Help for the Small Church
Oct. 6, 2026
Host: Dr. Jamie Mitchell
Guest: Terry Thompson
Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 10/06/26. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.
Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue.
Jamie Mitchell:
Well, it’s so good to be with you today. I’m Jamie Mitchell. I’m your host. These last two weeks, I’ve been traveling through Egypt and Jordan, learning much, but I can honestly say I’ve missed doing this program and sharing with you. And I’m excited about being back today, especially about our topic, because I believe it will resonate with many of you. The Hartford Institute has done extensive research on the churches here in America. Here’s what they have found. 70% of all Christian churches in the United States are under a hundred attenders to worship. That’s approximately 358,000 churches. And that means 250,000 are under a hundred. And if you thought that the main line and liberal churches were pulling that number down, 71.3% of evangelical churches are under a hundred. The median size of congregations have been falling for years. In 2002, the median size was 137 people.
2010, 105, 2015, 80. And 2025, the median size of a congregation was 70. Size is one thing, but age is another. Over 32% of the churches are 65 years of age and older. And churches of a hundred, that number balloons to 49% with the median age being around 58 years of age. National congregation study has determined 48% of churches are under a hundred have a full-time minister and their budgets are around $100,000. All of that to be said that many, if not most churches in America are small. They’re aging. They lack energy. They lack young people. And the young people are not replacing those dying off. And we don’t have the resources and leadership or funding to turn things around. Small churches struggle in many way. And it’s not adding people are becoming a medium or large church will solve all their problems, yet healthy churches grow and reach people and expand their ministry impact.
And it’s clear that small churches need help. And today we want to talk about the small church, some of their unique challenges and how to begin to see effective, healthy change occur in those congregations. And to help me as the director of Small Church USA. Now that’s an appropriate name, Terry Thompson. He pastored a small church and by God’s grace and diligently applying biblical principles of ministry in that context, he saw God do some amazing things, but he still had a love for the small church and he launched Small Church USA because he realized small churches needed extra help and those pastors needed special training and encouragement. Brother Terry, thank you so much. What a joy to have you on Stand in the Gap today.
Terry Thompson:
Hey Jamie, great to be here with you. I appreciate the opportunity. Anytime I get a chance to talk about small churches, I’m always 100% in. It’s a topic that I’m very passionate about.
Jamie Mitchell:
Well, Terry, you heard my opening and I know you’ve done your own research and there’s a lot of small churches across the nation. Some, even though they’re small, are healthy and effective and they’re making disciples. They just might be in a community that just doesn’t have many people like a rural setting. Yet there are many small churches for a variety of reasons that we want to discuss today. What I want to know is what got you focused on small churches and why did you start Small Church USA?
Terry Thompson:
Yeah, thanks. That’s a great question. I started my ministry career as a youth pastor for 12 years in Indianapolis, a very metropolitan area. And then I was an associate pastor for two years in Columbus, Ohio. So another very metropolitan area. And then God called me and my family to go to Crawfordsville, Indiana, which is about 12,000 people in West Central Indiana, surrounded by cornfields. So just typical small town America. And we went there in 1998 and it was my first lead pastor position. I went into revitalize Pleasant View Baptist Church, which had been in steady decline for about 10 years and had gotten down to 20 elderly people. And there were two men, no kids, and the rest were elderly ladies. And it was my job at 35 years old to go in and revitalize this church. And to be perfectly honest, I had no idea what I was doing.
And we went in and we knew that the church was unhealthy. It had been for a long time. We had to get it healthy and then see what God could do with a healthy church. And so we started to work and we started to pray and somewhere along the line, God showed up, which is what has to happen if anything is ever going to get renewed. And the church began to get healthy and the church began to grow and God began doing a really good work. And 24 years down the road, that church of 20 elderly people today is a church of a thousand people on Sunday morning. And God did immeasurably more than we could have ever asked or imagined in Crawfordsville, Indiana. And in those 24 years that I was leading, there was a number of pastors and churches that had reached out and heard the story of what God had done.
And they just said, “Hey, how did you do it? Can you help us?” And when I was leading the church, I really didn’t have the bandwidth to take on a lot of other church projects. So a couple of years ago, I handed the church off to a next gen pastor who’s now my pastor, and we started Small Church USA so that we could very intentionally and on a much broader scale begin working with all of these pastors and churches that had been reaching out to us and saying, “Can you help us?” And so I lived church revitalization for 24 years. I saw God do some great things and that just stirred in my heart the love and the passion and the need to help these small churches that are struggling and just need God to show up and do something special in their church.
