Ep 088: The Gift of Small: Embracing Your Church’s Vocation, with Allen T. Stanton

The Church Lobby

Small churches aren’t a problem to fix, they’re a unique part of the body of Christ that has gifts we need to embrace.

Karl Vaters talks with Allen T. Stanton about the importance of embracing what’s right about small churches, not in spite of being small, but because they’re small, in a conversation based on the content of Allen's book, The Gift of Small: Embracing Your Church’s Vocation.

Some of the subjects they cover include:

• A new take on the “all growth is good growth” assumption, based on the fact that we live in a culture that is so economically driven
• Why small churches should be more nimble, but often are not
• The differences between a hierarchical leadership model and the Solar System Model
• The importance of the “Parking Lot meeting”
• The differences between regular and episodic volunteers

Links:

• The Gift of Small: Embracing Your Church’s Vocation
• Reclaiming Rural: Building Thriving Rural Congregations
• 211Counts.org
• University of the Ozarks

Bonus Content

Four Practices to Help Your Small Church Stay Nimble, with Allen T. Stanton

Karl Vaters talks with Allen T. Stanton about the importance of:

• Acknowledging the places where small-membership churches are already good at change and where they already practice being adaptive and flexible.
• Remembering that not everything needs to change all the time.
• The looseness of small-church relational networks, rather than strict hierarchies and complicated bureaucracies.
• Understanding and appropriately managing the roles of individuals in the organization.