In 2017, I was the pastor of a small-membership church, and my wife was a youth pastor at a church in the next city over. A week before Christmas, our 6-month-old daughter woke up with a high fever and a nasty cough. Her breathing was so labored that we took her to the emergency room.
She was admitted and put on oxygen. The doctors assured us that she would be fine -- she had a bad case of RSV, which just needed to run its course. But for the next three days, she lay in her crib, an oxygen tube in her tiny nostrils, an IV in her tiny arm.
For a parent, there are few things more gut-wrenching than sitting helplessly beside the crib of your sick child.
For a young pastor married to another young pastor, there is no worse timing for such a crisis than mid-December. Between the two of us, we had a combined five Christmas services that needed to be planned and executed.
But it was this experience that really drove home to me the power of relationships in a small-membership church.
Read more from Allen T. Stanton » |
Leading during a global health crisis requires trust in medical professionals and the courage to love and not fear, say two pastors who cared for a congregant -- and congregation -- affected by Ebola.
Read more from George Mason & Mark Wingfield » |
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In this essay from 2010, the Center for Congregation's Wendy McCormick writes that, when congregations build on their strengths and assets, the energy and resources to respond to big challenges tend to increase.
Read more from Wendy McCormick » |
Alban author Steve Willis challenges the church to see how mainline Protestantism has grown comfortable and accustomed to the center but that the church needs to relearn gifts and skills from the periphery. This includes, of course, learning from churches that have found themselves strangely at the periphery in the mainline.
Read more from Steve Willis » |
Imagining the Small Church: Celebrating a Simpler Path by Steve Willis
Imagining the Small Church: Celebrating a Simpler Path bears witness to what God is doing in small churches. Steve Willis tells stories from the small churches he has pastored in rural, town, and urban settings and dares to imagine that their way of being has something to teach all churches in this time of change in the American Christian Church.
Willis tells us in the introduction, 'This book boasts no ten or fifteen steps to a successful small church. Instead, I hope to encourage you to give up on steps altogether and even to give up on success, at least how success is usually measured. I also hope to help the reader imagine the small church differently; to see with new eyes the joys and pleasures of living small and sustainably.'
There will be a variety of paths as the Church seeks new ways of being in this time. Willis knows this. The joys and sorrows Willis helps us see through the compelling stories of faith in the small church puts flesh and bones on the possibilities that lie ahead for congregations in the future as well as the here and now.
Learn more and order the book » |
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