A Healthy Small Church

From an interview with John Koessler, professor of Pastoral Studies at Moody Bible Institute:

What are two or three defining characteristics of the healthy small church in the 21st century?

One mark of a healthy church is a biblical sense of mission. It's particularly important for the small church to get its marching orders from Scripture, and not from the culture, particularly since the culture seems to focus on the large church. The Bible describes the church as a community of the Word, a community that worships, a community that demonstrates mutual concern and ministry, and a community that bears witness to the surrounding world.

A second mark of health would be a biblically informed sense of realism, because I think there are too many small churches laboring under the burden of false expectations. We approach ministry under the assumption that the small church is really just an underdeveloped large church, instead of seeing it as a distinct expression of the body of Christ. We really can't do all the things that the large church is doing, so we create a climate for failure and that failure creates a culture of defeatism. The mantra you often hear in a small church is, "We're just a small church."

A third mark of health is a more holistic sense of what constitutes church growth. Numerical growth is one dimension, but it's only one, although it's an important one. But there are other important measures. For example, I think the small church needs to ask questions about whether a congregation is growing in its understanding of God's Word. Do you see a growth in character among God's people? Are they developing their capacity for ministry?