If you have a lean gathering and 150 people, it’s not a problem. My experience in a number of church plants, however, has been widespread roster fatigue. When there are 50 of you and you’re trying to do a sermon, set-up/pack-up, food, children, music (+ sound and projector), and so on, you can easily be on a roster, say, 7 weeks out of 8. The effort involved doesn’t seem to pay adequate dividends in terms of discipleship and mission. You could get better outcomes by different means. And it can come to define and dominate your church’s raison d’être — people don’t feel like doing much else for discipleship and mission during the week, because their ‘church time-track’ is taken up.

On the other hand, Sunday gatherings can be excellent if you’re in a larger group, and you’re in a context where your gathering is a key front door for mission, and it leads to excellent relational time (e.g. everyone goes off to eat with one another afterwards). There can still be a job to do, however, to ensure people don’t think that the only (or even principle) place of discipleship and mission is the Sunday gathering.

So I’m thinking the reason we’re not good at the missional community stuff (in Dubbo) is not that we’re too busy, it’s more that we haven’t thought about it too much or haven’t had it modelled to us, so we are too scared to or don’t really know how to pop in on someone for dinner or how to open the Bible with them over a meal? I’m optimistic that we can get it going pretty naturally as an outworking of who we are to.

On this question, one thing I would want to say is that church is a community to belong to, not just an event to attend. It’s not something which exists from week to week, but continuously, day to day.

Seeing some kind of opposition (in the abstract) between ‘big church’ and ‘small church’ might suggest an event-based mindset. Rather, I’d want to say, “We’re a church (that is, a group of people following Jesus and presenting him to the world). What structures do we need to live effectively as his disciples?”

In some contexts, this will lead us to have big Sunday gatherings. In others, it won’t. I’m not sure there’s something intrinsically necessary to the big Sunday gathering (see, for example, the early church, the church today in China or India, and so on). But it might be a good thing to do. (For a range of reasons, I think Sunday gatherings are generally good things in rural NSW, for example.) The error is to imagine that Sunday can achieve everything that a church should do or might want to do.

Having dealt with the abstract, though, it’s possible to see how in the concrete, ‘big church’ and ‘small church’ can be in conflict. That is, if there are lots of tasks and rosters and centralized programmes to fulfil, it can sap time and effort which would otherwise be devoted to relational discipleship and mission. From what you’ve said in the Total Church thread, sounds like you’re on-board with this stuff 🙂

I’m sold on seeing our mission and discipleship in our homes and following Jesus as part of everyday life, I’m also wanting to hold on to the sunday gathering…

So for me I thing it’s big church AND little church and both are primary.
not primary and secondary church with one losing out.

I can’t speak for The Crowded House (TCH), but my guess of what’s going on here is the idea that if following Jesus together is our normal life, then it must take place where our normal life takes place — more in homes than in church buildings.

Having said this, some branches of TCH have big gatherings as well, which look like most Australian evangelical gatherings I’ve attended — 150 people, singing, prayer, 20–40-minute preaching, even sometimes in church buildings. So it’s perhaps a question of emphasis.

For TCH, The main business of discipleship and mission happens in ‘gospel communities’ (groups of 10–30 adults who endeavour to share lives and together show and tell about Jesus to those who don’t know him). If you took away the big Sunday gathering, you would’ve lost something, but you wouldn’t have lost your church (whereas I think for many of us, if we lost our Sunday gathering, we might also lose our church).

Another way of looking at it might be to think about the ‘base unit’ of church. Most churches I’ve been in here in Australia, the base unit is the Sunday gathering, and a subset of that gathering might be part of some other structure. So people will say, “80% of our church are in small groups.”

For TCH, the base unit is the gospel community: you can’t be part of the church if you’re not part of the gospel community. The Sunday gathering is a gathering of gospel communities, so you might say, “We had 110% of our church at our Sunday gathering last week.”

Yes I want my non-christian friends to come to church. But the reality is that most of them won’t. So my home becomes the missional centre of my weekly existence. There they see me live the gospel life, imperfectly. And they see that Christianity works, notwithstanding my sinfulness. I “preach” on my couch or around the bbq.

I go to a building on Sunday to meet with all my christian friends. And I think of it as a bit like a weekly ministers conference. It is terrifically encouraging. Yes, when I preach there I preach as though there were non-believers present. Some of them may have been coming along for years. Some of them might be there for the first time. But I don’t think that putting the majority of my evangelistic energies or hope into the sunday service is the best use of my energy.