Ekklesia Modesto

Helping out with the Afghan Refugee Bazaar today for Church!

The answer to the question is "yes". The linked blog post considers whether the impersonal nature of the response to abuse at a megachurch is intrinsic to to its size. When you have thousands of people you must have processes, bureaucracy, delegation and you might not get relationships or pastoral care. As a small Church we sometimes wish for more people to share community with, more talents to enrich the body, more hands to help tackle the work of following Christ together. ...But we remain convicted that the problems we have seen and experienced in our Church experience are *systemic* problems. They don't occur because people do not love Jesus, they don't occur because people don't want to do what is right. They occur because people are part of a body which aims to be a success - to become a large organization with all the problems that wealth, power, and size inevitably bring with them. If you want to fellowship with a body determined to remain a family that relates as brothers and sisters under one Head I suspect we could fit a few more folks in the door without imperiling our mission! A brief quote from the article: "The point here is that once an community reaches a certain size, it becomes all but impossible to provide humane attentiveness and care, not because the leader of the community is evil or vicious, but simply because the community has outgrown the leader’s capacities as a single individual person. [...] We recognize the need for humane scale in some enterprises already. Schools with low student-to-faculty ratios make much of that in their marketing material. We actually require daycares by law to have a certain teacher-to-child ratio. We recognize that when a work is scaled up, the humane is necessarily lost because simple human connection is time-consuming and relationally demanding."