In 1990, our family moved to Walnut from Pasadena to open a real estate office. (We closed that office a year ago due to the downturn, but that’s another story.)<\/p>\n
We started attending a small church that met at an elementary school, because we knew a few people there and because the pastor was our client – we sold him his house.\u00c2\u00a0 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
We’ve been at this same church for just about 20 years now. Many of my friends have left, and that pastor is now at another church. Staying at a church for this long is no small feat for me. I am the type of person who quits easily. I don’t finish craft projects, I almost quit grad school at the last semester, I like to make changes in my life once in a while. I make my husband move furniture around, just for a change. Previous to this I attended several churches for shorter periods of time.<\/p>\n
Why did we stay at the church for 20 years? I really don’t know, other than it’s God plan for us. And as a result, I see the many benefits of being at a small church.<\/p>\n
Many people think that a small church is “unsuccessful” while big churches with lots of people are “successful”.\u00c2\u00a0 This is simply not true.<\/p>\n
God purposely reduced the size of Gideon’s army from 32,000 down to 300\u00c2\u00a0 to accomplish his work. I am not saying that we should desire to remain small, or that we should not try to reach more people to come to our church. I am saying that the size of a church is not the main focus. God’s work can be accomplished, no matter the size, big or small.<\/p>\n
Here is what I’ve found to be the benefits of being a part of a small church:<\/p>\n
1. You learn to focus on God, not people. In a large church, there is inevitably a lot of socializing and friendship connections. This is a good thing, but it can also be the only thing that keeps people going to church. They go because their friends are there. But in a small church, there is potentially less distraction. A young woman in our church gave her testimony saying that she came to our church because she didn’t want to go to a large church with lots of single men to distract her from God. (Ironically she ended up marrying one of the few single guys at our church…God works in mysterious ways.)<\/p>\n
2. Things are simple. There’s not a lot of bureaucracy. If I want to start a discipleship group, or bring flowers to decorate the church, no one would object.<\/p>\n
3. There is personal attention and people know you. Yes, people can still slip through the cracks. But if you go to a small church, you would expect to participate actively, or you will have to put up with being hounded by people who keeps asking you to get involved.<\/p>\n
This past Sunday, I had only 4 kids in my Sunday School class. “A”, a fourth-grader said to me, “I like it like this.”\u00c2\u00a0 I kind of like it too. With only 4 kids, we can do a lot of fun stuff that you can’t do with 20 kids in a class.<\/p>\n
But I reminded A that we should always welcome new friends, and not be too comfortable being with our small group of buddies.<\/p>\n
Of course, I am the first to admit that our small church has many shortcomings. But why focus on those? If we believe God has a purpose for our small church, then we can be assured that He will accomplish it. Maybe He is using this church to grow just a few specific people… maybe He is using this church just to grow me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In 1990, our family moved to Walnut from Pasadena to open a real estate office. (We closed that office a year ago due to the downturn, but that’s another story.) We started attending a small church that met at an elementary school, because we knew a few people there and because the pastor was our […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spiritual-life","category-thoughts-on-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/katylee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/katylee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/katylee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/katylee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/katylee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/katylee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1068\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/katylee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/katylee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/katylee.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}