From its title, I expected The Gifts of the Small Church to be another church leadership book with a systematic list of benefits found in the small church, perhaps with a chapter devoted to each. However, this interesting little book is more stream of consciousness of the author’s experiences as a United Methodist pastor of a small rural church in Zebulon County, North Carolina. Names of churches and people have been changed but the stories have the ring of truth and the people portrayed are sometimes just too unique to be imaginary.Byasee states right from the beginning that neither the church nor his book has the answer or the “secret.” He says: “The small church is not the answer to the world’s problems, any more than living purposefully, ‘bestly,’ secretly, or whatever else. The small church is just God’s primary way of saving people.” That’s a powerful statement backed up by Byasee’s words that “most of us through most of time have met Jesus in small churches. The great diversity of Christ’s body through time and space has proliferated in the small.”
Stories of individuals and their relationships are the backbone of this book, as they are of the church itself. While in a large church it’s easy to avoid getting to know people that aren’t like you, in the small church this comfortable isolation isn’t possible. In chapter twelve of the book, titled “Divine Election,” Byasee tells of a dispute in his church over a local election and zoning issue and muses that the most painful part was that “they were all good people…But could not, for the life of them (or their pastor), get along.” Yet this is “the small church’ glory. You can’t avoid the person you hate…And because of it you have a shot at being Christian.”
With the ever increasing divisions between “red” and “blue” Christians, Byasee’s point is well taken. Only by getting to know people with different viewpoints can we go beyond stereotypes. The presumably liberal, antigun preacher/author realizes that the gun-owners he met are “not violent people. They are hunters and gun-lovers, not people who shoot at other people. I wouldn’t have known the difference had I not spent time with them.”
Byasee’s style is humorous and honest if a bit quirky (such as referring to King James as King Jimmy) and it’s obvious he truly loves the people he ministered to in Zebulon despite their faults and foibles. The local church portrayed in this book isn’t a loving, emotionally healthy family so much as a loving, somewhat dysfunctional one. The author admits that many of us have had painful experiences in the church and compares it to a crazy mother: “She bears us. Nurtures us. Raises us. Makes our life possible. Then when we hit adolescence she embarrasses us…Then finally we hit adulthood and realize we’re more like her than we meant to be…The church wounds us, like every parent wounds…She marks us forever. And without her we’d not be us.” Real life, real love is messy, imperfect, and sometimes maddening, like God’s gift to us of the small church.
