my church, I will lose my job. Talk about pressure. If a pastor claims to be unmotivated by the numbers, he is lying, delusional, or independently wealthy.
Interestingly enough, the statement “I’m not doing it for the numbers” has often been offered as a kind of half hearted rationalization for something we don’t like about our church. Big church pastors will use the statement to assuage the guilt they feel for having siphoned off hundreds of people from other, less relevant churches in the same community. “God brings the growth,” they argue, “I’m not in it for the numbers.” At the same time pastors of small, struggling churches will excuse their lack of growth by claiming that they “weren’t in it for the numbers in the first place.” Let’s face it, we are all in it for the numbers, to some degree or another.
The importance of these numbers can make it brutally difficult to look favorably on the efforts of burgeoning churches in your community, the ones with the meteoric spike in weekly attendance…especially when you are losing families to that very same church. What are we supposed to say as yet another resource-holder leaves our church and upgrades to Church XXL? “Congratulations on the promotion”?
Hardly.
If you are like me, you probably wish them well to their faces but secretly curse them behind closed doors, all the while sitting in your cluttered office with no running water, wondering what it’s like to be a pastor of a mega-church, a church with the “right kinds of problems.”
As I write this our church is about five families away from financial viability. I say this because in our community five families translate to about $25,000 a year in giving, which is the amount we need to not only meet our budget, but also make some necessary upgrades to our facility. The leaders in our church feel that our current congregation is giving generously and probably cannot be asked to give more. This means that if we don’t get five more families in the next couple months, we will not be able to maintain our facilities and we will also need to slash certain budget items.
The darker side to all this is that we have lost more than five families over the last couple of years to our local Churchasaurus. In my position, it is hard not to view that church as an adversary. They have plundered our little village, albeit unintentionally, and stolen our resources. Since we presently lack the resources needed to provide the kinds of services the savvy church consumer demands, we must rely entirely on “outreach” if we hope to grow. Of course, we have no money for that, either.
This is one of the most frustrating struggles of small church ministry, fighting for survival, not against Satan and his dark hordes, but against the well groomed, white toothed Pastor of the amply resourced juggernaut we affectionately call the “mega-church.” It is a battle for the resource-holders, the people who can give of their time, energy, and finances to our ministries. They have ‘em, and we often don’t. If we don’t get ‘em, we simply will not survive.
If the past decade of the resource battle between our church and the local Churchasaurus were immortalized in film, I imagine it would it would be a kind of macabre and less than inspiring version of Rocky III. They would be Clubber Lang, and we would be, well, not Rocky Balboa, but probably his trainer, Mickey. It’s round three, Clubber has hardly broken a sweat pummeling us in to oblivion and we are wondering why our legs feel so funny as we fight the irresistible urge to walk in to the light. “It’s sooooo beautiful!” Yes, it has been that bad.
I will often pull myself up by the bootstraps and try to take a more positive course of action, be proactive in the struggle for ministerial significance, do what it takes to attract the kinds of resource-holders my small congregation needs. I’ll buy up an armful of books by the who’s who in local church ministry. A book by Hybels, a couple by Stanley, oh and here’s one by Rob Bell, he’s hip, and a bit younger than me, but I could pull it off, I know I could. I am a dead ringer for Mr. Bell, really, except for my pasty complexion, lumpy frame and male pattern baldness, of course.
The problem with these books is they are all written with a certain set of presuppositions, assumptions about reality that don’t always hold true for the small church. The assumption that we have discretionary money, for example. It is rare that I read a book by a Churchasaurus pastor who addresses the resource gap between their existence and my own. When they do it is usually a limp acknowledgement of churches on my side of the fence, “…and this is an idea that you can do on a small budget” they claim, not realizing that churches like mine have no expendable monies at hand. At all. Period. At the end of each month there is nothing left over to try any idea that costs more than what I can dig out of my couch (which is typically about $2.73, after tithing).
This resource gap is the catalyst for the angst that many pastors like myself experience when coping with the ferociously bleak paradigm of big church versus small church. The big churches have the resources, the small churches don’t. The big churches are able to impact large numbers of people, the small churches are not. The big churches have significance, the small churches are, well, not-so-significant.
Ah, significance. The American dream is really all about significance. It is about achieving, accomplishment. I know it is not entirely true from the vantage point of a Christ-follower. After all, we ought to have a more eternal perspective, a more sanctified paradigm for evaluating the significance of our lives. But blood runs thicker than spirit, and I am an American by blood, my DNA predisposes me to the angst of anticipating the birth pangs of my inevitable mid-life crisis. It will most likely be a dark, dark day when I finally make my peace with ministerial insignificance.
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