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Ok, ok.  So, I said yesterday’s post would be the last one in this series, at least for a while.  Overnight is a while, right?

I forgot that I had not addressed the size of the church and its relationship to its ability to be Missional.  Suffice it to say, this will be the last post in this series.  For a while.  Or at least until the mood hits me.

So…  Mega churches.  Can they be Missional?

I think it is important to understand the nature of mega churches in the first place before we can answer that question.  In fact, once we understand the nature of the church, it becomes easy to answer this question.

Mega churches took off during the “Church Growth Movement” and became the ideal of every pastor and every church.  Part of this is tied to the American culture that teaches us all that “bigger is better” and that we must “keep up with the Jones’.”  We see this mentality at work when there is a gathering of pastors who end up asking one another, “Whatchya runnin’ these days?”  whereupon, the inevitable comparisons begin.  The goal, of course, is to wait as long as possible to answer the question so that you can evaluate everyone else in the room and fudge your numbers accordingly. This will ensure that you are at or near the top of the heap.

The euphmism that we’ve coined to describe this act is called, “Ministerially Speaking.”

Right.  To “speak as a minister” is to lie to your fellow church leaders about the flock you shepherd so that they will respect you more, even though the respect is falsely garnered.

Which reveals just how ungodly and unbiblical the motivation to be a bigger church really is, or, at least, can be.  It also reveals how internally focused the mega church tends to be and that becomes a barrier to engaging those around us.

The reality of the mega church is that its size creates a demand for massive amounts of organizational processes.  If these processes are not maintained, the organization breaks down and the entity becomes smaller because of the confusion.  A church will only grow to the point that the organization can facilitate its size.  To be mega, then, you must be highly organized.

To be organized on the scale of a mega church, you need a bureaucracy of some sort, and that tends to become … ta da … institutional.

I’m not saying that a church shouldn’t involve hundreds and even thousands of people, but if it wants to be Missional and be that large, then it has to be de-centralized.  This combats the drive to pull all of the people into one place incorporate them into the massive programs then created to keep them busy while they are there.  It also combats the tendency of people who don’t become assimilated into the programs from falling through the cracks.

If people come into the church through personal relationships that then pull them into a small group setting, then the large corporate worship service, it is hard for them to fall through the cracks, since they are integrated into the body before they hit the door of the church.

There is also the issue of church planting.

A growing Missional Church will have as its goal its own ability to reproduce, which gives it a natural way to keep itself from becoming a bureaucratic institution.  If it has, as a part of its DNA, a trigger that causes it to peel off a section of its own leaders and workers to create another church, then size never drives it to institutionalism.

Two miscellaneous thoughts about this.  (1) The more decentralized the church, the less need to check its size and planting can become more strategic missionality and not just the drive to stay lean.  (2) The recent drive of mega churches to reproduce as mega churches with satellite campuses strikes me as a need to reproduce while still maintaining control.  This enables them to count all those in attendance in “their” column, revealing, in my mind, a motivation that is not healthy – if I am correct in assessing their motives.  If they really want to reproduce, it would seem to me that they would let them go, so that they can then reproduce, which becomes an exponential factor of reproduction rather than an additional factor.

I’m not totally convinced satellite locations are “bad” because it is possible that those churches couldn’t do what the central campus can do for them… but it does seem to lead to a sense of institutionalism and it definately leads to people falling through the cracks – at least in my experience.

Posts with related content

• February 9, 2010 -- The Missional Church: A short, simple video (0)
• January 14, 2010 -- Ed Stetzer on Missional Leadership (0)
• November 5, 2009 -- Driscoll on Grace for the Disgraced (0)
• November 3, 2009 -- Ed Stetzer & David Fitch (0)
• October 29, 2009 -- Mark Devine on Missional Churches in The Messenger Podcast (0)