25 Jan We the “Little” People…in America’s Smaller Communities by Jim Graff
We the “Little” People … in America’s Smaller Communities
by Pastor Jim Graff
One of the expressions we say from time to time, is “little things really do make a big difference”. However, I have noticed that most of the time I hear that phrase, people are reacting as if they hope it is true.
We want to convince people that it is true, because if we do not convince them we know they will lose their sense of significance. And significance is defined in Webster’s Dictionary as, “the quality of being important”.
Could you imagine what would happen if all of the little people in God’s family began to feel unimportant? I can, because I live on the frontlines of this battle every day. When you lose your sense of importance you lose your inspiration. And when you lose your inspiration, your energy, development and productivity all suffer.
This past year two hurricanes hit the Texas and Louisiana coastlines decimating what people had worked years for. Understandably, the people felt devastated and demoralized. We have had the privilege of helping a number of these families rebuild their lives at our church in Victoria, Texas. What fulfillment it brought both to those who gave and those who received.
During this time a headline from the Associated Press caught my eye. It read “Rural Residents say they felt forgotten”. The article described how dozens of residents gathered under tight security at First Baptist Church in Deweyville, TX to talk with the Red Cross and the Federal Emergency Management Agency representatives. U.S. Representative Kevin Brady of Texas was there wearing a bullet proof vest under his dress shirt!
There was obviously quite a bit of emotion at that meeting. The representatives of the rural residents did their best to describe how they were overlooked and felt forgotten in the aid process. The response of Red Cross spokesman, Armand Mascelli was, “We are not going to get it right the first time. That’s unfortunate, but that is the real world.”
It is an unfortunate fact of the real world that we are not capable of getting everything right the first time. But it is time for the church to get something right … pastors of smaller churches and pastors shepherding people in smaller, overlooked places are highly valued by God!
Let me share the demographic realities. According to Operation World there are only 71 cities in the U.S.A. with a population over 1 million people. But there are nearly 3,000 counties in the U.S.A. with populations under 150,000 people filled with smaller cities and towns that need vibrant, significant churches. And the church is facing this challenge all over the world. In the whole world there are only 482 cities with populations over 1 million people, yet in India alone there are 500,000 villages that have yet to hear that Jesus Christ came!
The 2000 World Christian Encyclopedia states it very plainly, “Urban dwellers are more evangelized than rural dwellers”. That is a cold, hard fact. But there is another fact that warms my heart, God is raising up people of significance who are finding their importance in their service to God regardless of the size of their church or community.
My wife, Tamara, and I have pastored our church in rural Victoria County (population 84,000) now for sixteen years. The church has grown from 200 people to 2,400 people in weekend attendance and the ministry has grown from a $275,000 budget to a $4,000,000 budget during that time. We always smile when people from other places ask us about our pastorate. Usually the question is eventually asked, “Where is Victoria – is it in the U.S.A. or Canada? You can tell our city is unknown to them, but it is not unknown to God.
Twelve years ago when Tamara and I were in our early 30’s and we had pastored our church in Victoria for four years, an attractive offer came to pastor a large church in an area with a population of six million people. We were ready to go, mostly because we have a desire to lead a church with a large mission’s budget so we can help lots of people here and around the world.
We met with the pastor and his wife. We were grateful for the opportunity. We knew the pastor and his wife were very godly people and we knew it was God leading them to make us an offer.
However, we could not talk God into it! And really we were so happy. We loved our people and the thought of investing our life for their well-being and the well-being of our community satisfied a deep hunger in our heart.
Not long after that God opened our eyes to His greater plan. Driving across America, we started noticing smaller cities and towns in a way we had not noticed them before. We noticed the people had good looking and well maintained schools, and great sports facilities (especially the football stadiums of Texas). However, all too often the churches in these smaller cities and towns were struggling to make an impact.
My wife and I organized people in our church to do a survey. And the results challenged us … the vast majority of people in American’s smaller counties live in a place where the largest Pentecostal / Charismatic church has less than 1% of the county population in attendance in weekend services.
