Sometimes it happens organically — a small church and a big church form a relationship and start working together.
But now there are new efforts in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to try to cultivate intentional partnerships between bigger congregations and smaller ones, to explore ways they can work together in mission, both overseas and close to home.
The Association of Presbyterian Mission Pastors — a group that’s open to anyone but is mostly comprised of representatives from larger congregations — is working with the Wee Kirk ministry of Presbyterians for Renewal to try to nurture such conversations. When the mission pastors group met last fall, it paid to bring Wee Kirk representatives to the gathering in Louisville with the hopes of furthering the potential for such partnerships.
Increasingly, “the little churches have come on the radar screen for the larger congregations,” said Paul Detterman, executive director of Presbyterians for Renewal.
How exactly that will play out is still taking shape.
“The way you do mission anywhere is first you form the relationship, and out of that you build enough trust that you can talk about it,” said Jim Milley, associate pastor for outreach and equipping at La Cañada Church near Los Angeles and president of the mission pastors’ group. “And when you get to talking about it, you might figure out what to do.”
Already, some models for collaboration exist, including some that organize a group of smaller congregations from a region to work together on mission.
Herb Codington, for example, is pastor of Bethany Church and Lydia Church in Clinton, S.C. Those congregations are part of a cluster of about 15 small churches that collaborate on a joint prayer ministry, for example, or occasionally hold a progressive dinner for older adults.
They’ve also begun working together on international mission efforts, starting with an instinctive response some time back after hearing that a hurricane had hit the Dominican Republic.
“Small churches don’t have the bureaucracy,” Codington said. “You just go outside and meet under the oak tree,” and do what needs to be done.
Concerned about the suffering the hurricane had caused, the cluster of congregations raised some money, contacted a wholesaler in Miami, and arranged to have more than 16 tons of relief goods shipped free of charge, thanks to an airline’s generosity.
“When you have an average attendance of 12 people, you don’t dream in big terms,” Codington said. But by working together as a group, “it gives you the capacity to dream big dreams again.”
Clearly, many smaller congregations face significant financial and leadership challenges.
Often, “they don’t have pastoral leadership, they’re small, they’re aging,” said Phil Tom, the associate for the PC(USA)’s small church and community ministry office. “All they want is for somebody to come in and fix it. … They’re tired.”
But often the small congregations have cultivated significant gifts as well, Tom said. They are faithful and resilient. They pray. They know the needs of their communities. Because their continued survival can’t be taken for granted, some are willing to be bold — they’re willing to take some risks, figuring the future looks pretty precarious anyway.
In San Diego Presbytery, Solana Beach Church, a large congregation, began working with an agrarian and mostly Muslim ethnic group in Ethiopia. When a message went out to the congregations in the presbytery saying, “this particular group needs a lot of help, would anybody be interested, the very first church that responded was the smallest congregation in the presbytery,” said Nancy Moore, a retired pastor who’s involved with Wee Kirk in California.
This is a church of mostly elderly people, and “every Sunday they pray” specifically for the Ethiopian people,” Moore said. “The first thing you think of with a big church is big mission budget. Small churches tend to not be wealthy, but there’s a heck of a lot more that goes on.”
In Herb Codington’s cluster of churches in South Carolina, those small congregations have been building on their strengths, particularly the capacity for hospitality, by participating in Christmas International House — a program through which individual families agree to host over the winter break foreign college students who are studying at American colleges and who don’t have the funds to go home.
Codington’s family, for example, has hosted students from Korea, Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia, and he says many international students “would love to get in to an American home just to see what American culture is like. “We’re promoting this among all the Wee Kirk conferences as something that is very easy to do, it doesn’t cost big bucks,” Codington said.
Sharing ideas
Some of the bigger churches are intentionally starting to use their resources to give smaller congregations ideas of what mission opportunities are available, to do some of the legwork that a small congregation that might not have a full-time pastor might not be able to do on their own.
Marilyn Borst, for example, is director of global mission at Peachtree Church in Atlanta — a large congregation that is involved in mission work all over the world.
“In a larger church, you have someone like me who exists in a world where all of your e-mail and all of your radar is tuned to opportunity and connections” for international mission, Borst said. “We have the luxury of focusing on all of that.”
But part of what she’s tried to do, in speaking at two recent Wee Kirk conferences, has been to provide information to smaller congregations of how they might plug in to what’s happening elsewhere — to make them aware of opportunities for service. She tells them, for example, about the presence of Presbyterian Christians in unexpected places like Iran, Cuba, and Syria, for example and about work being done to build Christian communities in places such as Pakistan and Vietnam.
“Mission is not about resources or numbers, it’s really about the call of the Spirit to do God’s work in the world,” Borst said. “It’s not about big budgets. But you can’t care about or pray about what you don’t know about.”
So Borst spoke at Wee Kirk about “how God is at work in the world,” both through the PC(USA) and through faith-based organizations outside the denomination.
She spoke about “the power of 10″ — about five helpful books to read about mission, for example; about six things the global church wants Presbyterians to understand about their priorities; about 10 financial contributions a small congregation can make to have a big impact. “What can $300 dollars do that gives your congregation a sense of, ‘We’re really part of what God’s doing?'”
What people are beginning to talk more about is that both big and small churches bring their own gifts to mission.
Borst said she told the Wee Kirk conference that “what the global church most needs from us … is to be known and to be prayed for.” A big church such as Peachtree is “… like a whole planet unto ourselves.” But a small, rural congregation in the United States can establish a “sister” relationship with a small congregation in rural Africa or Latin America, for example, and discover they have much in common — “they are like one another.”
And smaller congregations sometimes challenge larger ones to notice the needs just in far-away places, but close to home.
“In many of our rural communities, the mom-and-pop shop has shut down because the Wal-Mart has come in,” Codington said. The schools have consolidated, the population is sliding, and often “the only institution left to provide some kind of social cohesiveness or sense of community is the church.”
Small rural churches, while struggling, are “just reflecting struggling communities. They’re on the wrong side of the track, but that’s exactly where they need to be. … Jesus said, ‘Go to the least.’ That’s exactly what many of these churches are trying to do.”
And increasingly, people are talking about the contributions that little churches can make to mission and how knowledge and resources can be better shared.
“The small church can say, ‘This is how you do mission with people — not to them or for them,'” Moore said. “The local church has the eyes and the ears and the expertise for local mission. … But for foreign mission it’s the big church that has the eyes and the ears,” and can help the smaller churches connect with opportunities.
For example, a missionary who visits a large congregation might be given just a few minutes on Sunday morning to speak; there’s too much else going on, Detterman said.
“But if they know that there are 26 congregations in that region who would be thrilled to death to host a missionary for a weekend, as only a small church can,” they would visit those churches — and the big church might serve as the liaison to make that happen.
By doing things such as that, “we are connecting the small-membership churches into the global church,” Detterman said. “It gives the large congregations a mission field literally right outside their door.”
