This conversation between Travis Michael Fleming and Brandon J. O’Brien really highlights the power and potential of smaller churches, drawing from O’Brien’s book The Strategically Small Church. It pushes back on the common idea that bigger automatically means better, and instead shows how smaller congregations actually have unique strengths that often get overlooked.

O’Brien makes the case that small churches don’t need to chase numbers to be effective. Instead, they can lean into what makes them distinct and serve their communities in meaningful ways. One of the most helpful shifts in the conversation is the reminder to see people not as barriers to growth, but as essential partners in the work of ministry. That kind of perspective changes everything—it creates a healthier, more collaborative church culture.

Overall, the episode feels like a breath of fresh air for ministry leaders. It’s an invitation to stop comparing, embrace where you are, and focus on real, meaningful engagement instead of just trying to get bigger.

Takeaways:

• Smaller churches really do have unique strengths—and instead of seeing size as a limitation, it’s something that can actually be leveraged for meaningful, effective ministry.
• There’s a needed mindset shift when it comes to people in the church. They’re not obstacles to growth—they’re partners in the work God is doing.
• Brandon makes an important distinction between just being small and being strategically small. It’s about being intentional and making the most of the opportunities that come with your size.
• There’s also a powerful reminder to see yourself as a missionary right where you are. That perspective can completely reshape how you engage your community and think about outreach.
• Travis and Brandon push back on the idea that bigger equals better, pointing instead to faithfulness as the real measure of success in ministry.
• The conversation wraps up with encouragement for pastors to embrace where they are—to accept their church as it is and stay focused on the specific mission and people God has entrusted to them.

Keep up with updates from Apollos Watered: The Center for Discipleship & Cultural Apologetics.

Get Travis's book Blueprint: Kingdom Living in the Modern World.

Join Travis's Substack, Deep Roots Society.

Help support the ministry of Apollos Watered and transform your world today!

Today's episode is brought to you by Alicia Garcia.

May the Lord bless your new family.

I think it is possible to begin to view your congregants as either tools that are helpful for growth or as obstacles to growth.

And it becomes, I think, very difficult to pastor people well when you either view them as the reason you're not achieving your ministry goals or that you have to put them to work to meet your goals.

Welcome back to Ministry Deep Dive, where we explore the ideas, strategies, and stories shaping the future of the church.

I'm your host, Travis Michael Fleming, and today we're diving into a conversation that I think is going to be incredibly freeing to a lot of pastors and ministry leaders.

We live in a church culture that often celebrates bigger, faster, and louder.

But what if it's not?

That's not actually the goal.

What if smaller isn't a limitation, but a strategy?

That's exactly what we're unpacking today with Brandon J. O', Brien, who is the director of Global Thought Leadership at Redeemer City to City.

And we are compatriots.

We both went to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

We laughed a little bit about that right before our time coming on the show.

But Brandon is an author, editor, and church leader, and his book the Strategically Small Church offers a compelling vision for how smaller churches can thrive, not by competing with the mega churches that are out there, but by leaning in to their unique strengths.

Brandon, welcome to Ministry Beat Time.

Thank you so much.

I'm really pleased to be here.

Well, I am excited to get this thing started.

Let's kick it off with the Fast five.

Are you ready?

I think so.

Okay.

How about this one?

What is one book besides your own that is really influenced your ministry thinking?

I would say a novel.

I'm reading again.

It's called My Name Is Asher Lev, which is maybe a strange choice written by a Jewish author, but it deals a lot with calling and gifts and how to know if what you're doing, your gifts, are a gift from God or if they're a distraction.

And I just have.

I find it a deeply moving thing.

So I read it every couple of years.

It's different every time.

Highly recommend.

What year was it written?

70S.

I don't know.

I have it around here somewhere.

It's been out a while, so maybe, yeah, he was.

That's the author of the Chosen or the Promise, which is.

Those are the more familiar books.

But yeah, I think every time I read it, I relate to a different character and then rethink the whole story again.

And it's.

I find it really meaningful, so.

Makes me more empathetic, I think, to people in ministry.

Yeah.

And I don't get any royalties from recommending it, but I do recommend it.

I should get.

Because I've done it a lot.

You should, you should.

All right, number two, how about this one?

You've been in all kinds of different ministry.

What is your funniest ministry experience do?

Well, one that was not funny at the time, but is funny to me now.

I was like 21 maybe and solo pastor of a small rural church.

And there was a man in the church who considered it his church.

He hadn't been there in like 30 years, but he came home to die.

And because that was his church, I was his pastor.

But he had lived for those last 30 years as a real self identified hobo on, on trains.

And I was the pastor of this man who was like 70 years old.

He'd abandoned his family to live on trains and then came back to reconcile.

And I was in charge of the funeral and like trying to think of what do you say about this in this scenario?

Was really stressful.

And then I had a good friend, co author Randy Richards at the time, who I asked him for advice and he said, whatever you do at the graveside, don't stand on the wrong side of the coffin.

