by Ken Morgan | Apr 22, 2026 | Uncategorized
If you have school-aged kids, you probably got them kitted out with new shoes to start the school year. New shoes for kids need to allow some room to grow – but not too much – perhaps a half-size or so. Shoes that are way too big will have the kids slipping and tripping everywhere, while shoes too small could inhibit growth and cause lasting damage. A very similar principles applies to leadership style in churches. In his very helpful 1983 booklet ‘Sizing Up Congregations’, Arlin Rothauge introduced us to the idea of church characteristics based on congregation size. You’ve probably heard conversations about family-sized, pastoral sized, program-sized and corporation-sized churches. Rothauge pointed out that each size category required a different leadership structure in order to be effective. By implication, the leadership contribution required of clergy is different at each size category. For example, a minister in a family-sized church (up to 50 congregants) could probably visit each of the families in their congregation every year – and may well be expected to do so. The senior minister of a corporate-sized church could never visit all the families in their congregation and few would expect them to do so. If they tried, they would either burn out or neglect other responsibilities. Problems arise for ministers when the leadership style with which they’re most familiar and conformable is a mismatch for the size of their congregation. It’s not unusual for a newly-minted minister who has grown up in a corporation sized church to be assigned a family-sized church as their first placement as a priest in charge. Big churches work by formalized systems and sophisticated, text-based electronic communications (scan...
