Faith+Values: Little altars everywhere

When it comes to churches, small has become huge.

While public attention has focused on the proliferation of hangar-sized mega-churches with memberships in the thousands, the number of small churches has been quietly but dramatically growing.

Since 2000, 664 small churches (defined as one with an average weekly attendance of 100 people or fewer) have been started in the Twin Cities. That's twice the number of small churches formed in the 1990s and dwarfs the 135 that took root in 1980s.

Moreover, the pace is continuing to accelerate, said the Rev. John Mayer, executive director of City Vision, an organization that tracks religious demographics.

Few of these emergent churches have their own church buildings. Instead, they meet in homes, school cafeterias, storefronts and restaurants. Some have conventional services with Bible readings and sermons, while others break with tradition, meeting over shared meals and taking a more conversational approach to the scriptures. But most have a shared vision: They are cross-cultural, multidenominational and intently focused on serving people in their neighborhoods.

"Our goal was to have a church that represents the people who live around the church," said Pastor Michael Rice of the Cross-Cultural Evangelical Free Church in St. Paul. "I'm not saying that it's impossible to do that with existing churches, but it certainly is much harder to do."

Minnesota model

Although small churches are growing in number nationwide, Minnesota is taking the lead -- driven, observers say, by an interest in education and religion, changes in demographics and a hunger for community.

"We're a very intellectual state," said Judy Niemi Johnson, creative director at Calvary Baptist Church in White Bear. "We're very open-minded, and we're on the tip of the Bible Belt, which means that there's a strong religious base here. When you combine all three, you end up with a 'perfect storm' for the growth of the emergent church."

Immigration, too, has played a large role in the small church charge.

"A lot of these small churches are ethnic churches," Mayer said. "We [in the Twin Cities] have the largest Liberian population in the United States. We have the most Somalis, the most Hmong and the most Burmese."

It's not that they have anything against established churches, explained Pastor Francis Tabla of Ebenezer Community Church, a Liberian congregation that holds services in Park Center High School in Brooklyn Park. Their need for their own church is as much social as it is spiritual.

"It's not easy to be an immigrant," he said. "You lose your home, you lose your family, you lose your culture, you lose your way of life. Coming together provides us with a sense of community."

Tabla's church started in 2000 with just eight people. Now nearly 400 strong, it's in the process of raising money to build its own facility, which will include a sanctuary, education wing and community center. Of the estimated $3.5 million needed, the congregation already has raised $1.1 million.

Close connection

But pastors say that even longtime Minnesotans are coming to small churches looking for community.

"The great advantage of a small church is the intimacy of the relationships," Rice said. "In a large church, you can't know everyone."

Pastor Mark Van Steenwyk of the Missio Dei church in the Cedar-Riverside area of Minneapolis agreed. Working with gatherings of 20 or so people who meet in the basement of a neighborhood cafe, he emphasizes personal bonding.

"We concentrate on establishing relationships," he said. "There's a tendency in some larger suburban churches to back away, to not interact with the people with needs."

The Rev. Jason Ormiston of All Nations Baptist Church in northeast Minneapolis said small churches naturally generate the closeness that larger churches have to work at fostering.

"That's one reason that large churches have so many meetings," he said. "The meetings are really just small churches that exist within the big church."

A sense of mission

Although storefront churches don't look like their big-box brethren, many of them spring from the same well.

A major tenet of many religions is to bring new members into the fold. And studies have shown that the best way to reach people who don't regularly attend church is by starting a new one. So big churches have been spinning off ("planting" or "seeding") new, smaller churches.

"Some churches focus a lot of energy on planting new churches," Mayer said. "It's part of their DNA."

Ormiston said that it's what the Bible mandates.

"It tells us to reach out to others," he said. "It's all about discipleship. I call on other churches to do the same thing."

Ormiston practices what he preaches. He started his church with only eight families (including his own). Earlier this year, his congregation bought its own building in northeast Minneapolis. Recently, he told the congregation that within a few months he'd be stepping down to start yet another church.

From the seminaries

Seminaries also are fueling the trend. Some newly ordained ministers aren't interested in the traditional vocational path of becoming a minor assistant pastor and then working their way up through the ranks. They come out of the seminary pumped up about making an immediate difference in the world.

"A lot of seminaries have classes now on how to start a church," Mayer said. "The newly ordained ministers don't want to read about it; they want to do it."

Sometimes the job finds them. That was the case with Rice, pastor of the Cross-Cultural Evangelical Free Church.

"I always thought that I would go to work in an established church," he said. "I was finishing seminary in Chicago when I got a call from a group of people in Minnesota who were looking for someone to help set up a small church that reflected its community. I've always been interested in diversity, so I came to meet the people. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this is what God laid on my heart."

No guarantees

Despite their popularity, not all new churches make it. In fact, the mortality rate is high.

"On average, 50 percent of the new churches die within the first five years," Mayer said. "I've read that 70 percent of small business don't make it five years, and for restaurants, it's something like 90 percent [that fail]. So, they're doing better than that."

Few small churches generate enough revenue to pay a full-time clergy's salary. Some can't afford any salary at all.

"Financially, it's difficult," admitted Van Steenwyk, who supports his ministry through two other "day" jobs.

And any church, regardless of its size, is carried on the backs of its volunteers. With fewer people to share the load, small churches have to be careful not to overwork their members.

"Some small churches can't survive because their members get burned out," Mayer said. "They reach a point where they just give up."

But Mayer said that even with the inevitable failures, startup churches aren't likely to go away.

"The good news is that the more that are started, the more that survive," he said.

Jeff Strickler • 612-673-7392

Jeff Strickler • jstrickler@startribune.com