We contacted pastors who had built exemplary churches. They did not all build large churches by big city standards. However, if your church has 100 people in weekend attendance and your county population is only 5,000 people you have reached 2% of your county. If your weekend attendance is 1,000 people and your county population is 50,000 people you have also reached 2% of your county. Most of us had never met each other but we sure enjoyed discussing together how God feels about overlooked pastors and overlooked places.
That is how the Significant Church Network was born. It has a clear two-fold focus. First, it is bringing support and mentoring and training to pastors and church leaders who feel forgotten as they labor in overlooked places. In addition, it is helping God’s people everywhere discover the sense of significance God intends us all to live with.
We were all created to live a life that feels important. Ephesians 2:10 puts it this way in the Message Bible – He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing.
Good works feel good. And true significance is birthed from these good acts of service. Significance emanates from the liberating knowledge that what I do matters to God and people. And we are all called by God to live with that sense of importance. But we must resist the foes of our significance – a focus on size, notoriety and approval. And we must recover the foundation of real significance – an awareness that what I do is worth doing, even if nobody ever notices but God.
I cringe when I hear pastors of smaller churches speak of themselves in a self-depreciating way. And I don’t care if they are in small towns or big cities – the truth is they are highly valued by God. I heard recently that a survey revealed the following results concerning America’s megachurches. About 4% of America’s population attend megachurches – (Churches with over 2,000 in weekend attendance). That must mean the other 24% of Americans attending churches on a typical weekend attend a smaller church. These numbers may be slightly inaccurate but let me tell you what is totally accurate – the vast majority of America’s Christians are being discipled and cared for in smaller churches. And if leaders in these churches lose their sense of significance God’s work will suffer greatly.
Often I am asked to predict the future of the American church. We all wonder what our communities will look like the next ten or twenty years. We have incredible challenges before us. Secularism and apostasy (especially among the twenty something’s in the church) are formidable foes. However, I feel our greater foe is this sense of insignificance. We will never be all God made us to be until we keep it from stealing our energy, development and potential.
I will tell you what I would like the future of the American church to be. I would like to believe the next ten years will be known as the beginning of the Third Great Awakening in our nation. If you are unaware of what happened in the first two Great Awakenings it makes for fascinating reading. All over this great country of ours cities were changed – people wrote of how almost instantly the majority of people in cities started going to church and church steeples from newly constructed churches filled the skylines.
The amazing thing to me about the Great Awakenings was how they happened. They were not one continuous revival but a series of revivals in several locations. And almost without exception, the spiritual awakening began in a smaller community of people before spreading into the large percentage of the city or town. Most people think the Awakening came differently. But if you stop to think about it, in a small community people are intimately connected with each other. If you go to a local restaurant and there are a hundred people there, you will share a family meal with some folks, from your church. If you walk through the local grocery store or hardware store, you are going to see people that you know. The victories and hardships, and struggles in smaller communities are not just commonly known, they are commonly shared.
That is why I believe these community churches hold the key to the next Great Awakening. Our communities are hurting. Every community in this nation is filled with people who don’t know how to turn around circumstances a post-Christian mindset has caused in their life. I remember recently going back to my own hometown (population 1,000). I went to the local bakery I always went to as a child. They gave me a baker’s dozen once when I was 10, and after I found a place willing to give me 13 donuts for the price of 12 I was hooked.
I asked the lady behind the counter how people I grew up with were doing. She was the mother of a childhood friend and she knew everyone. After relaying some sad stories of divorce, substance abuse and disappointment tears welled up in her eyes and she said, “Things were different in the old days – people acted better and cared for each other better”.
How true that is. I know what it is like to be raised in a smaller community. And for sixteen years, I have learned what it is like to do ministry in a smaller community. It is easy to feel energized seeing the lives of people change who you know well and love deeply. But it is also easy to feel unsupported, unimportant and worst of all insignificant.