And I said, well, what's the wrong side of the coffin?

And at that moment the phone rang and he's like, I have to take this.

And he took the phone and I still.

And then I just left thinking in the world am I going to do so.

So that whole thing was horrifying at the time.

In retrospect, I think it would make a great TV show or something.

The whole comedy of error related to that situation.

Nothing you study in any class prepares you for doing the funeral of a self described hobo in a small church.

Right.

So.

Randy's been on the show, by the way.

Oh, wonderful.

He's a great guest.

Just think the world of Randy.

Randy.

It was a, it was a good conversation.

We talked about the other book that you wrote with him reading scripture with western eyes.

So.

But I digress.

Let's get back.

What is.

How, how about this one?

What is the strangest food you've ever eaten?

Oh gosh, that one's hard because I grew up with Cajun family and I am married to a woman from Singapore and have done a lot of travel.

So I have That's a good question.

I don't even know where to start.

Although I will say the weirdest food experience I had was in Singapore with my wife, and they have a dish called Drunken Prawns.

They bring live gigantic shrimp, you know, like, to the table in a dish.

They pour alcohol of some sort on them, and then they flop around, and it's just to show you how fresh they are.

And then they go cook them.

I didn't know they were going to cook them.

And they poured the stuff on, and one of them got out of the bowl and landed on the table and started to make its way across.

And I thought, like, is this a kill it and eat it kind of situation?

Or what's the.

What are the rules here?

So I think that ended up being a very normal meal, but it.

It had the potential at the beginning to be a really weird one.

Okay, here's the next one.

If you were a store, what store would you be?

And why?

Any kind of store.

Ooh, that's an interesting question.

I would be a used bookstore, and I don't know why other than the idea of sitting in one.

I wouldn't even need customers necessarily.

Just sitting alone in a used bookstore.

I could be pretty happy about that.

I think I would go crazy because I would be like, I can't read them all.

I can't read them all.

I feel so much pressure.

I think.

I don't know, just open them and smell them and put them back.

I think I could be pretty happy.

So.

Okay.

Okay.

All right.

So here's the final question.

And how about this one?

This one's a simple one.

Just because we're going to lead into our conversation today, what's one thing people misunderstand about small churches?

A short answer.

Yeah.

I think that something people misunderstand about small churches is that they are.

That they are perceived as failed churches by virtue of being small.

Well, then let's transition and use that as a segue to get into the conversation.

Yeah, let's talk about even the title strategically Small Church.

Break that down.

Yeah.

So it depends on who's listening and where they're listening.

All of those words need some amount of definition, right?

So I tried to have it.

I call it just a minimal ecclesiology in the book to say a church has.

Is doing mission formation and worship.

So not worried too much about polity or leadership.

Am agnostic in the book on male or female leadership or baptism or those kinds of things.

So worship formation and ministry.

Small is also contested, but I'm Kind of using anything under 100 just for the sake of discussion and statistics.

I think I always get this wrong, but in the U.S. i think the median is now under 75.

So the vast majority of churches are, in the U.S. at least are well under 100.

And by strategically, I mean not a church that's reluctantly small.

And so it's little and it wishes it was big and, and is just sort of wrestling with the disappointment of being a small church.

And I don't mean intentionally small necessarily, like the simple church movement or microchurch movement or how I like all of those.

But I don't, I don't mean that either.

By strategically small, I mean a church that has identified the unique opportunities for mission in a small church and is leveraging them for mission formation, worship, and is not.

Yeah, they're not trying to stay small, but they're not, they don't regret being small.

They're.

They're leveraging those particular strengths for the kingdom's sake.

Now, of course, we're going to talk about any church right now, and all the pastors that out there are listening.

Very few are going to say, man, we're strategically small.

And very few of them want to stay strategically small.

Let's just be honest.

But what are some of the dangers of assuming that bigger is always better?

Because we do think that, and that's not always true.

You actually mentioned this.

Yeah, man.

So I think, I think that there's a lot there.

I think there are spiritual dangers.

I think that I know a lot of pastors around the country and in other parts of the world who feel ashamed that they have not succeeded in growing a church to a certain size, because certain size churches, certain size platforms become a kind of.

Are celebrated as markers of ministry success.

And so if you don't hit those markers, I think personally, individually, people can carry a lot of shame about being unfaithful servants of Jesus because they haven't gotten enough people in the door or they haven't accomplished enough.

I think pastorally it's really dangerous to fixate on growth because then you're.

It's very.

This doesn't happen all the time, obviously.

So please, you know, we'll assume that everything I say could be nuanced.

And I'm just going to, you know, maybe do that one preface here.

But I think it is possible to begin to view your congregants as either tools that are helpful for growth or as obstacles to growth.

And it becomes, I think, very difficult to pastor people well when you either view them as the reason you're not achieving your ministry goals or that you have to put them to work to meet your goals.

Right.

But I also think that kind of theologically, the biblical narrative, this is oversimplifying, but there's a whole lot of biblical narrative about God doing remarkable work through small things because when that happens, the only person who can receive credit for it is God.

