Seven Overlooked Advantages of a Startup Church

Does a small church have a chance to succeed?

If you’re a startup church in a city seemingly full of mega churches, do you have a chance to succeed? In a word, no. Not if you try to compete head to head. Not if you try to act like a big church. If you try to steal the giant’s lunch, he’ll probably eat your lunch. But it’s not time to throw in the towel either. There are at least seven things that you can do now that can give you tremendous advantages as you launch your new church.

1. You’ve Got Nothing to Lose. First of all, if you did (which you don’t), you’ve already walked away from a salary, your retirement, that little office in the middle of the hall. You’ve committed yourself to planting this church. You already quit your job . . . remember? This is it. Secondly, everything is straight up from here, you’ve got kids to feed and you’re hungry. This is huge! The mega church has been doing this for a lot of years. It has systems and quotas and established traditions to maintain. It is like a rock concert with a throng of people coming each week — so many people, in fact, that it doesn’t even try to connect with individual people, anymore. Everything it does is fine tuned for the masses. The problem is that the mega church has to have huge crowds to survive and the church has changed since it first started. There’s opportunity in new niches that haven’t been fully exploited. And the mega church is still doing it the same old way to an ever-changing sea of people. But the masses are getting smarter. They are looking at what a mega church delivers and the price tag seems way too high for what they’re getting. They’re tired of being anonymous and they want to find a place where people know their name. There’s a place for a hungry guy like you who has nothing to lose. This is an advantage.
2. You’re Completely Happy with the Small Fish. The mega church has to eat a lot to be happy. You can do with crumbs. There’s a lot of room in the city for a little fish like you. You can operate anonymously, fly completely under the radar, and it won’t hurt your ego a bit. This is your advantage.
3. You’re the Senior Pastor. It’s true that when the pastor of that mega church wants to meet with the mayor, odds are that he’ll make time for him, after all he is the lead pastor. But in a big church, you can bet all your enchiladas that the lead pastor is far removed from the day-to-day action. He has people who are getting the job done for him. Except for lead donors and high-profile members, the lead pastor rarely gets in on any of the action. But with you, it’s a different story. You are the senior pastor of your startup church and you have a lot of interaction with your people. You can use this power and flexibility to wrap yourself around each and every person, and make yourself indispensable. The people who you lead, get to work with the senior pastor. This is an advantage.
4. You’re Very Fast. An office full of people with slow-moving bureaucracies, being meeting-ed to death, and who have a slacker mentality, can’t get the job done faster than you. They can’t hire nine women to work really hard on a team and produce a baby in a month. Just because a mega church has an organization doesn’t mean it is faster than you. You can do it yourself and you are very fast. Today, you don’t have one committee meeting to waste your time and energy on. And because you’re just one person, the only way you can survive is to stay focused and work like your life depended on it. Come to think of it, your life does depend on it. You’re fast and this is an advantage.
5. You’re the Underdog. We’ve all been to a lot of Super Bowl parties where the two teams playing didn’t mean a lot to anyone in the room. Most of the time, your friends chose to root for the underdogs. Well . . . you’re the underdog here. There are a lot of people around you who are rooting for you and who are more likely to spread the word about you and activate some really great referral networks for you. Being the underdog is an advantage.
6. You Don’t Have Any Overhead. You rent an elementary school cafetorium for your services. You work from a converted shop in the back of your house. Your PBX system is a cell phone. You don’t have an executive pastor or an accounting team. The only insurance you have is on your leased computer equipment and that’s only because you have to. You don’t have a company car and there isn’t a crop of volunteers waiting to work for you. You can do what the mega church can do, for a whole lot less money. The ministry you create is in your heart and between your ears. It doesn’t take a big corporate machine to deliver the goods. Right now, you are the ministry and your monthly survival numbers are very low. You don’t have any overhead and this is an advantage.
7. You’ve Got Time. This doesn’t mean that you have time to waste. You still have to apply knowledge to work to increase capacity; and you’d be a slacker if you didn’t apply logic to what you do, to increase your productivity. But this doesn’t mean that you have to rush things, or hold things back just to meet quotas. When it counts, you’ll work your tail off to get things out the door ten times faster than the big guy. But when you can make a difference by taking your time and doing it right, you will — and it will show. You control your time and you can use it to your advantage.

Steeple provides fund raising and organizational development services to faith-based and community-based organizations of the nonprofit sector. Our efforts are dedicated to putting nonprofit managers and trustees in touch with the tools and resources they need to develop their organizations and to conduct successful capital campaigns. Our work with clients is for the long-term—to build internal capacity, to create brand equity, and to attract and retain funding. Since 2007, we’ve helped nonprofit organizations like yours raise more than $14 million.

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