Hi, everybody. My name is Rolando Castro from the Baptist Church Planning Network. And I'm so glad you're here. I'm excited because I have my friend and colleague in ministry, Stephen Atkerson. We're going to be talking about small churches and how those churches can be a force. Stephen, thank you for your time. Thank you for your willingness to do this. Well, it's my pleasure, Orlando. What a blessing to talk about the things of the Lord, especially as relates to his bride, the church. You remember back a long time ago, I think it was 7-Up, they called themselves the UNCOLA. Well, we're like the unchurch, in the sense that the way we do church is not very traditional by contemporary standards. I've been a bivocational pastor of a small church since 1991, and so Obviously, I didn't have as much time as a full-time pastor to do a lot of things that traditional churches do and full-time pastors do. So I kept looking to the New Testament to see how was the early church set up and were there some practices of the early church that we might be able to use in our situation. And we've looked at how the early church approached worship, how they approached communion, how they approached decision-making, and their Ideal size for a congregation. And so from that, we gleaned some truths. We think there's strategies for growth. It's certainly blessed us. Not only spiritual growth, but also numerical growth. Right now, for example, I've got about 100 in my church. But we don't want to have many more than a hundred. Our vision is to reproduce smaller churches, to send out groups of people to plant a new smaller church that plants other small churches. So over the years, we've started other churches out of this one. So we intentionally remain small. But being small gives us the opportunity to practice some of these early church approaches to ecclesiology. And I'm excited to tell you a little bit about how they did things. That is fantastic. What I want is to bring attention to a new way of doing church that is actually working for many people right here and across the world. Believe me, this is a model that you can find everywhere in the world. Let's think just a moment about how the early church did things. Church buildings, as we know them today, didn't exist until hundreds of years after the New Testament was written. It's obvious from the New Testament, from commentators, and from history that they met in people's homes, probably because of persecution. But our thinking was, well, since they met mostly in homes, which means their churches were small-er rather than large-er, the things we read about in the New Testament were designed to work best in a small-er setting. So our first commitment was we wanted to think small in a really big way. Now, I don't mean micro-churches, us four no more. We want to reach a lot of people of the gospel, but we'd rather see 1,000 people spread out in 10 churches than 1,000 people in a single church. I come from a big church background. I was baptized at First Baptist Atlanta in the 70s. It had 7,000 members. I was ordained at Bellevue Baptist in Memphis. It had, at that time, 14,000 members. I know how those big churches work, I know the blessings of them, but now I actually prefer the smaller church model. And so one obstacle to planting a new church is money. Jim Henry, I think, down at First Baptist Orlando said it was going to cost them like two million dollars for the next church plant. And I was talking to the director of missions in San Antonio Baptist Association, and he said the typical cost is about a million dollars for a new church, and that's a pretty high barrier. avoided that. First, mostly we prefer to rent different places. That lowers your cost considerably if you're just renting on Sunday. The pastor's office would be in his home. So one thing people are surprised to learn is in the New Testament, worship was not a spectator sport. Today, if you go to a baseball game, you can sit in the stands and cheer, but you're never going to get down on the field and throw the ball. And so in churches today, we've trained people to be pupitators. You can come in and sit down and be quiet, or we'll let you sing, but you're not going to kick the ball, so to speak. But in the early church, it's obvious there was a principle of participation. There was the active use of spiritual gifts in a church meeting, so it wasn't as pastor-centric. Of course, we still need pastors. I am one. But for a large part of the meeting, the pastor in the New Testament is more of a coach on the sidelines than the star player. It's his job to follow the rules, keep it edifying, but any member in good standing in the early church had the opportunity to use his spiritual gift, especially the spoken gifts, to edify, to build up, to encourage the body of Christ. So one of the things we started doing is our first hour You could call it song and testimony. And so gifted people help us with the music, but then anybody that's a church member in good standing has the opportunity to bring a testimony, a short word of exhortation, an answered prayer, something that's designed to encourage, to build up the brothers. You have this rich diversity of sharing because of that, and the pastors get to enjoy it too. They get to sit back and learn from the experiences and the things God has done in the lives of everyday Christians living the Christian life out in the world, and they're coming back and reporting what happened. So the pastors get to enjoy it, but also people now are getting up and speaking, and a lot of my job is behind the scenes as I coach people what is and is not edifying, how to not talk for so long, how to make it shorter, how to make it relevant. And so... A lot of my time during the week is coaching quiet people to speak up, talking to people to speak less, other people, how to work with what they say to make it truly edifying. And of course you have misfires, but the risk is worth the reward. It's a lot easier, Adrian Rogers said, to cool down a fanatic than it is to resurrect a corpse. And so in a cemetery, there's perfect order, but there's no life. So sometimes we risk a little disorder, but the advantage is now people are actively engaged in a church