Jamie Mitchell:
Terry, the fact of the matter is, as I have gone around speaking in my role here with the American Pastors Network, I have run across more small church pastors. But the other thing I have run across is I’ve run across a lot of large church pastors who don’t take notice of the small church. They don’t come around. And one of the things I’ve appreciated hearing your story and hearing about Small Church USA is that you never forgot where you came from. You never forgot where you started and what experience you went through and how God used that experience both to shape you, but to give you something to pass on to others. And that so encourages me and that’s why I wanted to have you on the program. Friends, the likelihood is that most of our listeners today, you’re in a small church. The percentage is great.
And if not, then you might be a church that could be used to help and encourage small churches to grow because there’s plenty of them around you. Now when we come back, I want to start to unpack this whole idea of a small church. I want Terry to share about the uniquenesses of a small church. That might be you. You might be a small church pastor and you feel like you are alone, you’re not. Today we are here for you. We want to encourage you. We want to give you insights and we want to encourage every person sitting in the pew to look at their church and say, “How can we make a difference?” Don’t go anywhere. Today our focus is on small churches here in America and how to make a change. Welcome back. Today our focus is small churches. 70% of churches in America are under a hundred and that size presents some unique challenges.
Terry Thompson from Small Church USA is with us today. Terry, paint a picture for us. Why are churches small? Why do they find themselves in that position? Are there some common factors to help us understand why small churches are small?
Terry Thompson:
Yeah, thanks Jamie. Yeah. The US Census Bureau, I did a study on that, that 91% of all the communities in the United States of America have a population of 15,000 people or less. So if you think about that, the fabric of our country is small towns, not big cities. And a lot of our churches are in these small towns, which means they’re just in a smaller context. And so there are a lot of small town rural churches, which would just lend itself to the fact that they’re going to be smaller than some of the big metropolitan areas, but others, communities have changed and people have left and all of those kinds of things factor into that as well. But I think when you look at about 80% of the churches in America today are plateaued or in decline. And I think there’s a couple of reasons that when we look at these statistics is why we would see that.
Number one, they’re aging out and they’ve lost the next generation. And I think in the churches that we work with, and we’ll talk a little bit more later about how we do that, but I think our churches and our pastors are very reliable to God’s word. They’re faithful to preaching truth, at least in the evangelical circles we run in. But I think there’s a missing piece there that as we’ve stayed reliable to the word, I’m not sure that we’ve stayed that relevant to the culture of the day. And certainly God’s word doesn’t change, but the culture does and how we reach the culture, we have to rethink that. And I think there’s a piece there that we need to explore. And then I think number two, I would say status quo rules the day in far too many of our churches that we need to rethink and reexamine how we’re trying to reach our culture.
And sometimes that means mixing up the status quo in our churches, which gets a little nerve wracking at times. But if Jesus is the ultimate example, which he is, if you study his life, he basically challenged the status quo and created chaos everywhere he went. And I think sometimes we just need to shake some things up a little bit and rethink on how we do that. One statistic that I read not long ago, we have about 340,000 churches in the United States that are plateaued or declining, but only about 30% of them will actually do anything to try to stem that tide and stop the erosion and get things moving again. And so I think there’s some things there to think about and chew on as we think about why are churches small.
Jamie Mitchell:
Terry, that helps us understand the why, but churches that are small, they just face some very practical challenges and concerns and maybe even some things that hinder them to move past being small and start being more effective and reaching more people. As you’ve gone in and obviously consulted and talked and spoke and studied this, what are those challenges? What are small churches hampered with that really stand in the way of them moving forward?
Terry Thompson:
Yeah. So since we started Small Church USA several years ago, our engagement is a year long engagement with pastors. So we really do get to know them in depth. And we’ve worked with 154 pastors from 23 different states and some international pastors. And so we’ve got 154 data points to look at, which is really helpful. And I think there’s a couple of things. I think number one, sometimes churches are trying to do too much and they need to simplify and prioritize what are the main things that we need to do and do really well. And I think sometimes they’re just trying to do too much with too limited of resources. And then the second thing I would say is, as our churches go through doing evaluations, we help them work through that. The two areas that always come back that these small churches need help in are evangelism and discipleship or the multiplication of leaders.
