My wife and I have worshiped in some very large churches over the past six months. Thousands of people flood their campuses each Sunday. Their worship leaders are professional musicians. Their pastors are great communicators and exceptional leaders. I enjoyed my time in these churches and came away having heard some helpful sermons.

Many pastors I know work in towns that have smaller populations than the Sunday attendance of some of these churches. On the American religious scene, the megachurch is the epitome of ecclesial success. Nevertheless, if churches want to become more effective, they should consider going smaller.

By “going smaller” I don’t mean they need to reduce their Sunday morning on-site attendance or their online participation – hardly that; the more the merrier. I mean they need to see beyond big productions to transformative personal encounters. A church is not effective because many people attend Sunday worship gatherings but because the people who do attend stay engaged all week long.

This engagement requires rich community within the church, which is more than a “just Jesus and me” affair. A church with ten thousand people and a multimillion dollar budget is a failure if its people don’t spend meaningful time together.

In a successful church, the ministry is not done for attendees but by attendees. The minister is not the guy who stands on the stage – or at least the minister is not only that guy. Everyone who is part of the church is a minister. This doesn’t mean that everyone preaches or officiates at weddings, funerals, and baptisms. It means that everyone uses their God-given gifts to serve others.

The successful church functions to “equip the saints for the work of the ministry.” The ministerial staff is not hired to do the ministry for people, but to equip them to do the work themselves. The nature of this ministry work varies depending on the giftedness of the person doing it. One person might teach, another helps people in need, a third leads, a fourth evangelizes.

Likewise, in the successful church, the pastor is not the only person who engages the Scriptures in a regular and life-changing way. The janitor does too. So does the first-grade Sunday School teacher and the person serving coffee. People are not only told what the Bible says but are instructed to study it for themselves.

The Bible itself emphasizes this one-on-one kind of connection in the church. St. Paul, in one of his earliest letters, tells the Thessalonian church members to encourage and build each other up “one to one,” or as we would say, “one-on-one.” Paul is thinking small here, but he knows that the results will be big.

In another letter, the apostle is positively gleeful because in the church “the love of each and every one of you towards one another grows ever greater.” Such love is not primarily expressed at large group events but in one-on-one friendships.

St. Paul was a big picture thinker if ever there was one, yet he was regularly engaged in these one-on-one relationships. He can say that he encouraged church members like a father encourages a child, and that he did this with “each one of you.”

Churches often measure their success by how many people come to their large group events. A different metric would be more helpful: the percentage of people who are engaged in loving one-on-one friendships that encourage church members and build them up in the faith.

This would require a different way of thinking from the one that is ingrained in church leaders’ minds by their education and denominational culture. We have all heard the story of the shepherd who left ninety-nine sheep to go and search for the one sheep that is lost. We naturally appropriately see in it a picture of Jesus, yet we fail to apply its lesson to our ecclesial practices.

But we should. These one-on-one relationships are part of the church’s critical infrastructure. If they deteriorate or are absent, the resulting structural damage will place future growth at risk and may even lead to a catastrophic collapse.