meeting, not just singing. Man, they can bring a song, they can bring a testimony, they can bring a short teaching in this first hour. Now, another advantage is we're purposely smaller, but we know everybody. You can't hide in our church. One lady visited one time and she got out before I could talk to her. The second week she came and I apologized. I'm sorry, I didn't talk to you last week. She said, well, that's okay. The church I go to now, it was two years before a pastor spoke to me. Well, see, that church is too big, in my opinion. Because we know what's going on in people's lives, We get a chance to find out, well, what's the marriage like? Is the father really leading the family? Is he a priest in his home? How are the children? Are they decent citizens? Are they well-trained? Because we're small, we can easily assess that with people. If they need help, it's personalized discipleship there. A friend of mine says, preaching is essential, but it's not sufficient. There also has to be that one-on-one interaction with people. So we're purposely small enough, we can do that. So we're intimately involved with each other's lives. We know what's going on in people's lives. And then we can tell whether they're walking with the Lord or not by the fellowship we have together. But another thing the early church did that surprises people, they not only did the Lord's Supper every week, it was an actual supper. The scholars would tell you that, historians tell you that, and most importantly, it's obvious from Scripture. Well, if the idea to do it as a supper didn't come from Jesus, where'd it come from? And since it did come from Jesus, What are we missing if we don't? Well, one of the things we're missing is this relaxed fellowship time. So every Sunday, first hour is song and testimony, second hour is teaching, and then we start the Lord's Supper as a meal. So you've got this extended time of fellowship. We call it communion community around a table. And we start at 10.30 Sunday morning. And you can leave whenever you want to, but almost every week, there's still people here at 5.30, Rolando, 5.30. So this fellowship time, again, this is how we're getting to know people. And we see where we can help people in other areas. And that leads to other social opportunities to be in each other's homes. But a good thing about this kind of church, It's not about one man, it's about one another. And everybody takes ownership in it. Even like bringing the food to the Lord's Supper, the church doesn't provide that. It's like in the Old Testament, they bring an offering to the temple. And by the way, they usually ate that offering. That's part of the equation. Everybody's bringing food, almost like an Old Testament offering. It's an act of worship. They're bringing food for the Lord's Supper. It's a legitimate giving and expense, just like putting an offering in a plate would be. And so people are involved in the speaking, in the food, in the fellowship, in the sharing. And so they're excited about it. It builds love. It builds unity. It builds community. It builds fellowship. Of course, that impacts their spiritual lives. And when they start radiating about Jesus, well, then they start telling their friends. Then that spiritual growth with us has always resulted in numerical growth. That is amazing. I love the whole process. It feels so organic. That's a good word. So something that I observed last time I was here was the high amount of young people as members of your church. And believe me, this surprised me. Usually, especially, you know, Gen Z's and millennials and all these generations, They are very different from my generation. So my generation was looking for big crowds and numbers and, you know, power. That was the mantra of my generation, power. But this generation, my kids are part of it and the generation that come behind are looking more for community, for small numbers. And I don't know if You can't back me up here. I mean, am I right? Is this something that younger generations are liking more than older generations? What is your impression on that? Well, for whatever reason, the Lord has sent us a lot of younger people. That's correct. And the amazing thing is the parents follow soon after to learn about this crazy thing their kids are so excited about. I know some church models of church growth focus on making church geared to high schoolers, and they'll have rock bands, and a dark auditorium, and smoke, and they're cool in their hip. But that hasn't been our approach at all. We're square. We're square. I'm an old guy. And these kids come. And so I think it's because it's real. They can participate at every level. They're playing in the band. I say band. You know, we make a joyful noise. And we've got violins and banjo and djembe. Keyboard and stuff guitars and they take turns playing and it you know, it sounds like we're amateurs, but it's a joyful noise and the kids Take turns leading worship along with all guys too and then during the share time again They'll get up and share stuff and excited about that So I think this opportunity to participate is good. Now. The next thing is though when the teaching time comes it's typically not a three-point in a poem sermon, it's more Socratic, it's question and answer. And so we like to teach exegetically through passages of scripture, like right now we're going through Philippians, but it's more question and answer. And so they do participate. They're reading scriptures, they're making statements, they're answering questions. It gets them very engaged with the process. And then of course we transition into the Lord's Supper as a meal, and that's a fantastic time of fellowship for them too. We weren't trying to attract any particular demographic or age group, but this more of a New Testament approach to doing church has been a blessing to all age groups. And as you noticed, especially these high schoolers started sending us. And something's going on, as you said, because the parents who don't come here, they're like, what is this strange thing? Like one parent showed up. Now, we're happy in our church. We just want to come and see what this thing is our kids are into. And then they never left. I thought you said