Nano-Church

There's a kind of compression of decimal places when reporting the size of churches.

I mean, logically you should only be allowed to call yourself a mega-church when you have at least a million members. In which case, Anglicans, Methodists, Southern Baptists and the Orthodox Churches are all mega-churches. The Catholic Church is a giga-church. And most soi-disant "mega-churches" are merely kilo-churches. Some of them, truth be told, are no more than hecta-churches.

But then I read on Episcopal Café about a "micro-church". Surely, I say to myself, a church with a millionth of a member is no church at all?

Of course,  I'm being silly. Mega- and micro- mean, in their simple senses, "big" and "small". And, given the choice of a big church where the pastor is a long way away and you have to go through layers of assistant pastors, group leaders, Thrones and Dominions to reach the seat of power, and a church where you can just ask the pastor to pass the salt, I reckon the micro-church has a lot to say for it.  Especially when you reckon that the abiding temptations for the leader of a large church include pride, manipulation, ambition. The worst you can manage as a dinner church leader is taking an extra Brussels Sprout, or one too many glasses of wine.

I note that the first comment on the report on Dinner Church relates to how they pay the pastor - expressed as "is it sustainable?" If it's the sort of church where the people go out to eat to worship, and only need to stick up a sign in a shopfront to turn it into a place of worship - yeah, that's sustainable. Stop talking about money.  Let them eat and worship God, I say. And if the thing falls apart at some point in the future, then they won't have some useless purpose - built edifice left behind, crumbling like Ozymandius. They'll just leave it to be converted, and move on - unencumbered by architecture, but with memories of many happy, holy meals.