Myth 1: “New Testament churches were HOUSE CHURCHES! Large churches are unbiblical!”

REALITY: There are both house churches (Rom 16:5) and megachurches (a 3,000-person church in Acts 2) in the New Testament.

What matters to Jesus is church HEALTH, not church SIZE.

MYTH 2: “Big churches are just Celebrity Pastor personality cults!”

REALITY: Jesus was followed by huge, adoring crowds (Matt 4:25, Jn 12:13), while no one listened to Jeremiah (Jer 7:27). Being well-known isn’t bad just like being unknown isn’t bad. Bad is bad.

Some well-known pastors are faithful and some well-known ‘pastors’ are evil. There are unknown pastors who are faithful and ones who aren’t.

“Then why are there always articles about bad big-church pastors?!” Because planes that land safely don’t make the news.

Christianity Today doesn’t make podcasts about pastors like these:

MYTH 3: “Big churches are all about the numbers!”

REALITY: The New Testament church tracked numbers (Acts 2, 4, 6, there’s even a Bible book called “Numbers”!) and every church should be “about the numbers” because every number represents a person, and every person matters to God.

So yes, we are “all about the numbers.” The number of:
⁃ Meals distributed
⁃ People saved
⁃ Marriages restored
⁃ Children adopted
⁃ Churches planted

If a church isn’t “about” those things, something is wrong.

MYTH 4: “Big churches are huge wastes of money!”

REALITY: Because of factors like economy of scale and cost peruse, large churches are usually, but NOT always, more efficient with resources. I’ve pastored a church of 125 people and a church of thousands. When it came to spending, here were the differences:

Comparatively, the large church was able to allocate:
⁃ A lower percentage of the budget to salaries
⁃ A way lower percentage of the budget to Sr Pastor
⁃ More than double the percentage of the budget for missions
⁃ Less than half the percentage of the budget to mortgage

Having more or fewer resources isn’t wrong. What matters is how a church uses the resources it has.

MYTH 5: “Yep! All this is why
megachurches are BETTER than small churches!”

REALITY: Nope. Nobody addressed this better than Pastor Tim Keller…

Every church has a culture that goes with its size and which must be accepted. Most people tend to prefer a certain size culture, and unfortunately, many give their favorite size culture a moral status and treat other size categories as spiritually and morally inferior. They may insist that the only biblical way to do church is to practice a certain size culture despite the fact that the congregation they attend is much too big or too small to that culture… There is no “best size” for a church. Each size presents great difficulties and also many opportunities for ministry that churches of other sizes cannot undertake (at least not as well). Only together can churches of all sizes be all that Christ wants the church to be.

Tim Keller

A church can be huge and dead. A church can be small and thriving. Nobody cares how big grapevines are; the only thing that matters is how much fruit they produce.

Big isn’t bad (or good). Small isn’t bad (or good).

Bad is bad, and good is good.

God has used the megachurch to reach Korea and the house church to reach China. We should hold models loosely and Jesus closely.

Ed Stetzer