Excerpt from The Small Church Advantage: Seven Powerful Worship Practices that Work Best in Small Settings (Chapter 11)

Celebrating communion together should be one of your greatest small-setting strengths. It calls
for hands-on, everyone’s-invited, full-body-contact participation. Your worship superpowers!

Here are the seven communion practices I see shared by vibrant small congregations.

Here are seven characteristics shared by small congregations with lavish communion practices.

So why do our congregations need to link rest to Labor Day? Without a connection to rest, our
expectation of work becomes corrupted. We step over the needs of actual working bodies–our
made-in-the-image-of-God bodies. And without connection to rest, our expectation of workers
also becomes corrupted. We risk treating them like a utilitarian thing. Instead of a precious,
blessed part of our very good cosmos.

The following is reposted with permission from prolific author and faith columnist for the Kansas City Star, Bill Tammeus. In Bill’s Faith Matters blog, he provides excellent and free resources about religion and ethics.

“ . . . . Small congregations also matter to the future of the whole Church—in all places.

Really?

Yes. Small congregations are crucial local laboratories.

Because here’s the awkward, overlooked truth. Our “trickle-down” worship resources were never meant to trickle-down. They were always designed to fit a very particular set of needs and aesthetics–a big congregation’s set of needs and aesthetics. 

“It’s an essential, hiding-in-plain-sight theme in the Bible: making do. God’s work never depends on ideal plans, perfect people, or the right resources. Instead with the boldness of divine love, God works with whatever and whoever. God makes do.

A Lutheran pastor recently shared her preferred name for small ministry settings: Scrappy Congregations. 

Brilliant! 

Great news! Market Square Books will be publishing my work on small congregation advantages. It should be out in Spring 2023. 

Small congregations come in lots of flavors. The differences matter—even when the size is the same. See 2 reorienting questions for but-we-used-to-be-big congregations.