Choosing Between a Small Church and a Mega-Church

For hundreds of years the most important question people asked when choosing a church had to do with denomination. That is still a major factor (even today very few people can or will move effortlessly from Lutheran to Baptist to Episcopal services), but of almost equal importance is a factor that has emerged only in the last generation or so: size. People searching for a church now must decide if a small church or a mega-church is best for them. Both have advantages and both have drawback, and all should be considered.

Before looking at the strengths and weaknesses of the two types, some definitions are needed. For the purposes of this article, a mega-church is any congregation with over 2,000 people attending regularly. A small church is one with fewer than 300 regular attendees. Obviously there are a great number of churches whose congregations fall between these two numbers, but this is a look at small vs. mega, not medium vs. fairly large.

In some ways, choosing between a small church and a mega-church requires the same analysis of advantages and disadvantages that one would apply to the question of whether to live in a small town or a large city. In saying this I am not discounting the leading of the Holy Spirit in choosing a church, but rather acknowledging the realities of life in America today.

The New Testament has examples of both types of congregations. The first chapters of the Book of Acts tell of very rapid growth in the church that occurred as people were hearing the Gospel for the very first time. You can see similar explosive growth anytime the Gospel was proclaimed in areas where it had not been heard before, such as Eastern Europe after fifty years of communist rule. In Romans 16:3-5, Paul acknowledges a much smaller church, sending greetings to Priscilla and Aquila and the "church that meets at their house." The house-church movement in China mirrors this type of congregation. Jesus himself gave us the minimum size for a congregation: two or three. In Matthew 18:20 He said: "For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them."