The myth of the 'program size' church
It's time to expand our vision of a thriving faith community
Close your eyes and think of church.
I’m willing to bet you see a building, a group of people, a minister standing up front.
Go further than that: what happens at this church? What do people do all day, all week? What would they do, ideally?
If you’re like me - a mainline denominational Christian church member (Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopalian, etc) - you probably envision a Sunday school, a choir, an outreach ministry, a Bible study, a set of special events throughout the year.
I’m always fascinated when I’m in conversation with ministers and congregations that we all seem to have the very same idea of what ‘church’ should be - whether our particular church is that way or not.
And when we start talking about doing new things at church - bringing in new members, or growing spiritually, or somehow trying something different - the suggestions usually don’t stray far from this unified vision of how church works.
It’s usually some new kind of program. We get excited about a new 5-week series on Paul, or a new children’s choir or a new way to shepherd newcomers.
There’s nothing wrong with these things - except they rarely actually change the way we think of church.
I blame Arlin Rothauge.
I have nothing against him personally. In fact, I think his book: ‘Sizing up a Congregation for New Member Ministry’, is quite brilliant. He uses organizational management theory and applies it to the dynamics of church size:
Family (0-50 members)
Pastoral (51- 150)
Program (151-400)
Corporate (or ‘Resource’) (401-1000).
The book’s focus is how clergy should adapt their leadership style for different size churches and their needs. It is a concise and illuminating look at how all congregations are not the same, and they need different things from their leadership.
But Rothauge - through no fault of his own! - created a monster.
‘Church size theory’ became wildly popular, and it permeated the culture to such a degree that we still unconsciously (and consciously) use it as the basis for congregational development and leadership.
The result of this is that all of us (I really think it’s all of us in the mainline church) have an unconscious vision of what an ‘ideal’ congregation should look like, and also that we’re somehow inadequate or lacking something if ours doesn’t look that way.
Somehow, in the midst of learning about church size and leadership, it also became popular to believe that as church leaders we needed to grow our church to the next level.
Again, I don’t think this was Rothauge’s suggestion, and we shouldn’t blame the messenger (I was being facetious above, really!).
Alice Mann’s 2001 book ‘Raising the Roof: the Pastoral-to-Program Size Transition’ is one example of how ministers could theoretically move their church along in growth, and she reports that ’most program-size churches (about 60 percent) have at least 10 ongoing classes for children and adults’.
That is a lot of pressure on churches - and it underscores this idea that in order for a church to be ‘successful’, it needs to have at least 400 people in the pews on Sunday, and it needs run a lot of programs.
I’ve spent a lot of time with clergy and congregations over the past decade or so, and I study congregational trends diligently, and I can say a few things about today’s church with confidence:
Church growth theory has never worked as a tool for church growth (nor was it meant to).
The idea of the ‘Program Size Church’ is still stuck in our brains as the only vision of what a ‘successful’ faith community looks like.
Rothauge published his book in 1982. The Episcopal church has lost 1.5 million members since then.
Very, very few congregations today are actually ‘Program Size’ - and few of those have ‘at least 10’ programs.
In order to thrive in today’s church, we need to open our imagination to what ‘thriving’ looks like, beyond programs.
This is a good thing - and it’s harder than it seems.
LOTS of people are working to re-imagine church right now, which is wonderful. But I have noticed that often, that re-imagination is focused on content, it’s not systematic.
What I mean is: we’re still assuming the starting point is a ‘program size’ congregation in our heads.
It’s more than just a difference in size - though that is important. In the Episcopal Church, 85% of congregations have fewer than 100 people in the pews on Sunday. 55% have fewer than 50 (numbers for other denominations are harder for me to access, but I know the declines are similar).
The really important part of reimagining church for the future is starting somewhere else besides programs.
It’s giving ourselves permission to believe that a new era for Christian community can start from a new baseline for how we create and function in the community.
Can we imagine faith communities that are based on peer-to-peer discipleship?
Can we imagine faith communities with no outreach, no meetings, no schedule of classes?
Can we imagine more intentional communities based on what it means to follow Jesus and love God and our neighbor?
Can we imagine how today’s technology can help us let go of a programatic structure and embrace more direct ways for members to grow in faith, to connect with God and one another, and to reach beyond the wall of our own church and engage others?
I can imagine these things. I think more of us are imagining these things.
I love Rothauge’s book for what it taught us about the church of the 20th century. And for how it opens the door for us to create the church of the 21st century.
Farewell and good riddance to "churchgrowth," Routhage's and Mann's expert assessments. Also to ASA obsession (Average Sunday Attendance) as the only measure of health, growth, decline, whatever. None of this, including the fixation with "programs" ever had anything to do with what the people of God, the body of Christ is. All of it was the theologically and politically "correct" perspective when I was ordained in 1983. A lot has happened and the reasons are many, diverse and complicated so no one should go looking for a one cause for the change. You could look at my Community as church, church as community (Cascade, 2021) for more analysis and reflection but NO recipes for fixing anything. There aren't any. Yet, we have far to go in rediscovering what church and ministry are essentially about. Nevertheless we keep doing them, I am certain this is a path of better understanding our common life in Christ.
Fr. Cathie, as always, I am so thankful for your posts, your insight, and your thoughtful perspectives. In my 25 years of ministry experience, the rock in the road to doing church differently (be it new programs, different programs, or measuring something other than Attendance/Building/Cash for church vitality) is that it is so difficult to find consensus on what on earth Church is, or what spiritual health/vitality is. Have you found any ways to help communities address this this and to dig deeply into who they are called to be today... not just revisit or reignite who they think they were called to be in 1973? :-) I find that we Christian folk struggle to agree on what this whole Christian Life is all about, and tend to focus on our version/purpose/meaning of our faith and make it the most important for everyone else. Some say it's right doctrine/belief in worship and Sunday school classes, others say we should be about fellowship/community with each other, others find meaning in quiet prayer or mystical experiences, and others want to focus on serving. This is just the tip of the iceberg of the different takes on what faith and church "should" be. So, rather than embracing this breadth of Christian experience and honing in on what matters to our community, we instead don't talk about it and simply embrace church growth in lieu of the breadth of spiritual vitality that Jesus models for us. I'd love your thoughts on this and any ways that you have found that help us break through the fixation on program and growth over spiritual health and vitality.