And if our churches aren’t focused and don’t have a priority of evangelism and discipleship, which is the great commission, then we’re hurting doing the mission of the church, which is the great commission. And so I think some of those things are really huge factors in small church concerns.
Jamie Mitchell:
Terry, as I have spoken to different church members, not so much pastors, but church members, and sometimes pastors relate this, they will say, “Look, we don’t want to get big because we like being small.” And when they say that, there are certain things that they like about being small. They know everybody, it’s been a family church, or maybe they can control things. But if they start getting healthy, one of the natural things that happens is they do begin to grow. They do begin to add people. Have you ever heard that as an excuse why they don’t want to grow? They like remaining small. And if they do begin to grow, how can they keep those things that they like when they’re a small church?
Terry Thompson:
Yeah. I have heard that. And I think for me that there would be one regard where it’s okay for churches to remain small, and that is if they are intentionally, philosophically a micro or home church that, “Hey, when we get to X a number of people, then we’re going to create another micro home church.” I think it’s okay to stay small in that regard. Other than that, I really don’t see in the scriptures that staying small for those reasons is a biblical reason to stay small. And if we are fulfilling the great commission and reaching the lost world for Jesus, our church is going to grow, which I think is the purpose of the church. And I know from our church, going from 20 people to a thousand people, we had a lot of different growth barriers that we had to walk through and watch the church change.
And I think one of the things that is hard as a church grows is that those relationships that you have and everybody knowing everything is what people like. But there are ways to do that as the church grows. As the church gets bigger, it has to get smaller at the same time. And that’s why you have things like small groups or community groups or things like that, which helps keep the relational capacity, but yet fulfilling the mission that God has for the church.
Jamie Mitchell:
Terry, when we talk about small churches, my mind immediately goes to the resources they have. They don’t have the number of people, the critical mass to do the kinds of ministries that they need to do, and they don’t have the finances to do it. I mean, they’re just limited on finances. How debilitating are those two really main resources, reaching a critical mass and having the resources that you need to make things happen?
Terry Thompson:
Yeah. I mean, obviously those two things are critical. You’ve got to have some resources if you’re going to try to expand. And that’s why just a minute ago I said, I think that’s why a lot of churches, they probably need to simplify and prioritize what they’re doing so they’re not trying to do too much and wear everybody out. And I think there’s a movement today, and I know we’ve seen it in some of our churches where churches are starting to think outside the box and saying to themselves, “Okay, maybe we don’t have the critical mass and the resources we have, but if we merged with somebody else or if we did some kind of a partnership or something with another ministry, maybe we could get there so that we can get the church moving forward.” And so I think a church has to seriously look and evaluate those things and just see, man, how do we keep this thing moving forward?
Because what we don’t want is we don’t want the church to close its doors and that community to lose the gospel presence that it so desperately needs.
Jamie Mitchell:
Terry, here is one other thing, and we got probably less than a minute. Sometimes churches have a lot of money. They got money in the bank. They can last for a long time. That could be a problem as well, can’t it?
Terry Thompson:
Oh, without a doubt. And we run into that occasionally, not as much as the other way. But yes, having money in the bank, sometimes that can just be like being on life support. The church really is unhealthy and dying and it just doesn’t know it because it’s got money in the bank and can pay the bills and all of those kind of things. And it really can be a false sense of security for a church that I think a church has to be careful of.
Jamie Mitchell:
Friends, over the years, I’ve watched people have a mental roadblock over the size of the congregation. There are certain things that small fellowships naturally do well, but overall, they can’t fulfill what God really wants them to accomplish. Sometimes being in a small church and just holding on to your smallness can be a debilitating factor to seeing what God can do in your church. When we come back, let’s understand the pastor of a small church. We are the American Pastors Network. Pastors is our middle name. Being a small church pastor is a unique issue, both how you move forward and what you have to work with. Terry will come back and he’ll give us some insights. Don’t go anywhere. Here at Stand in the Gap today, we’re talking about small churches here in America.
Well, if you’re just joining us, we’re discussing small churches in America and if there are ways to help them, not just to get them bigger, but to be more effective and fulfill the mission of reaching and discipling people. We’ve been having a discussion with Terry Thompson, who is the director of Small Church USA. The size of a church can inhibit that goal and we want to help churches move forward. Terry, obviously one of the keys of helping a small church will be the pastor who are in these churches. Can you provide some insights on who a small church pastor is? What strengths do they have? What areas of growth are they generally needed to develop to bring about the kind of change to move their church from maybe a small declining church to a growing healthy church?