We all know what it feels like to be overlooked and uncelebrated. My wife, Tamara, grew up in a pastor’s home as the daughter of the late John Osteen. Her Dad pastored one of the largest, most influential churches in our nation … but it did not start that way. She remembers when less than 200 people gathered each weekend in Lakewood Church. She is grateful that her Dad instilled a spirit of significance in her continuously reminding her that our esteem should come from our privilege to help, not merely how many he helped.
One of my favorite people in history is Abraham Lincoln. He was made fun of. He was tall and not very attractive. He had a high pitched voice. He was viewed as an old country boy with an idealistic dream. His efforts were met with rejection, rejection and rejection again – before he fulfilled his destiny and freed millions of Americans who would have lived in bondage without his efforts.
He reminds me of my favorite person in history – Jesus Christ. Isaiah 53:2-3 says, “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him. He was despised and rejected of men.” In Matthew 21:42 Jesus described himself to religious leaders who despised Him as the stone the builders rejected, who has become the cornerstone.
It is clear to me that we must embrace our significance before we fulfill our destiny. And it is also clear that Jesus’ ministry continually grew in influence because of who He is on the inside not the image he portrayed on the outside.
God wants us to fulfill our eternal potential everyday. And He wants churches filled with leaders who are beacons of significance not burn outs of a church system.
Here are some practical steps you can take:
(1) Embrace the significance of your ministry over the size of your
ministry
In II Corinthians 10:12 – The apostle Paul wrote, “We do not dare to classify or compare ourselves with some who commend themselves. When they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves by themselves, they are not wise”.
It is not wise, but it is common among Christian leaders. And it is how so many wonderful leaders have had their sense of significance destroyed. I remember talking with our Significant Church leadership team, and discussion turned toward the reality some pastors who shepherd 3% of their counties are among today’s finest Christian leaders. If you pastor 3% of the population in a city of 1 million that’s 30,000 people attending your weekend services. If the city is 2 million … it is 60,000 – etc.
It may help some pastors to hear that, but it is more important all pastors hear God values their effort not merely their achievements.
(2) Focus on why your ministry is important to individuals – not
masses of people.
I cannot tell this story in its full form. However, we would all benefit by reading a story told by the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. He told of an emperor who wanted to find how he might best live his life looking into the wisdom of the universe.
He asked three questions, none of which were easily answered: What is the most important time? Who is the most important person? What is the most important task?
The answers he eventually discovered were: The most important time is now. It is the only time we have. We cannot change yesterday. And tomorrow will only be better if I make today better. The most important person is the person you are with. They are the only one you can help and make feel important. And the most important task is making happy – doing something to bless the person you are with. That should help you find your path to significance.
(3) Build relationships with people who value the right things.
Our sense of significance is fueled by being with the right friends. Try forming friends with people who understand significance and you will discover it is true.
There is a wonderful story told by the inspirational speaker, Dan Clark. Dan had a friend named Paul. Paul had a brother who did quite well in life. One Christmas, Paul’s brother gave him a brand new automobile which made him very happy and very proud.
On Christmas Eve as Paul came out of his office, he saw a little kid eyeing his car. The little kid was a street urchin. Paul asked him, “Do you like the car?” “Oh yeah”. Paul said, “My brother gave it to me for Christmas.”
“Your brother gave it to you for Christmas? Didn’t cost you nuttin?” The street urchin asked. “Yeah”, Paul said. “My bother gave it to me. It didn’t cost me nothing.”
The little boy said, “I wish”, and Paul knew what he was going to say. He just knew he was going to say, “I wish I had a brother like that.”
But Paul was shocked when he said, “I wish I could be a brother like that”. And Paul was further shocked when he offered the little kid a ride and the little boy asked him to wait in front of his house. A moment later, he came down the steps with his little brother who was crippled over his shoulders.
He said to his little crippled brother – “His brother gave him this car for Christmas. Didn’t cost him nuttin. Can you believe it? Some day I am going to buy you a car like that. So I can take you by all the stores and all the wonderful places I told you about”.
Paul was shocked into significance that day. And he learned an important lesson. A real sense of significance is birthed in a focus of being not doing. And it is fueled by fellowship with the right people – people who understand we were all created for significance.