I’d kind of forgotten that there are lots of evening meetings when you’re a minister of a mid-sized church; small churches just don’t have that many meetings. Yesterday, I left home at 9 a.m. and got back at 11 p.m.; today I left home at 9 a.m. and here it is 9 p.m. and I am still at church.<\/p>\n
This is one of the unspoken reasons why many ministers don’t want the membership of their small church to increase. They look at the ministers in mid-sized churches, they see that those mid-sized-church ministers typically attend three evening meetings a week, and they don’t like what they see.<\/p>\n
This is one of the unspoken reasons why many church members don’t want their church to grow any larger; for there are many church members who prefer an informal organizational style, and don’t want the more formal organization required by a larger church, the type of organization that engenders a formal decision-making process requiring many evening meetings.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, there are those of us who actually prefer more formal organizational structures. We also like evening meetings (in moderation: no more than three per week). And we like the increased diversity, the greater financial stability, and the additional programs that come with mid-sized and larger churches.<\/p>\n
Both smaller churches and larger churches have their strengths and their weaknesses. It’s not that one is better than the other, they’re just different.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’d kind of forgotten that there are lots of evening meetings when you’re a minister of a mid-sized church; small churches just don’t have that many meetings. Yesterday, I left home at 9 a.m. and got back at 11 p.m.; today I left home at 9 a.m. and here it is 9 p.m. and I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meditation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4536"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4536\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4541,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4536\/revisions\/4541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}