you weren't looking for church. Well, we weren't, but we like it. You know, there's life. I guess that's the difference. It's life. And it's this free expression of the body. Again, it takes the wisdom of pastor's oversight, if not anything goes, but still done properly. People like it from all age groups. Now, sadly, I just did two funerals last week. We had a man in his 90s and a lady in her 80s passed away, but we've got them from the whole gambit of ranges of ages, and what a blessing that's been. That's great. Something else, ethnically diverse. That's what I observed. Was that intentional from the beginning or is something that just happened? The only thing we did intentionally was to try to do those couple of New Testament church practices and God has sent us everybody else. As you know, we've got quite a few black folks in the church and we've got people from India and Burma and the Philippines and China, Congo and refugees and other places, too. I can't just think of it off the top of my head, but the diversity is fantastic. Now, we are in a diverse area. We're in beautiful downtown Tucker, so we're close to Clarkston. Oh, and South Sudan and Uganda have been coming. Yeah, what a blessing that is. But we didn't target it. It's just God has sent them or they've been attracted. Church members, tell them. They get excited and they come. Well, what would you recommend to a pastor who may be struggling with his church being, I don't know, about 60, 70, to maybe turn the table, you know, and instead of trying to do the same thing over and over, you know, trying this. Well, you know, let's take a First Baptist, if anywhere, usually it's larger. Small churches, the size you've mentioned, we don't have the financial resources to compete with a large church in terms of programs and quality of music, so I wouldn't even try. We can instead play to our relational strengths if we purpose to do that. I would argue that a smaller church, the size you've mentioned, there are strategic, and I would even say divinely designed, size advantages to that if they take advantage of it. So we can be like the nimble ships of the English fleet sailing in between the big galleons of the Spanish Armada if we do it. So first is don't even try to be like the big church. in the way they do things. Instead, we play to our relational strengths where you create that family atmosphere. We're letting people try to own that meeting to get involved with the meeting with proper coaching, of course, and the meal is creating now this fellowship atmosphere. It might mean some things got to go overboard. You can't do everything. One church here locally has started doing what we were talking about. They did away with Sunday school and now have a two-hour, first-hour song testimony, second-hour teaching, more of a two-hour. She might have changed some things, but I think to think outside the box is called for, and in this case, even though it's not traditional by conventional standards, it's very traditional by New Testament standards. There's no doubt that's how the early church did it, and I think you can never go wrong doing it the New Testament way. I think there's a tremendous blessing there to do that. So I would argue that You have to convince people this is biblical. It takes time. It wasn't built in a day. We don't want to violate people's conscience. But slowly moving toward incorporating some of these steps we've talked about, getting more people involved through the Lord's Supper, through the sharing time, would go a long way toward doing that. Jesus said you don't put new wine in old wineskin. So if we compare that to church, if the wineskin becomes ecclesiology, then that means there's some ways of doing church are better than other ways of doing church. And he says if you put new on an old wineskin, it ruptures the wineskin and you lose the wine. So that would, if I just press the analogy, that means some ways of doing church might hurt your walk with Jesus. So what's good for one church might not be good for another. So instead of just trying to copy what we've done for a hundred years or what the church down the street is doing, if we look back to the New Testament and consider that approach, it might be putting a new wine on a new wineskin, which is going to be a win-win situation. If that pastor is looking for help, like resources or how to be trained on this, What will you do? I've got a ministry in addition to my church, and we offer pastors training in how to work through these things and what we ask you to do. We've got a book called New Testament Church Dynamics, and this is those four things I talked about. Early church practice is what the Bible says, what the scholars say, and we've been doing it 30 years. And so we ask the guys to read one chapter, watch a video. We've got videos on YouTube. And then we do a phone call and we talk about, okay, how would you do this in your church today? Because we know the pitfalls to avoid and how to translate it more into a 21st century context. So we've got YouTube videos, we've got this book, we've got MP3s, and we'll be happy to do sort of an internship by phone program to help pastors think through any questions they have or how they might implement that today. This is great, Stephen. I want this to be like an attack of any kind of other model of churches. Because I believe every church is a representation of the bride of Christ. And I respect and love churches and pastors across the state. What I want is to bring attention to a new way of doing church. So I would love for you to contact Stephen. We'd be glad to help you. We'd be glad to talk to you in any way we can. And we hope this can help you thinking about thriving as a small church, extending the kingdom of God. Thank you so much for your attention. Thank you, Stephen. This message was produced by the New Testament Reformation Fellowship, reforming today's church with New Testament church practices. Permission is hereby granted for you to reproduce this message. You can find us on the web at www.ntrf.org. May God bless you as you seek to follow Him in complete obedience to His Word. May your faith in the Lord Jesus be strengthened and your daily walk with Him deepened. ? ?