So when Joshua fights Jericho, the goal is not, it's not that like blowing trumpets is a forgotten military strategy that we should try some more.

It's that like this doesn't work except that God won this war.

Right.

They're outnumbered, they're outmatched.

But God did it, Gideon.

And you know, when he amasses an army, finally God says you're, your army is too big.

Which is ridiculous.

No army has ever been too big.

The only thing an army could be is too small.

And, but if it's too big and you win, then you'll think you did this because you had enough people.

And God wants you to know this happened because I made it happen.

Right.

And I think that there is something to that.

I have seen enough large churches up close to think that, that a lot of the success that is being achieved could continue to happen if the Holy Spirit was not working there.

Because it's just, it's well programmed and well resourced and you know, it's, it's a well oiled machine.

But I see a lot of smaller churches where I think the only reason that this is doing what it's doing is because the Holy Spirit is making it happen.

And I think that that is an important testimony to the world, but also to the church kind of more broadly.

In the book you mentioned, there is a difference between a church that is just small and strategically small.

Yeah.

What do you mean by that?

Yeah, so I think that some, there are churches that are small because.

Well, there are some churches that are small because they're ornery, right.

And cranky and they don't want to change and they don't want the neighbors to come to the church because if they did, then they'd have to do things differently and you know, that kind of thing.

So that's one reason.

I think there are other churches that are small because, you know, they're dying.

I talked to a pastor just recently here in the Chicagoland area who's the church is on the decline and they're at the sort of like we either turn it around or we close it kind of thing.

And it's because they don't they're not reaching people.

They're not on mission.

They're just, they're a, they're a, a dwindling congregation with a large building and, you know, all that kind of stuff.

Those are small.

But what they haven't figured out is that they haven't figured out are there things that you can do by virtue of being small, like be hyper focused on this particular kind of people or on this particular neighborhood, or be.

Able.

To involve more of your people in the work of ministry in the, you know, the preaching of the word in worship, can you focus on involvement and participation instead of numbers?

Because you have a congregation where you can actually tell who's participating and who's not.

You've got that kind of close.

So I think a lot of the things that are, that are wrong or bad about a church of any size can happen in a small church too.

But I, meaning people can come and be passive and people can come and be demanding, and that can happen anywhere.

Right.

But I think that small churches do have opportunities to engage in mission in unique ways and in worship in unique ways and formation in unique ways.

And once people, once churches identify those things and lean into them, I think that's what moves them from just being small to being strategically small.

Let's play that out.

Because when you, when you talk about they can do these things strategically, there's some advantages that small churches then have that mega churches or larger churches just simply can't replicate.

Yeah.

What is that?

Yeah, well, I think there's a handful, and I won't mention them all, obviously, but I think like one, for example, that I enjoy talking about is, you know, the one thing that smaller churches can do particularly well is intergenerational ministry, for example.

So in large churches, the success of ministry is often kind of demonstrated by having particular targeted ministries for people of different ages.

And so we know we're succeeding because we have a robust children's ministry and a robust youth ministry.

But that means that when families show up to church, then they part ways and everybody goes a different direction and then they meet again in the parking lot and the, the generations don't have opportunity to interact with one another, learn from one another, etc.

And I, I think as a result, that's where a lot of kind of contention over worship styles and things like that happen is if you want to listen to upbeat music, you can go do that in your children's spot, you can go do that in your youth spot.

Right.

There's no real need for the gener learn how to exist together as a church in a smaller congregation where you don't have the personnel necessarily to pull off a fully programmed children's ministry, where you have plenty of space for everybody to sit together in the worship center, where you need volunteers for everything.

And that could be volunteers of all ages, including children and youth and young adults.

There are a lot fewer barriers, I think, to having people of different ages together in meaningful ways.

And I know of large churches that are trying to figure out how you actually get your kids and your adults together, but they can't do it because there's not enough seats in the auditorium or because there's not enough, you know, the way the calendar works, everything specialized.

It's a lot of work to get the generations together in a smaller church.

It's not a lot of work.

And so it's something that can be leveraged more easily in a smaller congregation.

Now, that being said, just having people of different ages in the room is not intergenerational ministry.

And so I've also been to smaller churches where there are people of different ages and they're all unhappy.

And that's not the goal.

Right.

So I don't think I put this story in the book, but there's a. I remember one time I was preaching a pulpit supply, which sounds like a thousand years ago.

I don't know if anybody even calls it that anymore.

But I was preaching at this little church, and it was a woman, elderly woman, and her elderly brother and her two grown sons.

That was the entire church.

And there were two daughters that, like, ran circles around the sanctuary the whole time.

And when I would get, like, visibly distracted by them running around, the dads would grab them and spank them, like, right in the middle of the sermon.

And that's kind of hard to imagine in church in general these days.

But I would submit that is not intergenerational ministry just because there were multiple generations in the room.

And so, again, the small thing doesn't make it automatic, but I think it does reduce obstacles.