Terry Thompson:
Yeah. Thanks, Jamie. Man, I love our pastors. I have the utmost respect for them. We especially, we work with some bi-vocational pastors. I have the utmost respect for those guys for working a full-time job and pastoring a church. After we work with these guys for a year, I have 154 new, really good friends that are pastors and man, I just love that. Our pastors, man, here’s what we see. They’re humble men. They’re faithful to the word. They’re not going off the cliff theologically. They’re really good shepherds. They know how to care for their people and they do that well and they love them well. And I think we see those strengths over and over and over again. The two things that I think are missing that when we get our pastors in and we work with them and they all say the same thing, “Man, this is what I need.” They need to learn personal leadership development.
How do they raise the bar of their leadership? Because I think everybody understands the first goal of raising the bar of growing an organization is you have to grow the leader first. And so their personal leadership development, and then strategically, how do we figure out how to get unstuck and get things moving forward again? And I know a lot of these pastors, they were like me, went through intensive Bible college, seminary training, learned how to study my Bible. I didn’t have one class on leadership. I didn’t have one class on strategy. And then they threw me into a church and said, “Go lead this.” And then you find yourself going, “I have no idea what I’m doing here.” And so I think that leadership and strategy are the two big things that our guys are asking us for and wanting help from us because it’s just not something we got in our training years.
Jamie Mitchell:
Terry, some of the pastors like a small church and they have no interest in doing more, growing more, shepherding more, making the personal changes to help a church be more effective. I know the pastors who come to you are looking for help, but why do you think a pastor would want their ministry just to remain small?
Terry Thompson:
As ministry goes, it’s challenging and it will challenge us personally. It’ll challenge our leadership. It will challenge the people to grow. It will push you outside of comfort zones. I mean, all of those kind of things, which I don’t think are easy for anybody to do, to walk into the unknowns like that. But my biggest challenge for that question would probably be this. I think looking at the parable of the talents in Matthew 25, the wicked and slothful servant was the one that did nothing with what God had given him. And he’s the one that really got chastised in the parable for not working hard to multiply what God had entrusted into his care. And so I don’t think for a pastor, it’s really an option not to do nothing. I think our job is to work hard and try to see the church be healthy and flourish and grow for the kingdom of Jesus Christ.
Jamie Mitchell:
Terry, you mentioned about bi-vocational pastors. I’ve run into a number of them over the time. And one of the things I’ve said kind of off the cuff to them is, “So what’s your goal for not being bi-vocational anymore?” And many of them have kind of looked at me kind of strangely like, “Well, I’m bi-vocational. I’m always going to be bi-vocational. I’m stuck being bi-vocational.” And in many times the church isn’t even thinking that, “How do we get our pastor to full-time status?” Have you run into that as an issue? And how do you challenge a pastor in regards to his employment, his job, his salary? How big of a piece of is that when you’re dealing with a small church pastor?
Terry Thompson:
Yeah. I think there are some guys that they just, that’s what they want to do. They want to be what we would probably call co-vocational is they want to have their vocation and pastor. And some of them, that’s just kind of their calling and their mission, which I think is great. And I think we’re probably as communities shrink and churches shrink and they have a hard time affording pastors, we’re probably going to see more of that and not less than that. But I think pastors that are bi-vocational that are working a job and pastoring a church, but would love to just pastor the church full-time, then I think that’s got to be the goal of let’s get this church healthy because how much more can be accomplished with a full-time pastor than a part-time pastor? And so I think there’s different philosophies that go into that and it’s just kind of dependent on where the church and the pastor is in the context of where they are.
Jamie Mitchell:
For pastors listening today, Terry, it’s not wrong to say to yourself, “I would love to see this church grow to the place where I have a full-time salary and I can focus my attention on my church.” There’s nothing wrong with that, is it?
Terry Thompson:
Oh, absolutely not. No. And I think most of the guys, and we do have some bi-vocational guys that we work with and we talk to a lot of them, I think most of them would love that to be their goal and then they should put a strategy together to try to get that goal accomplished.
Jamie Mitchell:
Terry, in your experience working with small church pastors, I know you mentioned that they need to develop themselves personally as leaders and then figure out some strategy. Are there one or two skill sets or changes that you see over and over again in regards to a small church pastor that they have to either learn or make and practically speaking, meaning is a small church pastor, maybe one of the problems is he just doesn’t know how to find new people and bring new people in the door. What are those skill sets that you see over and over again a small church pastor really needs to hone into?
