How To Keep Your Church Small
By Stephen Portner

Make prayer optional. Let only the few who can stand up in front of everybody and impress them with their
fluent vocabulary do the praying for the entire body of believers.

Encourage Bible study only for those who already know all there is to know about God and living godly
lives.

When sermonizing, pontificate eloquently utilizing cumbersome ecclesiastical vocabulary. You will impress
the socks off all the university scholars in your congregation while the average person will be so
overwhelmed, they will maintain the glassy-eyed look of awe.

Either try to please everyone or consider yourself so above everyone that their opinions are not worthy of
consideration. Either attitude will do.

But sure to ignore conflict and avoid it at all costs, even if it means compromising your integrity. If you
avoid troublemakers long enough, they will grow tired and just leave the church.

Try to keep the other people in the church from truly loving and caring for one another. Let the paid staff
do all that -- after all, what else are they paid for anyway? If members of the congregation will remain
thinking only of themselves, then a lively atmosphere of grumbling and complaining will be maintained by
all.

Be more concerned about survival than reaching out to others in the name of Jesus. Sock that money away
in CDs for "a rainy day," and don't worry about those around you who are physically and spiritually hungry
and thirsty.

Make sure to have a lot of meetings where people report what they could be doing if they didn't have every
night taken up by meetings. Encourage people to have hair-trigger emotions so that each meeting contains
at least one ranting and raving, including red faces, derogatory remarks, hand slamming, or foot stomping
-- all in the name of Jesus, of course.

Try to keep things the same way they have always been. You ruffle less feathers that way, because you
only have the same people in worship every week (minus those who die off, of course). If others don't feel
they can worship in the way you have always done it, then that's their problem.

Don't invite any strangers, especially unbelievers, to your worship service (not services (plural), because
one service should be good for everyone. (How else will you get to know everybody?) Inviting strangers
to church only encourages change, and could possibly cause a power shift from the old and established to
the new and experimental.