It makes it easier to make adjustments without having to fire staff or reallocate budget or build a new building or do that kind of stuff.

You can kind of, if you see the value, you could make the change quickly in a smaller place and, like, leverage it.

Well, it's easier to turn a rowboat than it is a, you know, a cruise ship.

That's exactly right.

Yeah.

So when the.

The smaller churches are more.

More mobile.

That's right.

Yeah.

But you and I. I mean, I've been A pastor of smaller churches, pretty much my entire ministry.

And now I'm in a, in a larger church helping out.

But, you know, each church has.

It's funny, it's almost as if every church wants what the other church has on one respect.

Like, smaller churches want to be big.

And I know bigger churches where they're like, I've met some pastor world leaders, which are, they're just exhausted and it's like they created a beast, now they have to feed it and they hate it and they want to get smaller.

And yet we know statistically that more and more Americans are going to larger churches, and many of those smaller churches are dying.

And there are so many pastors out there that are just feeling this massive discouragement.

And this isn't just unique to that.

I think numbers don't always prove success.

But how do we help people that are in these pastors that are in smaller churches change that mindset from discouragement to hope?

Yeah, well, and you've touched on a number.

I'm, I'm not great with statistics, but one of my favorite ones, because it's, I find it fascinating and I don't yet know exactly what to do with it, is that because of the way church attendance is distributed, the, the overwhelming majority of pastors will pastor a small church, but the overwhelming majority of people who attend church will attend a large church.

And I find that really fascinating because there's a mismatch between the pastor's expectation of what normal ministry looks like and the congregants expectation of what normal ministry looks like.

And so if I'm in a small church and someone comes up to me and says everybody I know goes to a larger church, that's probably not, that's probably not exaggeration.

It's very possible that everybody that person knows does go to a large church.

And so I think it is really, it's a helpful thing to keep in mind that if you were to put 10 pastors in a room, odds are they would all be pastoring smaller churches, put 10 congregants in a room, odds are they're going to a big.

All of them are going to a big church.

So that's one thing to keep in mind, is that like, the congregation and the pastor will have different lived experiences about what's normal.

And I think that's a helpful kind of thing to keep in view.

I think another thing, and this is, this is based on some research, but this is just kind of me talking.

I think one of the things that large churches have figured out how to do is how to be appealing to a large cross section of the population in any particular place.

And that's good.

But it also means by being appealing to that large cross section, they are necessarily unappealing to a lot of other subsections of the general population.

There are people who will not go to a large contemporary church because they feel uncomfortable socioeconomically or ethnically or socially or something else.

And it doesn't sound like I'm answering your question, but I sometimes have to talk myself there.

So I'm just.

It's a long Runway on this question.

I think that one way you can shift from despair to hope is to say you can't out compete the nearest large church for reaching whatever demographic they're reaching.

So if they're really good at reaching 30 year old college educated suburbanites and that's who you want to reach, you will lose because they're going to be better at it.

But those folks might, that church may be really bad at reaching the single mothers or the socioeconomically depressed or recent migrants into the area or people who work in an industry like, I don't know, nursing or theater or whatever and have weird schedules and, you know, can't go to church in normal hours.

All of those folks may feel uncomfortable in that other place and might really like being in a church like yours.

And so I think if we can shift and say, I can't win at that game, so I'm not going to play that game.

We're going to play a different game.

And the day the game we're going to play is not numbers.

But who in our community is currently not being served by a church?

Because there will be a lot of people.

And if you can find those people and count success as reaching those people who are currently unreached, I think that can shift from despair, that we're failing to hope that there's something meaningful here to do and we can do it.

I don't know if you remember that book.

Yeah.

But the big question that they asked was if we were to be taken out of the community, who would notice?

And I.

You mentioned that the megachurch draws from a region whereas that smaller church is much more focused in a neighborhood.

Yeah.

And I know both of us have read the great churching.

We had Michael Graham on the show and they talked about the success track, how some of these churches are set up with the success success track of the kind of the The Christian ideal on what people should do.

Yeah, but so many people fall through the cracks in that.

Do you think that the small church has the opportunity to kind of capture those who don't that kind of fall through the cracks and they didn't follow the success track?

Yeah, yeah, I think absolutely.

And I think.

I think they can and I think they should.

And I think that who that is will vary significantly from place to place.

I do think that one thing I find interesting about small churches is that I think if you look at churches of a thousand across the country, they will have a lot of similarities in terms of what they're doing and who they're attracting.

If you look at churches of 50 across the country, they will be so different from one another because they're so much more contingent upon and I think reflective of the local community.

So I, I think I use this example I don't remember in the book, but the little church I pastored in college was in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

Brown Springs, Arkansas was the name of the town.

And you did mention that.

Yeah.

And if, if you name a town after its most noticeable feature, I think Brown Springs is probably, you know, not great.

But they set up a.

They were all, all the workers were.

They drove log trucks, they were welders, they were electricians, they were tradesmen.

