One of the more offbeat (and deliberately controversial) technology blogs is by the wonderfully named Robert X. Cringely. His comments on technology, innovation and the internet are often way outside my sphere of (even vague) “expertise” (or even interest for that matter), but this post from his blog was quite intriguing – chiming in with a rolling coversation I’ve been engaged in about church size for the last (nearly) twenty years:

Facebook is useless to me. We’re all too connected to really connect.

Yes, I hide all the Mafia warriors and the Farmers and those people lately who are so thrilled to be breeding weird little animals. I hide as many of my inane friends as I can. I don’t join any groups and I am a fan of nothing, but it still doesn’t matter. There are people whom I’d actually like to know what they are doing and maybe they care about me, too, but we just no longer meet-up.

[…] If Facebook goes under it will be because of its own success. If Facebook doesn’t go under it will be because they learned in the nick of time the same lessons as every other successful serial publisher since the dawn of printing — that there is an ideal circulation size to monetize a given advertising base and you can easily get too big to make any money.

In this case there turns out to be a corollary effect that says you can be too big to be useful to your readers, too, which is why Facebook’s demise — if it happens — will be so swift.

If Facebook really wants to get profitable it needs to get smaller…

The parallel with church size isn’t exact of course: clearly – at least for All Souls – the first reason Cringely gives (i.e. too big to monetize advertising) isn’t terribly relevant… but the potential to be “too big to be useful” might just be. If church is meant to be a place where people can belong and “connect” (to use Cringely’s language a bit more), then on first glance a church of 50 is going to be more useful than one of 5000…

…which is where the parallel becomes rather useful. What Facebook has to do is find a way to grow, whilst still giving me – the user – a manageable connection with ‘friends’ (in the techie, Facebook definition of that word), rather than allowing me to be overwhelmed by people, notifications and invitations – leading to me becoming disengaged and ultimately leaving.

You’ve heard me say many times that the Bible gives us no ‘let-out clause’ in its call to grow bigger. Not because we’re to be empire-builders, but because there are thousands of people living round here – and in our networks of friends and colleagues – that simply don’t know (or don’t care) about the good news of Jesus. To shut up shop and say “We’re full” is selfish and utterly against the heart of what we’re saying we’ve found to be true.

But whilst we grow larger, we also have to find ways to stay small.

Here are some of the ways – concrete and conceptual – that we’re trying:

  • Our building size helps – we’ll never have a single service congregation that much larger than our current morning one. People can belong to a congregation that will never top around 130-150 regular adults…
  • …which is one of the reasons we started a second service (before we really had to in pure ‘fitting in the building’ terms) otherwise our combined numbers on a Sunday morning would be teetering on the edge of ‘not useful’ already.
  • Homegroups – groups of 10-14 people meeting for chat and prayer in a home each month – are ways of people connecting up meaningfully.
  • Digging Deeper – short courses give us the opportunity to connect with people around a shared interest or concern for a limited time, meaning connections are built across the church.
  • Picnics, cricket, socials… all help keep us ‘small’ even as we grow by helping us connect.
  • Opportunities to be part of a team – from children’s groups to Welcome Team, being part of a small team of people on a Sunday ‘making something happen’ is a great way to keep church from feeling too large.

Thoughts?