Churches: Is Biger Better?

"Where two or three are gathered in my name," says Jesus in Matthew 18:20, "I am there among them." Many of us feel most connected to God in this kind of intimate setting. How, then, does our experience of His Presence change as "two or three" become "two or three hundred," or "two or three thousand?" Is "bigger" necessarily "better," as the president of a large bank exclaimed during a recent merger?

It certainly looks like a trend in most of American life. But it’s not just mega-banks that make us feel like numbers. The trend toward mega-churches raises the question of whether large or rapidly-growing denominations, too, risk alienating their members. More and more it seems that even religious leaders get caught up in the prevailing secular worship of bigness.

But ordinary people often feel overwhelmed by this emphasis on size. It’s almost as if, to paraphrase a popular bumper sticker, some congregations believe that "the one who dies with the most worshipers wins." Individuals, on the other hand, crave intimacy, and have the need to be personally understood and valued. Increasingly, people are resisting the trend toward bigness, looking for places, like television’s Cheers, "…where everybody knows your name."

For many, a community of faith satisfies that need to be known. "People are anxious to make and maintain friendships, and the church has emerged as one of the few places left where they can do so," writes market researcher George Barna in The Second Coming of the Church.

But as Dale Hanson Bourke of Religion News Service says, "A ‘community’ of 5,000 or more people, for example, is hardly intimate and hardly a community." Jim O’Keefe, marketing coordinator for the Wisconsin-based Genesis Associates, a church fund-raising consulting firm, says, "At some point the congregation might ask ‘Is this a church or a corporation?’"

As the rest of our institutions continue to tell us that "bigger is better," perhaps we should remind ourselves of the need to consider not just quantity in our religious lives, but quality - the quality of our relationships with God, and through God with each other. You can search the Scriptures in vain, but you won’t find Jesus counting His converts. Instead, he reminds us, then and now, that "Where two or three are gathered in my name…"