Friday, July 15, 2011

Heart of the small church



Bev and I attended an unaccustomed presentation from a chief economic advisor to a major bank yesterday.

As he listed the half dozen shocks that the NZ economy has taken in recent years he said that what was needed was not some tinkering with the bits and pieces of the economy. What was required, he said, was a completely new DNA.

The rest of his talk was full of statistics and details, some of them frightening, some encouraging, but the gist of it was that recovery for this country will be a long, slow haul and will need some serious commitment from people at every level.

Throughout his recounting of our wayward financial affairs the elephant in the room was the word greed. He didn't use it once, but it was there.

We are still thinking about the implications of his talk for our personal financial affairs. But those three insights come back to me when I think about our small congregation.


  • The small church needs a different kind of DNA from any other church; it has to be wired differently, to develop a distinctive character. It is not a small church pretending to be a big church. It is what it is, with the people is has.

  • The small church needs to be in it for the long haul; there is not quick fix that will change its situation or suddenly grow its membership.

  • The small church member needs to remember that the church is not there to fill one's own needs, but to serve the needs of others both inside and outside the membership.

Usually, we in the church like to tell society how it should be. Today, I learned something from the secular world of economics that told me something about how the small church might be.


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