By Laura Stephens-Reed

For a long time there has been commonly-held wisdom about church size dynamics and the role of the pastor at each church size:

The family size church has fewer than 50 people, with most of them related to one another. This congregation experiences little numerical growth because it is difficult for visitors to enter a system that feels like (and usually is) a family. The pastor functions primarily as a chaplain, preaching weekly and providing pastoral care, but leaving the decision-making up to the members.

The pastoral size church has 50-150 people. Often there is a solo minister, though sometimes there is an associate minister or part-time specialized minister (e.g., youth minister) as well. New people primarily come into the congregation through the minister, either because the minister has cultivated relationships with them or because visitors are drawn to the minister’s sermons or worship leadership. The minister is involved in (and likely drives) all facets of ministry, including providing most or all of the pastoral care and attending most or all committee meetings.

The program size church has 150-350 people with multiple ministers on staff.  The senior pastor casts a vision and equips other staff to oversee the  implementation of the vision in their respective ministry areas. New people primarily come into church through small groups. Without a foothold in a small group, visitors get lost in the congregation and usually stop attending.

The resource size church has 350+ people and a large staff of ordained and lay people. New people primarily come into church through ministries and/or activities (e.g., sports ministries, recovery ministries, quilting groups). The senior minister manages the staff and tends to the institution’s development, functioning much like a CEO.

One of the casualties of COVID, though, might be the applicability of these tenets, because churches are starting to realize the limitations of this thinking. Here’s why:

Few congregations know what size they actually are. Onsite attendance patterns were already shifting pre-pandemic so that “regular attendance” meant coming to church one to two times as opposed to three or times per month. Those trends have accelerated because of people’s re-evaluation of their priorities after lockdown. In addition, no one has figured out how to count online participants when it’s possible to gauge numbers of screens tuned in but much harder to know how many people are watching those screens and for how long. (I don’t think raw numbers are helpful for knowing how much impact a congregation has, but numbers are useful for thinking about who is here, what gifts and needs they bring, and what that means for how we structure the staff and our life together.)

Even in smaller churches, those who engage mainly online might have little to no personal contact with the pastor. This doesn’t necessarily mean that online participants are casual attendees or consumers. They might have found an authentic community, hosted formally or informally by someone else. For example, churches that use Zoom or Facebook to broadcast services often appoint a layperson to welcome people to the online worship experience and to facilitate interaction throughout the time spent together. Those who attend online might or might not ever show up to the physical church campus; but if they do, they might already have established connections with others in the congregation without the help of the pastor.

Most congregations, no matter their size, became more staff-focused during the pandemic. Pastors absorbed even more of the work first because they hoped Covid would be a short-lived crisis, then because they wanted to protect their lay leaders from as much stress as possible and believed it was their job as paid ministry leaders to keep the church going during physical distancing. Much of these extra duties involved technology, and many congregations are still re-organizing what tasks belong to whom.

Some churches that are technically family size attempt to operate at pastoral size. I find this to be true when working with newer, more outward-focused congregations. They often don’t have a dominant biological family to which everyone defers, but they do have hopes for big impact in the world around them. This means they are doing a lot more beyond onsite worship and Bible study, yet feel the constraints of their pastor’s time limits because a lot of ministry still runs through the ordained leader.

For these reasons I believe we need a different approach to church size dynamics and the role of the minister, particularly at the levels formally known as family and pastoral size. (Note that a vast majority of churches in the United States fall into the two smaller size categories.) The ministers in these congregations were already stretched thin, expected as they often were to be the hub for all the relationships in and all the work of the church. That wasn’t sustainable before, and it definitely isn’t now if those pastors are still trying to do all of the things, particularly the online aspects of ministry.

A new framing for size dynamics could do more than keep pastors from flaming out and leaving ministry, though. Rethinking dynamics is an opportunity to expand connection points. Having laypeople whose role it is to facilitate online engagement can empower and democratize leadership in new ways. Effectively welcoming congregants from all over the globe can broaden our sense of who our neighbors are. Providing real community online to those who need it and can’t find it nearby is a real gift. While this work might require the vision and leadership of a pastor, it doesn’t necessarily require the pastor’s hands-on involvement. In other words, redistributing the ministry obliterates the need for the pastor to be all things to all people, even in small congregations. More importantly, though, it’s a great chance for the Church to be the Church, connecting disparate parts of the body of Christ and calling on the full range of God-given qualities and talents.

What could it look like and what might be possible for your congregation if it were more dependent on all the people in the (virtual and physical) room than on the pastor?

Rev. Laura Stephens-Reed is a clergy and congregational coach based in Alabama