“I PLANTED,
APOLLOS WATERED,
BUT GOD GIVES THE INCREASE”
-I CORINTHIANS 3:16
I ended the tenth “BCIP” with these paragraphs:
I’ll talk about this more later, but let me just say that very large churches often have a mission focus. There’s a point where a church is large enough to “professionalize” an outreach toward secularists who have no faith or connection to the church. Generally, this happens around 2000 active members, though many “experts” say that number is much lower. It is the case that big and mega-churches attract outsiders … Most multi-cultural and outreach-based churches are large, for example.
In Paris, however, almost all “outreach” is done by very small churches, most with less than 50 congregants.
I want to know if this a pattern in the West, in particular in highly secularized cities, that the growing edge of Christianity is found in small, culturally invisible churches? If this is the case, what does this portend if the growing churches in cities are moving from, say, 20 to 50 members, or even 50 to 200 members, and the physically huge churches are subsidized by their home denominations with declining membership?
Lets tackle these questions.
Let me begin by saying this is NOT my field of expertise. I’m only observant. So take what I say critically — test these words for their truthfulness!
What I’ve seen in Paris so far has given me pause because the way Christians go about church planting in foreign countries (as well as “foreign” parts of our own countries) does not seem to be working well. We tend to steal sheep (we grow our congregations by taking members from existing congregations) or move sheep (we find new members among Christians newly immigrated). What we do poorly is create sheep, that is, convert people from the religion of atheism, those who have never believed or stepped foot in a Christian church.
I wish I could get some hard statistics on how many people were brought to faith in Paris through the efforts of church X, Y or Z. My guess is not many. Most growing churches have latched on to Christian immigrants, mostly from Africa, who want to re-create the churches they had loved in their home countries. In other words, the population of Christians in Paris has increased via immigration, not outreach. I have not seen highly successful outreaches to heritage French people — the “real French” — who are often adamantly atheistic and difficult to reach. I’d love to be proven wrong, however!
I am very concerned that Christian outreach to center-city Parisians done by small churches is ineffective — such an outreach may best be done by large churches. It’s my contention that large churches are better at outreach than small ones — it’s also my observation that almost all the churches heavily involved in outreach in Paris are tiny. These small churches are struggling to exist. Planted and sustained by a young married couple, they rarely reach more than fifty congregants, if even half that.
Of course it is possible to plant churches from scratch — that’s the New Testament pattern, no? So why isn’t it working?
It could be that in a church with 20 to 50 people, everyone knows each other, perhaps too well! There’s no room in a small church for disagreement — fifty people cannot support a faction. In fact, it could be said that the small church itself IS a faction … as are all churches in a way. In this sort of cloistered environment, the desire of the church planting couple to GROW the size of the church to the point where it can attract new families, couples and singles may be thwarted by the unique social dynamic of that particular church into which outsiders would be hard pressed to fit.
Small churches have unique personalities. They’re more like families than congregations. It’s very, very difficult for an outsider to be “adopted” into a new family and feel truly comfortable in it. Large churches, in contrast, are anonymous. This means they have the social space to include the different cultural backgrounds and histories of new believers.
Because most people rarely know each other in larger churches, members naturally form subsets or groups within the church. This is the logic behind dividing a big church into “small groups” as well as the driving force behind larger churches to spin off a hundred or so of their own congregants to form another church. The point is that unanimity in a large church at the level of the congregation (not leadership) isn’t a desired goal. Big churches can tolerate those who can’t fit into small churches. New Christians on the fringe of the church culture feel less pressure to conform because, frankly, no one really knows them. They can grow in faith at their own pace in the background. So, at the congregational level, big churches have of the kind of diversity that counts — cultural.
At the level of leadership, large churches often have well-paid professionals whose job is to grow the church through evangelizing non-Christians. In other words, the roles of the church staff in a big church — pastor, teacher, event planner, scheduler, musician, architect, administrator and evangelist — are specialized, professionalized and efficient. Nothing is left to chance. When a professionalized outreach leader hears of a potential believer close to making a decision for Christ and therefore joining the church, this leader smoothly goes through the action-steps, procedures and rules geared toward reeling in this potential congregant. He knows how to maximize the number of people who make the choice to be and live Christianly in that church. He does it well.
Small churches must be at a huge disadvantage. Their approach is less smooth, more haphazard and highly personalized. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing — this is not a value judgment — but it does seem less effective.
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Here, in center city Paris, as far as I can tell, virtually all evangelism is done by individuals who attend tiny-to-small, store-front churches. There are no very large churches. True, there are physically large churches — grand cathedrals from the 18th and 19th century dot the cityscape — but as far as I can tell, the congregations of these churches are, at best, medium-sized. This is important to grok.
In the United States, the size of the structure generally follows the size of the congregation, but in Paris, churches built for large, family-based congregations have dwindled to a dozen little old ladies in the front pew. This means that only small-to-medium size Protestant congregations exist in center-city Paris. Most churches here are very small.
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Church planting here generally works like this: a couple (usually youngish, twenty- or thirty-something) feels “the call of God” to go to Paris and plant a church. If their home church is small, they sign with a mission agency; if their home church is large, their own church itself may send them. The ideal, I would think, would be to send several couples to the same area to work simultaneously — but this rarely happens. Usually, a lone couple is plopped into the middle of the city and left to fend for itself. I’m overstating the case a bit, but the degree to which church planters are supported by their home agencies seems negligible. This lack of support includes money.
Young, idealistic, inexperienced, isolated … the church planting couple works against the odds. With Christ, all is possible, of course, but since success can only be retroactively determined, to be honest, I can count on one hand the thriving, growing congregations in the center of Paris. All evidence points to mass failure.
I’ll be musing, in future posts, about possible solutions. To sum: the existing culture and methods of church-planting is not effective in Paris’ first eight arrondissements, it’s center city.
Something needs to change.
