When Small Churches Get Thin on the Ground

What is going on at Bures Baptist Church? I ask myself as I sit down to write another blog.

I’d love to be able to fill it with stories of all the small miracles that happen in the life of an active church every week. I’d love to share with you all the little details and answers to prayers, but frankly, mostly all I’ve talked about this week is babies, and the ways in which our prayers have been answered, well, I’ve been too sick to notice!

But it’s not necessarily an easy time in the church all round. Over the last few months a lot of our church members and helpers have been away or out of action, for short or long periods, sometimes once, sometimes repeatedly. Some have simply gotten a bit worn down, others have had changes in their day job, various different reasons.

I’m not talking about any one person in particular, but across the board, circumstances seem to have conspired to make our ministries a little difficult to manage/staff recently.

As a small church perhaps already punching above its weight with its contribution to the community, it can be a struggle. I hate to see people weighed down by their responsibilities, unable to get a break because we simply don’t have the back up. It’s not fair, and yet as a church God seems to have given us a lot of work to do.

We spoke this morning at assembly about how when life gets hard it’s easy to think God is being unfair to us. But actually we know that God is always just and if we look out for it we can still see the good things He is doing for us.

So we take heart and we find ourselves praying for God to ‘send more workers into the harvest field’, and to give rest to the weary, as the bible tells us He will.

A small church must still let God’s people get out and do the things they feel are right, it can’t be constantly hauling them in for meetings or refusing to let them move on in their journey.

But ‘sending out’ (however biblical) can be painful when your numbers are few, and it can feel a lot more like ‘letting go’. So please pray for us to have grace in times when we are short staffed, to courageously prioritise rest for our members and attendees and to be able to sustain our ministries where God is calling us to. Thanks.

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Interested in more?

Check out some of our Sunday sermons at: http://www.buresbaptistchurch.org/sermon_catchup.php