On Religion: Who Will Lead America’s ‘Small Churches’?
(ANALYSIS) One of the crucial services the Rev. Tony Marr provides as the leader of the Higher Ministries consulting firm is to connect young pastors — fresh out of seminaries and Bible colleges — with churches that need new leaders.
But there's a problem. Most of these churches seeking pastors have fewer than 150 members and are considered “small churches” in the Protestant marketplace. Many of them have around 50 active members or less. It takes about 80 to 90 active members, in most church traditions, to pay a full-time pastor's salary.
“This is a conversation I have almost every week,” said Marr, who is based in Johnson City, Tennessee. “At any given time, we have three or four small churches looking for pastors. ... It seems like nobody wants to go to those small churches. Nobody wants to serve God there.”
When Marr asks young pastors to describe their ideal “first job,” most say that they want to serve as an associate pastor on the staff of a truly large church — one with 1,000 members or more. In other words, they want to prepare to lead churches of that size or larger.
“They have no intention of taking a church with 45 or 50 or 60 active members,” he said, reached by telephone. “Many of these young pastors would rather work in coffee shops than lead that kind of church, even if these jobs would let them preach several times a week while ministering to real people and real families. They would rather work part time, or be volunteers, at the large churches that they see in their futures.”
This is a crisis that denominational leaders will have to face, he explained, for a simple reason. The most recent survey from Faith Communities Today found that 7 out of 10 American congregations have fewer than 100 people attending their main worship services. The average church has 65 members in the pews on Sunday. Digging deeper, in some denominations — especially shrinking mainline bodies — most congregations struggle to pay full-time salaries.
Backing that up, a Baptist Press report stressed that the "most recent National Congregations Study (NCS) found the median congregation in the U.S. welcomes 70 regular participants, including adults and children, and has an annual budget of $100,000."
But that's only half of the equation: The NCS survey found that the average churchgoer worships in a congregation with 360 regular attendees and a $450,000 budget. The bottom line: Larger-than-average churches — only 9% of all churches — contain nearly half of the nation's churchgoers.
Meanwhile, America's 2,000 or so "“megachurches,” those with 2,000 or more members, continue to attract millions of worshipers and have massive social media clout, especially among evangelical and Pentecostal churches and in nondenominational life.
According to a National Survey of Religious Leaders report, the median American minister leads a church with about 50 "active" members. Meanwhile, large congregations have strong advantages in terms of finances, buildings and staff members.
In terms of raw numbers, Marr noted, the “average church in America isn't the church that most people actually attend.”
Thus, most churchgoers are "comparing their small church with the churches that they keep seeing on Instagram, Facebook and all over social media — so these people don't feel like their churches are real or successful. ... When their people feel that way, the pastors of these small churches may feel like they are failures. That makes it even harder to find pastors for these churches.”
Truth is, large churches are getting larger and small churches are getting smaller. A recent Lifeway Research study found that the pastors of Protestant churches with 50 or fewer active members are the most likely to believe that their church will die in 10 years.
"The young pastors today are coming from large churches, and they want to work in large churches. That's what they consider a real church: one with the potential to grow. Our schools are training people to work in large churches," said Marr.
“But there’s still a need for the small church. ... We need pastors to realize that you can serve people who live in smaller communities. God didn't call us to attract crowds. He called us to feed his sheep.”
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Terry Mattingly is Senior Fellow on Communications and Culture at Saint Constantine College in Houston. He lives in Elizabethton, Tennessee, and writes Rational Sheep, a Substack newsletter on faith and mass media.