Grow Bigger By Growing Smaller
The power of small groups is face-to-face intimacy. The power of small churches has been that same face-to-face intimacy. Many small churches have not grown because at their heart they are simply a small group that likes what they do together and don't want to lose it. Hence the problem... how does a church grow large enough to be self-sustaining and yet maintain the intimacy?

Rick Warren had an answer. Small groups.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of both The Tipping Point and Blink had an article in The New Yorker back in September. It is a wise and fair rendering of the amazing story that is Saddleback Church and Rick Warren. In the article Gladwell talks about the problem of large -vs- small churches and the problems large churches face in finding volunteers, etc. The answer is in the small group. Here's one section he wrote:

...[H]istorically, churches have sacrificed size for community. But there is another approach: to create a church out of a network of lots of little church cells--exclusive, tightly knit groups of six or seven who meet in one another's homes during the week to worship and pray. The small group as an instrument of community is initially how Communism spread, and in the postwar years Alcoholics Anonymous and its twelve-step progeny perfected the small-group technique. The small group did not have a designated leader who stood at the front of the room. Members sat in a circle. The focus was on discussion and interaction-not one person teaching and the others listening-and the remarkable thing about these groups was their power. An alcoholic could lose his job and his family, he could be hospitalized, he could be warned by half a dozen doctors--and go on drinking. But put him in a room of his peers once a week-make him share the burdens of others and have his burdens shared by others--and he could do something that once seemed impossible.

He goes on, though to point out that the small group in the church is where the real power is to be found.

The small group was an extraordinary vehicle of commitment. It was personal and flexible. It cost nothing. It was convenient, and every worshipper was able to find a small group that precisely matched his or her interests...

As I see it, one of the most unfortunate misunderstandings of our time has been to think of small intentional communities as groups 'within' the church," the philosopher Dick Westley writes in one of the many books celebrating the rise of small-group power. "When are we going to have the courage to publicly proclaim what everyone with any experience with small groups has known all along: they are not organizations 'within' the church; they are church."

This is a problem that I was pondering again in church on Sunday. I was visiting a church plant where a friend is the pastor, but it is the same problem in the church where I am a member. There was an intimacy and power on closeness that the worship had. It was simply (yet powerfully) a large small group worship. There were more people than could be sitting in someone's living room, but it had the same feel.

But it will lose that if it grows much more, even though in order to sustain itself it must grow larger.

It is a difficult predicament. Whenever I think about it I get lost in the haze of the competing feelings of church and worship and intimacy and small groups and house church. I can't easily sort it all out. I like them all, perhaps because I am beginning to realize I need them all.

I need the BIG experiences of God's awesomeness. That's why we humans built cathedrals and the like. I need the community singing and praising together where my voice is drowned out in its separateness by all of US singing together. I need the one-to-one intimacy of testimony, teaching and prayer with brothers and sisters who I know and share faith with.

No easy answers, but I am sure that there are many ways that people wiser than I am will be working on it. Until then I remain a seeker- a pilgrim in a world far different than I grew up in, yet one that is getting more spiritually exciting every day.