When it comes to local churches, is big always best, or is small better, or does size just not matter at all? Three decades ago I had the privilege of being called to pastor a tiny but rapidly growing local church. The shack in which we were meeting was scheduled to be demolished to make way for a town house complex and so we had to find other accommodation. The property developer who was demolishing the shack offered us the choice of two plots of land on which we could build; one, a huge area right on the main road through the suburb and opposite the shopping centre, the other was a much smaller stand right in the heart of the residential area. The choice between these two options forced me and my eldership team to think and pray intensely about the nature of the church which any proposed building campus would house. The large site was ideally suited for a big, attractional church model and the smaller site would almost ensure that the church located there would be small, organic, and relational. This led me into a fresh study of the New Testament to discover the principles and values of local church. This is just a sample of what I found:

Other than the first expression of church life in Jerusalem, the local churches were small and intimate extended families.  Advocates of larger churches point to the 5,000 member first church that met in Solomon’s porch in the temple campus (Acts 5:12). The problem is of course that the apostles seemed to have got some fundamentals wrong in those early days and it would be unwise to use the early Jerusalem church as a model. For instance, Jesus had instructed them to go into all the world (Mark 16:15), yet they remained in Jerusalem until persecution forced them to obey (Acts 8:1). The churches they then established outside of Jerusalem were small, and we can deduce this from at least two main clues:

We know from historic evidence that there were no large meeting places that would have been available to the early Christians. Paul’s teaching concerning the church is intimate and community/family oriented and he even makes mention three times of the church meeting in private homes (Romans 16:5, 1 Corinthians 16:19, and Philemon 2).

The problem with this sort of reasoning is that it is by no means exhaustive or conclusive. For instance, the church, in say Corinth, may have had to meet as small groups in homes simply because there were no viable alternatives. One cannot conclude from the evidence that large church meetings are unbiblical or inherently ‘wrong’.

For me, it is far more important to try to understand, from the biblical evidence, the dynamics and underlying core principles of local church life. The questions to be answered would then be, ‘what size and type of local church would best serve these values, and what type of local church would erode these values’? The New Testament presents three main analogies of local church - Body, Household, and Temple.

The figure of a BODY is a wonderfully descriptive illustration of the functionality of the Church. 1 Corinthians chapters 12-14 develop the concept considerably, as does the book of Ephesians. Individual believers, in this analogy, are like single cells within a body. Each has the complete DNA blueprint of the whole body, yet each is specialised and developed to fulfill a specific function within the body. Each is interdependent, relying on others in order to exist and function. Even the ‘ascension gift’ ministries fit into this paradigm; Prophets, for instance, are like nerve cells which convey information to and from the brain; Pastor and Teachers are like red and white blood corpuscles carrying nutrition and oxygen to the other cells, removing waste, and combating sickness. And so on. The concept of the Church as a body reveals its functionality, inter-relatedness, and organic unity.

A second biblical analogy for the church is HOUSEHOLD. In Matthew 10:25 Jesus refers to his disciples as members of his household,