And that, that's a group that, in that part of that neck of the woods at least, you know, like the First Baptist Church is for, is a more white collar church.

And so they're just not gonna go there.

Now.

They may listen to the pastor sermons in their truck while they drive during the week, but I think not just spirit, not spiritually, but just socially feel out of place there.

So we would have 30 or 40 on a weekend.

And it was all blue collar people who, you know, I.

The first Sunday we had Sunday school first and then service after.

And after Sunday school, all the men were gone.

And I was confused.

I thought I had offended them somehow in Sunday school.

But I went outside and they were all smoking in the front.

You know, outside the church, it's like a very blue collar rural kind of thing.

And I thought this is why they wouldn't go to the big church in town, because this is the.

This behavior would not be acceptable there.

Right.

So I think it's.

So in that particular place, that sort of blue collar rural worker was a group that was underrepresented in other churches.

In a city like Chicago, there's going to be other groups that are underrepresented in those churches.

Or don't feel comfortable going.

Right.

So it's not that it's.

There's a, often association between like small and rural, but there are a ton of small urban churches, a ton of small suburban churches.

And in each of those places, the groups that are kind of, that fall through the cracks will be different.

But I think the opportunity is the same just to look around and say who's, who's not being.

Who's welcome anywhere if they're willing to make all the adjustments to fit in.

But who's not being accommodated in local churches and can we accommodate them so that they feel like this is a place for them?

And I think you start kind of asking that question, you begin to see that there's like tons of people actually who are disconnected that, that you might be able to reach.

Let's say that we've got.

I mean, I mean I'm, I'm for what you're.

You're saying because there is that, that, because we did that, we went through the uniquely you training back in the day.

And it basically said the vision of your church happens at the inner.

It was like a three circle Venn diagram.

The place you're located, the people that you have and the personnel you employ in the middle of that is kind of where you find your purpose.

Because you do need to find.

What is your local expression.

Because my, my last church, my third church, we were a part of a multi site and people would drive past us to that one because it was much larger and had a lot more programs.

And just socially the people that were going there wanted to be in those social circles and that was difficult.

And we were trying to imitate what they were doing and it felt like we were competing.

We were only 10 minutes apart, but our areas were very different.

They were in Chicagoland.

One was at the edge of suburbia, kind of like looking across to cornfields.

Well, we were in more of an urban suburban hybrid setting.

So we started looking more at the neighborhood.

As that happens though, you still feel this desire to compare because they're the ones getting the publicity, they're the ones that are getting the acclaim.

And it's really hard to be like we're being faithful because all of the hallmarks that the American evangelical church looks to for success, bigger influence, you know, are they talking, are they reading the books, all that.

What is then a healthy way that a smaller church can go about evaluating and understanding success?

Yeah.

Yeah, great question.

So I think there are a number of ways.

I think one of them is to say yeah, Are we in our mission, are we engaging people who otherwise would not be engaged?

Right.

So that's one way to do it.

And instead of saying, you know, numbers of people, we're saying kinds of people.

So these are folks who are not attending church anywhere else.

And we're able to engage them, whether it's one or it's 20.

You know, I think if you kind of put it on the qualitative side rather than quantitative side, that can be helpful.

I think with something like worship, instead of thinking in terms of professionalism or polish, or like, how good is the music or how compelling is the preaching, putting the emphasis on, like, participation is.

If I've got 50 people, are they all singing?

Are they all engaged?

Are they all connected?

Are they able to contribute somehow in the service by reading or by sharing or by praying or something?

And then I think if you, you know, if you just have to compare it, and we do at some level, I think, you know, a thousand people at church on a Sunday, the level of participation, if you are talking about the number of people or the percentage of people on the stage will be much.

The percentage will be much lower at a large church than at a small one.

So we.

You can have 50 people in your church and 10 of them are involved in some kind of spiritual leadership over the course of the service.

And that's 20% of your congregation is engaged in actively in worship and leading your people.

I think similarly, in formation is thinking, you know, are my people being.

Am I Or what.

How many of them are engaged?

Am I engaging them in ways that are meaningful to them?

And I think you could be grateful that you've got, you know, churches have, like, a smaller back door than smaller churches have less of a backdoor problem than larger churches have.

So you may get lots of people coming in at a large church, but you also have lots of people leaving.

And so I think if you're.

So formation is difficult if you don't know that they're going to be around a while and they're not.

Not connected.

And you really don't know how you're shaping books.

And it's easier then to measure heads than it is to measure growth of people, because you can't keep up with them.

I think in a larger, a smaller church, you can say, how are my people being formed?

Are all of them being formed?

Is there, you know, can I measure again, qualitatively, how.

How we're doing on that front?

And I think that shifts from numbers to quality is a helpful one also.

This is like a fun little game, but you could also think in percentages instead of in numbers.

And so if you've got 20% of your congregation engaged, well, even that 20% is just three people.

20% Sounds a whole lot better than three people.

So I think there's ways to kind of think through.

Right now, we've got half our congregation is engaged.

