Chapter Four

So, to sum up the question of congregational size and what that means for almost everything else about a church, what has come to be the standard understanding in modern American church life goes like this: you start with what's called "Average Worship Attendance" or as I'll be calling it, AWA, which is the average of your Sunday services across the year. Membership has long been mistrusted as a useful guide, because speaking from my own experience, I've served congregations with an AWA of 110 that had 1100 members "on the rolls," and a congregation with more like 90 AWA with over 500 in official membership. Newark Central has about 250 official members, another 300 in the "limbo" file, and at least 25 regular attenders who for a variety of reasons choose not to formally join.

But we have a reported average attendance of 152 -- which like most churches, includes Christmas Eve and Easter. If you take them out, we'd be more like 143. Our attendance has been actually on the increase since 2003; in 1991 we reported 221 AWA. The Disciples of Christ yearbook only started recording AWA in the early 80s; folklore says that in the Sixties we had 300 most Sundays and frankly I do not believe it, but it was probably higher than 221 when you add in children's church and such . . . but we only had one service then. Even with two dozen in the balcony most weeks in those days (as I'm told) I have trouble believing we had 225 on the main floor and 25 in the choir regularly. But let's concede that the Sixties were a different era, and it was more flush with kids underfoot, no doubt.

Over the last fifty years, though, we've been up around 200 average twice, and we've come down from that figure twice, and we've come up in the last eight or nine, but flattened out at 140-150 between two services. Where does that number put us, comparatively speaking?

The classic categorization comes from Arlin Rothauge, Sizing Up a Congregation for New Member Ministry (available online, Alban Institute):

• Family (up to 50)
• Pastoral (51-150)
• Program (151-350)
• Corporate (351+)

Following this were the seven categorizations of Lyle Schaller in Looking in the Mirror, along with two types he added in The Very Large Church:

• Fellowship/cat (35 or less)
• Small church/collie (35-100)
• Middle-sized/garden (100-175)
• Awkward size/house (175-225)
• Large/mansion (225-450)
• Huge/ranch (450-700)
• Mini-denomination/nation (750+)
• Very large (751-1,800)
• Megachurch (1,801-plus)

One of the more recent is Gary McIntosh, Taking Your Church to the Next Level, who lists five:

• The Relational Church: 15-200 worshippers
• The Managerial Church: 200-400 worshippers
• The Organizational Church: 400-800 worshippers
• The Centralized Church: 800-1,500 worshippers
• The Decentralized Church: 1,500-plus worshippers

However you sort it out, Newark Central has long been a Pastoral/Relational sort of congregation. We really do not have a history -- unless you go back to the pre-World War II, pre-fire days -- of being a Program/Managerial type church. If we were, we've lost that institutional memory.

We are what Alice Mann calls "The In-Between Church" and is a subject she's led workshops on as well as written books about across this past thirty year period. http://www.lifeandleadership.com/book-summaries/mann-the-in-between-church.html I will admit I had considered inviting the elders or a group in the church to do a group "read" of this, but I'll be candid -- I don't tend to get a good feeling about "book reads" in groups. Some read most, a few read a little, and most let the vocal folk bend the contents to what they thought before they read the common text. So I'm not sure we get to problem solving with book reads! I do think it's a good read for anyone interested in life around a congregation of our size.

So I would say that the "200 barrier" is a felt source of limitation, and hence a little bit of anxiety, for the congregation. But just as attendance patterns have changed, so have finances.