Recently I have been chatting with a good friend about the way we ‘do church’.  Now, Trinity is a big church and various people have often made criticisms about this for many different reasons so finally I decided to actually have a think about various aspects of this.

In the past I have always defended the notion of ‘big church’ based upon the fact that when you strip the gospel back to bare essentials, the response comes down to “heaven: yay or nay?”  That is the choice that every person should be offered and given the opportunity whether to accept or refuse.  Therefore, to all those who have said “it’s not about numbers”, I have replied “no, the gospel is, absolutely about numbers.  You are either with it or not.”  That said, we are not addressing the issue here in its entirety.

How can you make the most impact in a town?  (Let’s start at a small scale, so the numbers can be imagined..)  Is it better to create a huge congregation in the middle of town, with lots of ‘ministries’ operating from that base, where people can ‘come to church’, or is it better to plant smaller congregations spread all over the town so that those ministries run in relevant areas for people to receive?  Jesus invited us to spread the gospel, not contain it.

Now, at Trinity I do believe that we seek to do a bit of both.  There are ministries that go out to the people, but still a large base in town.  As the clusters grow, we see a greater spread of the gospel across the town and this is a good thing as far as I can understand.  But we need to be careful.  As with any large congregation there are dangers attached and potential traps that one could easily fall into and these are the traps that I envisage the church (at large, as an entity) falling into.

If you are the leader of a big church you must must must release other people to do the work of the Lord.  Unfortunately many people set up endless training programmes around themselves that offer the illusion of releasing younger people into leadership.  They have names such as “emerging generation” or “emerging culture” (I jokingly called this post “emerging couture” because often these programmes seem to create clones of their very trendy leaders and they go on for ever).  One preacher once stood up on an emerging generation stage and said “YOU’VE EMERGED!!  Now get off your butts and do something” (or words to that effect).  By running these programmes and training and training people, we end up making disciples (or rather clones) of ourselves, in the hope that they might get through life and do their job ok, but this is not right.

People are never going to be perfect and the enemy’s biggest tactic for bringing down the church is distraction and excuses.  Just let go and let God be God because if you don’t then you run the risk of saying no to God’s will and becoming an idol.  Don’t place people on a pedestal before God - I remember being challenged by the words of a secular song (Counting Crows) which said something about putting someone on a pedestal to watch them fall.  How true.

So why not send people out to fill some of the empty church buildings around here?  Why not run a ministry for the poor in the poor areas of your town?  Why make 30 old people travel across town for a dinner when you could go to a retirement complex and make dinner for them?

If you try to build a church that is top heavy (i.e. the minority leading the masses) then you run the risk of building the tower of Babel, - creating an empire to stretch to heaven only to have it crushed and resulting in everyone speaking in a different language that no one else understands.