I want to move that to 60%.

And we're not talking about numbers.

We're talking about kind of percentages of growth.

And I think that can be helpful to kind of as a.

As a conceptual shift.

So it's a mindset perspective.

I think it's largely that because the truth is, most, you know, numerically, most pastors are going to pastor a small church forever.

So you can either be disappointed about that or you can just accept it.

And I think that the.

What I'm trying to encourage in the book is just to say we refer to small churches as small.

They're actually just normal.

So you have normal churches, and you have unusually large churches, and most pastors pastor a normal church.

And I think if you're able to think of it in those terms that I'm pastoring under normal circumstances, like most pastors, the ones that I see represented on book covers and conference platforms, those are unusual churches.

Those are.

And that's like, value neutral.

I'm just saying the percentage of those kinds of churches is very small.

The footprint of those churches is large.

But most pastors, nine out of 10 pastors, are going to pastor a church that is not a mega church.

And so you can fight that reality for all of your ministry career and be resentful and bitter and sad and disappointed.

Or you can just say, that's.

That's the.

That's the calling God didn't say at the end.

I'm going to say, how many people did you baptize after your Easter egg drop, you know, from the helicopter?

He's going to say, were you faithful in the.

In what.

In what you were given, whatever that is.

And most pastors are given 100 or fewer.

And that's just so faithfulness there is what we're measured on by Jesus.

We're kind of measured by our denominations, our networks, or other pastors by size.

But that's.

It's.

I think it's helpful to know where that pressure comes from.

And it doesn't come from Scripture, and it doesn't come from the Holy Spirit.

It comes from each other and from our denominations.

I don't know if that was an answer.

To your question?

No.

Now I don't remember what the question was.

Sometimes I get going on zoom.

It's just me alone in my room, you know, and I'm just rambling on.

So sorry, but that's just like many pastors I know.

Yeah, it's like, what was the point?

I don't know.

We're talking about the birth of Jesus.

How'd we get to the Esk?

How did we get to the Second Coming?

With so many different churches though, that are closing, is there really hope for the small church moving forward over the next 50, 60 years?

Yeah, that's an interesting question because I think the statistics are hard to interpret.

I'm not a statistician, but it does appear that again, if you take percentages and not numbers, that over the last five years, smaller churches, like churches under 100 have not really gotten smaller.

It's middle sized churches have either gotten smaller or they've gotten bigger.

So there's this interest.

I think what we're going to see over time is lots of very small churches, same statistically small number of large churches.

And not a lot in the middle, I think is what may happen.

I'm not a prophet, but that's kind of my guess.

But isn't that Ryan Burgess take on it, that those moderate congregations are the ones that are disappearing?

Yeah, that might be it.

I need to double check that because it would be nice if I were not just making it up.

70% Of all statistics are made up on the spot.

That's right.

And 100% of the ones you've heard in the last 30 minutes were made up.

So I think that the.

I think churches will continue, small churches will continue to be the norm.

I do think we need to think about model because while I am not a particularly, I'm kind of neutral on like intentionally small micro churches or kind of missional expressions, those kinds of things.

The value of them is they don't cost anything.

So I think one challenge you run into in small churches is that they many churches used to be large and now they're small.

But they still have the overhead of a large church and that's impossible to sustain.

Right.

So you have to make some choices there.

And I don't want to be naive about the fact that that's a difficult spot.

I think that it will be easier for smaller churches to weather things if they prepare financially to stay small.

Meaning that just anticipate that instead of doubling the size of the building, maybe you just say, you know what, we're going to Plant, because then we can keep this thing at 100 and we can make another plant another congregation for less than we can double the size of this building.

And then in 20 years it's half the size again.

Right.

So I think if you're, if you're concerned about the future, I think multiplication is probably a better way of weathering that storm than growth in one place because the overhead's lower and because the.

Yeah, I think the trend lines are that being a medium sized church is hard.

And so I think small, it'd be good to anticipate small.

Define medium.

Give me the numbers for medium.

Yeah, so I think that I tend to think of anything under over 500 is large.

Statistically, I think it's like 95% of churches in America are under 500.

So I think of medium size as like maybe 200 to, you know, 499 or something kind of in that range, which is big enough that you need staff and you need space.

And so it's like, you know, you, you have a lot of need, but you don't have scale because there's the, the cost of ministry at that size, I think is proportionally more expensive kind of per person because you just have a lot of.

You have the same overhead as a larger church, but you have a smaller congregation.

And I think that the smaller congregations, I don't think you should be motivated primarily by the logistics of it, but I just think that it would be helpful if we were to begin thinking about smaller as more durable, potentially in the middle of financial crisis or in the middle of other kinds of things, if the cost is right sized to the congregation.

And I think where a lot of things go wrong is that costs are.

You have medium sized church costs and small church attendance, where you've got large church costs and medium sized church attendance.

And it's that mismatch that makes things unsustainable.

But you can meet in the living room forever doesn't cost anything at all.

