The God of Small Churches

Most of us have a picture in our minds of what a successful church looks like.

It is large. It has a full parking lot. The worship team is polished. The children’s ministry is bustling. The pastor is well known.

We absorb this picture from our culture without even realizing it. Attendance becomes the metric. Size becomes the measure of success. And small churches, almost by default, begin to feel like failures.

I want to push back on that.

Recently I have been studying the opening verses of Paul’s letter to the Colossians. And what I found there has been a helpful corrective to the way many of us have been trained to think about church size.

The Church at Colossae

When Paul writes to the church at Colossae, he is writing to a small congregation in a struggling town.

Colossae had once been a significant city. It sat in the Lycus River valley in what is now modern Turkey, and in earlier centuries it was actually the most prominent of the cities in that region. Historians like Herodotus and Xenophon both mention it.

But by the time Paul writes this letter, all of that had changed.

A new Roman road had been built through the region, and it passed through Laodicea rather than Colossae. That single infrastructural decision effectively ended Colossae’s economic significance. Trade routes are the lifeblood of ancient cities. When the road went around them, the city began to diminish.

By Paul’s day, Colossae had been reduced to a small market town. Insignificant. Overlooked. The kind of place the empire had simply moved on from.

And the church there was small to match.

We know from Paul’s letter to Philemon that the church met in Philemon’s house. Roman domestic architecture gives us a natural ceiling on how many people could gather in even a wealthy home. Scholars who have studied this put the upper limit at around forty people.

Taking everything into account—the size of the city, the single meeting location, the number of people we can actually identify by name in the letters—this congregation was most likely somewhere between twenty five and fifty people.

Maybe fewer.

What God Did With This Small Church

Here is what strikes me.

God inspired Paul to write a letter to this tiny congregation in this forgotten town. A letter so rich, so deep, so Christologically dense, that the church has been reading it and preaching it and studying it for two thousand years.

The letter contains one of the highest Christological passages in all of Scripture. It addresses false teaching with precision. It gives practical instruction for the Christian household. It speaks of the preeminence of Christ over all things—thrones, dominions, principalities, powers.

And it was written to approximately thirty people sitting in someone’s house in a town the Roman road went around.

God did not look at the size of that congregation in disdain. He did not wait until they had grown to a “respectable” number before numbering them among those who had recieved letters from an Apostle. He did not reserve His best for the churches in Rome or Corinth or Ephesus.

He wrote to Colossae.

This Is Not Unusual for God

When you step back and look at Scripture as a whole, this pattern is everywhere.

God chose Israel not because they were the largest or most powerful nation, but because they were the smallest. Deuteronomy 7:7 makes this explicit. He did not choose them for their size. He chose them because He loved them.

God consistently chose the younger son over the elder. Jacob over Esau. Joseph over his brothers. Ephraim over Manasseh. David, the youngest of eight, left in the field with the sheep when Samuel came to anoint a king.

God chose small places. The Messiah came from Bethlehem, which the prophet Micah explicitly calls too small to be among the clans of Judah. Jesus grew up in Nazareth, a town so unremarkable that Nathanael asked whether anything good could come from it. His entire ministry was based out of Galilee, a region the Jerusalem establishment considered a backwater.

God chose unlikely people. Fishermen. Tax collectors. Political agitators.

The pattern is consistent enough that Paul makes it into a theological principle in 1 Corinthians 1. God chooses the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chooses the foolish things to shame the wise. He chooses the things that are not, to bring to nothing the things that are.

So that no one can boast.

What This Means for Small Churches

If you are part of a small congregation, I want you to hear this clearly.

Your size does not determine your worth. It does not determine whether God sees you. It does not determine whether He cares for you or will work through you.

The church at Colossae was small. And God wrote them a letter that the whole universal church still reads.

The metric of success that the world uses—attendance, growth, visibility, influence—is not the metric God uses. Jesus Himself said that where two or three are gathered in His name, He is there among them. Not where two or three hundred are gathered. Not where two or three thousand are gathered.

Two or three.

The Good Shepherd does not only tend to the large group of the flock. A shepherd who only acknowledges the large group is not a good shepherd. Jesus Christ is the Good Shepherd, and He cares for every sheep He has purchased with His blood. He has promised to lose none of them.

That promise is not conditional on the size of the congregation they belong to.

A Final Thought

The letter to the Colossians was written to a small church in a forgotten town.

It was preserved through the centuries. It was copied by hand. It survived the fall of empires. It has been translated into thousands of languages. It is read today in churches on every continent, often in congregations much larger than the one it was originally addressed to.

God took a letter written to thirty people in a house and gave it to the world.

Do not despise the day of small things.

God has not forgotten your little congregation. He sees you. He cares for you. And He is more than able to do great things with your small church.

More than you could ask or imagine.