Terry Thompson:
Yeah. I think there’s two. I think number one would be they really need to learn how to have a missional focus of working on mission and vision and core values of why we do what we do and where we want to go and how we’re going to get there. And that’s so many of our pastors that come to us, they’re like, “Man, we’re stuck. We’re status quo. We’re in decline. I really don’t know what to do to get us out of there.” And so we do an extensive amount of work with them on mission, vision, and core values. Again, that’s just part of the strategy, but they have to be able to think missionally and work their church through those strategic steps for the church to get there. So again, that’s a leadership issue. And then the second thing, I think a lot of things that we see with our guys that are really good shepherds, they’re encouragers, they’re nurturers, but sometimes they need to learn how to push their people a little more than they do.
And one of my favorite quotes from the book Canoeing the Mountains, and this is by Marty Linsky, he said this, “Leadership is about disappointing your people at a rate they can’t absorb.” And I love that quote because that really is leadership. We have to learn how to push people, but at a rate they can’t absorb, but so that we move them forward to accomplishing the mission. And so I would say those would be two things that we see with our pastors that I think would be probably across the board.
Jamie Mitchell:
And Terry, when a pastor who maybe has been stuck or in decline or struggling or not sure, when they get a taste of success, and I mean that in the most godly way, a sense of fruitfulness, they start seeing some things move. Boy, it becomes so encouraging and almost addictive. They start saying, “You know what? If we can do this, there’s other things we can do.” You must have seen that in your ministry with small church pastors.
Terry Thompson:
Yeah. We see that all the time and it’s a really great thing to watch happen as the church starts getting focused and the church starts getting healthy and good things start happening. You can see just the hope of the pastor rises and His level of excitement rises, but then we also hear the stories about how the church starts seeing that, and you can just start seeing the momentum start to build and the hope come back to churches that for a long time had really just been hopeless that is anything ever going to really happen here? So yes, we see that all the time and man, we praise God every time it happens.
Jamie Mitchell:
Terry, I’m an interim pastor in a small rural church and I watch the eyes of people when we get new visitors in the door. They haven’t had a visitor in so long and it’s almost like literally a breath of fresh air. Well, I’ve said it over and over friends, speed of the leader, speed of the team. So much rises and falls on leadership. So pastor, if you’re listening, your church is struggling. Do not fall entirely at your feet. You can be a catalyst of change, but you got to pick up that mantle. When we finish up with Terry, I want him to give us some practical ways to see small churches thrive and not just survive. I also want him to share a lot about Small Church USA and maybe how your church can be helped by this wonderful ministry. Stay with us here at Stand in the Gap today.
We’ve been talking with Terry Thompson, the director of Small Church USA. Terry, your ministry was founded to help people and pastors who are in small churches as we’ve been discussing today. Can you briefly tell our audience a little bit about Small Church USA, how you come alongside a pastor in a church, maybe what’s your process and how can people find out about your ministry?
Terry Thompson:
Yeah, I would love to share that with you. On our website, smallchurchusa.com, there’s actually two really great options for pastors. One is I do an open Zoom invite once a month, the first Wednesday of every month. It’s called Discover Small Church USA in 20 minutes. And we just kind of jump on and let pastors know what we’re about and give them a little information and they can click on the opening page of our website and find out when those times are going to be and sign up to get on one of those. And then they can also click on a link that they can schedule a 30 minute call on my calendar and just tell me a little bit about their church and what’s going on and we can talk about how we can help. And so those are two really great options that are on our website, smallchurchusa.com.
But our process kind of looks like this. We have a year long engagement that we do with pastors. We put them in a cohort with five or six other pastors. Most of these are solo or bi-vocational pastors. And our year starts with a two and a half day retreat where we bring all the guys into Crawfordsville, Indiana. So we bring them into our hometown here and we have guys from all over the country, so they probably don’t know the other guys in their cohort. And so this gives them a chance to build relationships and we pray together and we study together and we worship together and eat together and we do competitions together and we just really build some really tight friendships during the retreat weekend. And then after the retreat, it’s a monthly Zoom call from wherever they are in the country or internationally.