And that's where I think I'm not on the side of folks who would say that the micro church or house church or something is the biblical expression.

I think it is a biblical expression, but I do think it makes a whole lot of sense, especially in urban areas where rent is expensive.

And if you plant a church in Manhattan, you're going to probably be renting forever.

Building a church is cost prohibitive and maybe in rural places too, that it's cheaper and easier to meet in somebody's backyard.

And all your budget goes to after church lunch.

Fellowship rather than a mortgage, because you can sustain that forever, whatever happens to the economy or charitable giving or whatever else.

And so I think there's.

That's not my main motivation, but I think for those who are thinking in terms of the financial stability of a small church, I think that hard decisions, you have to make hard decisions to get to sustainability, but it's not out of reach.

Tim Keller, I remember him saying before he passed that he felt that the church of the future, he said that megachurches will always have their role because they can do some things that other churches can't.

But he said, I see the future of the church much more small, nimble and multi ethnic.

Do you agree with that?

Yeah, I think.

Well, I, I think of it as more small and nimble.

I think multi ethnic is never an accident.

So I think that it would.

That I think it can be small and nimble accidentally, but I think it can't be multi ethnic accidentally.

And so I think that's aspirational and I hope it's the case.

I mean, America is increasingly non homogeneous, so if the church is not increasingly non homogeneous, there's a problem.

Right.

But I do agree, I think a lot of larger churches are functioning these days more like network or even kind of.

They're functioning often in the way that denominations used to function.

So you have, you know, large churches that.

I know of a large church that gives it space to pastors of smaller churches for events and things like that, because they know that those other congregations don't have space big enough to host something or they do pastor training because they know that it's expensive for a pastor to go to a conference.

And instead of funding them to go to a big conference, you just do something less expensive locally in a bigger congregation.

And so they kind of take on the role of like a.

Relating to other churches as a parachurch or as a kind of network or denomination.

And I do agree that that will happen forever.

I think that Tim, what I admire about Tim is I think he's very generous in assuming that large churches would continue to use their resources for the good of other churches.

And some of them do and some of them don't.

And Redeemer did.

Redeemer understood its role as existing for the good of the Capital C Church in New York City and made a lot of choices that on paper don't make a lot of sense because they were trying to release resources for the good of the city and not just for its own kind of long term viability.

And I think if large churches continue to do that, then they have a really important role in the bigger ecosystem.

But I think that the smaller church will increasingly be the.

It is the norm.

It has been the norm for 100 years, and I think it will be the norm for the next hundred years.

I don't think that's a change necessarily.

Well, isn't it?

It's interesting, and I can't remember who the guest was on the show that said this to me, but they felt like the last hundred years was the anomaly in that.

Not the small church piece, but the fact that the church was in America so big and maybe even in the last 50 years.

And now we're just going back to what it's always kind of been.

Do you think that's true?

I do think there's truth to that.

And I think that it's complicated because if you were to say different parts of the world, in different parts of the country have different makeup.

But I found it really interesting.

Rodney Stark was it.

Stark and Fink wrote the book the Churching of America, I think, which I found really interesting because they did some projections to try to figure out what church attendance numbers might have been like, you know, different parts of history, like the time of the Great Awakening.

And I always find it interesting if you think, why did people think.

Why did pastors like Jonathan Edwards think that there needed to be revival?

And it's because people weren't going to church or that the people who were going to church were just going because it was social and not.

They weren't fervent, they weren't committed.

And so if you kind of look back over the.

The history of revival is a reminder that for most of American history, most people didn't go to church.

And the churches that were hosting those revivals or other things were smaller churches, like massive numeric growth in the time of revival was always viewed as a sign of the Holy Spirit doing something un.

Unusual.

Right.

And I think that we have kind of forgotten in the last hundred years for sure, but in the.

Since the 80s, you know, especially late 70s, early 80s, that.

That it seems like perpetual numerical growth in one place is the norm.

In fact, it's unusual now, but it, you know, and I think.

I don't know what the percentages would be.

There were megachurches in the, you know, 19th century.

They just didn't have that word and they weren't aiming for it.

They didn't try.

But, you know, Moody and others like that would have very large churches.

But I think they recognized them.

As the exception, not the rule.

And that's where we've kind of flipped the expectation.

And we now view those things as the rule.

And small is the exception.

And it's never been the case.

It's not currently the case.

I don't think it'll ever be the case.

And I think just kind of getting your head around that is really, can be really beneficial that let's not fight against reality, let's just accept that this is how things are and leverage what we have for mission formation and worship rather than waiting until we have different things before we start investing in mission formation and worship.

Right.

I think it's easy to kind of neglect the church until it can do what you want it to do.

And instead if we could say, let's take what we've got.

What's, you know, the.

I think of Moses though.

What's in your hand?

What's in my hand is these 20 people.

And so what am I supposed to be faithful with?

Not the things that are not in my church, but the things that are.

Right.

And I think kind of just shifting and maybe that doesn't shift forever, but I think that can be a helpful reframe for people as they're trying to figure out what to do next.

