by Neal Banks

Created on: June 04, 2008   Last Updated: June 10, 2008

A church should never be judged simply on its size.

It is a sad truth that there are many churches that see death. Death to their mission, death of the Holy Spirit's movement among its members, death of the vision that birthed it. Churches disband, churches split, and churches become more like country clubs and lose vision. But this is never because of the churches size or lack of it.

Even the largest of mega-churches see these unfortunate things happen to them, as do the smallest meeting within private living rooms. But by the grace of God many churches are living, breathing brides of Christ. And many of them are small: meeting in living rooms, tiny parishes, coffee houses, and basements. But they are fostering life. They are bringing people to Christ and having intimate fellowship with our Creator, regardless of the fact they are small. They may not have resources, they may defy all common sense for any corporate body to keep supporting them, and they may be fighting to meet week after week. But they are teaching their members to love Jesus, they are growing them into mature Christians, they are fulfilling the Great Commandment and the Great Commission. And they shouldn't close or be allowed to close if they are doing the latter two things.

The early church had very small congregations, met in small upper rooms, and had little or no resources. You can read about them in the Acts. Yet they boldly proclaimed the message of the Gospel, and the saw huge conversions to Christ. Along the lines of thousands of gentiles in a matter of days. You want to read about revival, crack open the first six chapters of the Acts of the Apostles. They were not just seeing conversion to Christ, either; they were seeing miracles of healing, speaking in tongues, the dead being raised. By congregations that were by today's standards quite small.

I think we have seen an era of mega-churches and we often judge the abundance that a church has by how large it is. We see large congregations, mission trips going every where, big church campuses, huge donations to the community and we equate this with the Lord's blessing. These things are all fantastic, but what we should be asking ourselves is this: is that church teaching their congregation to love Jesus? Are they learning how to walk with Him every day? Do they truly have a love of the Lord?

A church should never be judged by its size, but for its impact for the Kingdom of God. You don't kill someone that still has life in them, and if the life of the Holy Spirit is alive and well within the body of a church then who are we to say it should die?

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