And we work through a playbook that I wrote on church revitalization. And so the pastor, this is what makes it a little bit unique. He doesn’t just do this by himself. It’s mandatory that he has to have a leadership team in his church that he works with to go through the year. And this is important for us because we want the church to have a voice in what’s happening. And so how this works is I’ll lead them through one of our online sessions. Over the next month, they’ll have the playbook and they’ll have all the PowerPoint presentations. And so after I lead them through one of our sessions, they lead their leadership team through that same session. So what we’re doing is we’re trying to help lead the leader to lead the leaders and it’s actually building a leadership pipeline for them. And some of our churches that are in a smaller context of 30, 40, 50 people, some of them are using a Sunday school hour or a Sunday night or a Wednesday night and they’ll take the whole church through it, which is fine with us as well.
It doesn’t matter what context they do it in, they just can’t do it alone. And then based on the session that we just went through then, the leadership team and the pastor, they have some evaluations to make on their church. And then after they do that, between our monthly calls, there’s a guide pastor that’s also in each one of our cohorts. So another seasoned pastor in a healthy church that’s going to stay with that group of pastors for the entire year. And between our monthly cohort calls, he calls each of his guys individually for an individual coaching call. So basically every two weeks throughout the course of a year, they’re going to get a touch from us. They’re going to be in a group cohort meeting and then get an individual call. And the goal of working through this playbook is that at the end of the year, they’re going to have created based on their church and their leadership team’s input and all of that, they’re going to create a three to five year strategic health plan for their church.
And we’re just walking with them step by step to do good evaluations, talk about good tools, resources, best practices, and then how to prioritize what do we need to work on this year, what do we need to work on the next year, what do we need to work on the next year? And we’re just helping them create this pathway for how to get their church healthy and then how to keep it moving for the years to come. And so that’s kind of the process of what we work through.
Jamie Mitchell:
Terry, that sounds absolutely tremendous. And if I was a small church pastor sitting there and feeling alone and feeling not sure what the next move is, that certainly would be like a magnet to me and draw me into one of those cohorts. And I want to encourage our listeners and especially pastors listening, reach out and find out about how you can be a part of the process at Small Church USA. Terry, I want you to finish up here. We have just a few minutes. If a pastor or church leader is here and they’re not in your cohort yet, or maybe they’re in process, but they’ve been listening today and you stirred them, we’ve stirred them to say, “You know what? I got to start making some moves. I got to start doing some things to start moving my church in a different trajectory.” What two or three things can a church do today to change that trajectory?
I know all churches are unique, but there must be some common things that you would encourage a pastor to do to get on the road to health.
Terry Thompson:
Yeah. We talk about four steps to church renewal and step number one is that crisis has to heighten the urgency. And I think one of the jobs of the pastor in a church, if the church is stuck or status quo or he wants it to move to a different level than where it is, the number one thing that has to happen first is there has to be some urgency created in the church to do something. And I think a great question for pastors to ask their leadership teams is, “Hey, if we do nothing other than what we’re doing right now, what’s our church going to look like in the next five to 10 years?” And sometimes just asking a simple question like that and letting people mold that answer will create a sense of urgency to move them to say, “Man, we really have to do something.” Because I would say to pastors, doing nothing is not an option.
And that’s like burying your talent in the ground. That’s doing nothing. That really isn’t an option. And I asked the pastor not long ago, I said, “Hey, what’s your strategy for trying to get your church healthy?” And he looked at me and said, “We opened the doors on Sunday and we have church.” And I said, “Well, man, I’m glad you’re opening the doors. I’m glad you’re having church, but that’s not a strategy.” And so I think sometimes just thinking through what are we going to be proactive in doing is the next step. And whether it’s Small Church USA or somebody else, doing nothing can’t be the option. We need to be proactive as the leader of the church, that we know that there’s some weightiness to be a pastor of a church because we know we’re going to stand and account for that. And so let’s be proactive in saying, “Man, this isn’t our church.
It’s God’s church and he wants to build his church. And what are we going to do to try to accomplish that and steward that well?” I think the urgency is the thing that needs to be raised in most churches to take the next step.
Jamie Mitchell:
That is a great final word. Terry Thompson, thank you for being with us. What a blessing and I hope people will grab hold of this. Friends, remember 70% of churches are under 100. The likelihood is you’re sitting in a small church today. And this issue may not be small, but effectiveness. I’m reminded of what Jesus said to the church of Philadelphia, “I know you have little power, yet you’ve kept my word and not denied my name.” Small churches can have a big impact. If you desire to grow and become more effective, check out Small Church USA. Again, thanks for being with us. And again, till tomorrow, live and lead with courage. God bless you. Have a great rest of your day.
Recent Comments