Speaking of reframing.

Yeah.

You wrote in your book the church doesn't have a mission, mission has a church.

What do you mean by that?

Yeah, that's a good question.

I always forget, you know, you write things and then you sleep.

I know other people go on and pretend like they've been thinking about these things non stop since the book came out.

But the.

I think that theologically what I mean by that is very often it's easy.

I think the God has a mission to grow his church.

And God's mission of redeeming all things and making all things new, he chooses to do that through the imperfect vehicle of the church.

The story of scripture is kind of like a story of God choosing to limit his abilities by partnering with people.

And I think the church is one of those examples of like, you know, he's hobbled in his work by the fact that he's chosen us to contribute to it.

But I think the church is the way that God is fulfilling his mission in the world to make all things new.

What often happens is we think of the church exists for its own sake and has to figure out what its mission is in order to keep existing.

And that's backwards.

Right.

So the church is not a corporation like Coca Cola or Apple or something that has to have a mission statement in order to figure out who it is and what it should do.

The.

The church is the expression of God's mission in the world.

And I think that that's where we sometimes forget whose church it is.

This is not.

It's not the pastor's church.

It's Christ's church.

And I think that's another reason why it would be helpful to not despise small churches, because that small church is Jesus's church.

And despising Jesus's small church feels like a dishonorable thing to do.

Right.

But if we recognize that even that small activity is an outpost of God's bigger mission to renew and restore all things, then I think that shifts how I understand that church's role in the world and in God's bigger view of things.

So I don't know if that's what I meant when I put those words in there, but that's what I mean today.

I hope that's all right.

If somebody goes back and reads it and is like, that does not sound like what he meant, then that's.

That's very likely the case.

I have one final question.

I mean, because we've talked about a lot of things today, but I know that there are a lot of pastors out there that are in a smaller church and they don't feel like it's strategic.

They might try to grab onto that title for themselves, and I hope that they do, but they're just deeply discouraged with where things are at, with what they're going through.

You and I both know what that's like.

What would you say to that pastor who feels like their church is just simply not enough to.

Yeah, I mean, I would say if we were meeting one on one, I get it.

Right.

I mean, I empathize with and sympathize with the feeling.

I think I might.

I think I might tell them that the church that you are called to pastor, the church that you have and the church that you have, not the church that you wish you had or the church that you might have later, but the church that you have now.

And if you can find the grace to accept that and do whatever soul work you might need to do with Jesus to wonder why, you can say, kind of root out, why is this thing that God gave me not enough for me?

I think that may be a place to start.

And I. Yeah, I probably only say the first thing.

If I don't know the pastor very well, and if I knew him better, I'd say the second thing.

Which is that I think that the, the dissatisfaction is not wholly dissatisfaction.

I think it's something that we need to take to Jesus and say, you've given me these 30 people and I'm unhappy with these 30 people.

Can you help me understand why and how I should approach them differently?

And I think that that is a place to start.

It's not going to fix the problems, but I think the heart, your heart is the place to begin.

Well, Brandon, what is one final water bottle that we can give those pastors and ministry leaders out there?

I think this I there's the word missional is used a lot.

We've talked about mission just now in the conversation.

But I think a final thing I would love people to take away, this is something I think, as someone who's not currently pastoring a church, is that I think it would be helpful if Christians of all sorts thought of themselves as missionaries in their geographic place rather than whatever else they might be.

So instead of saying, I wish that people just came to my church, think, well, a missionary wouldn't say that if they were in a place where there had never been a church, what would a missionary do?

They would go learn the neighborhood and they'd make connections.

And they do.

So I think thinking like a missionary is a really important shift.

And even if you don't know what that means, I think it just means imagine that you were dropped in your town without warning and you don't know where you are.

How would you figure out where you are and what this place is and how you should behave?

And I think that approaching things that way may not just help you be more.

Not just be more effective, but might also just give you a different imagination for what tools you have available to you if you start to kind of look around in that way.

Well, Brandon, this has been such a helpful and encouraging conversation today.

If people want to learn more, connect with you or grab a copy of the strategically small church, where should they go?

Yeah, the book is you can find it wherever books are sold.

I like bookshop as an alternative to the larger corporate booksellers that supports independent books stores.

But you can also find me online brandonjobrian.com as a website.

But I also snagged Brandon J. O' Brien at all of the social media things somehow.

So you can find me everywhere online.

Brandon J. O' Brien.

Well, Brandon, thank you for coming on ministry deep dive.

And for those pastors that are out there, ministry leaders, if you're serving in a smaller church, will statistics say that you probably are keep on going.

Keep listening to the show because we want to be able to equip you.

We know that ministry is hard no matter where you are.

And in a strategically small church, those challenges are different than those that are experiencing it in the larger churches.

But we're all in this together because we're all working for Christ and his kingdom.

Kingdom because we want to see people transformed.

I want to thank you for tuning in.

This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from ministry.

Deep dive.

Stay watered, everybody.