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The Gift of Small

Embracing Your Church's Vocation
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In The Gift of Small: Embracing Your Churchs Vocation, Allen Stanton argues that small-membership congregations can be faithful, vital, and viable. He encourages clergy and lay leaders of these churches to reexamine their congregations potential and celebrate the vocation of being small.

Small-membership congregations have long accounted for the majority of congregations in the United States. Despite this, church leadership resources often assume good leadership will result in church growth. Stanton shows how the assumption that healthy churches are growing churches fails to acknowledge the demographics of the communities that many small-membership churches serve and creates the perception that small congregations are failing or lack vitality.

In part one of The Gift of Small, Stanton explores the importance of relationships to the theological identity and organizational leadership of the small-membership church. Part two examines the people who belong to and participate in small-membership congregations and the assets they bring to the congregation. Part three focuses on role of the small church as a place of vocational discovery and source of community leadership. The book concludes with a look at Jesuss teachings in which small objects become agents of transformation.

Ultimately, this book seeks to dispel the myth that small-membership churches are failing and instead demonstrates how congregations might be faithful to a vocation of "being small." By embracing the importance of relationships, understanding the gifts of their members, and focusing their work, small-membership churches can be examples of vitality without the distraction of "church growth."

Allen T. Stanton is the chief of mission integration and outreach at the University of Tennessee Southern, where he also serves as the executive director of the Turner Center for Rural Vitality. Allen is an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church. He is the author of Reclaiming Rural: Building Thriving Rural Congregations and holds degrees from Wake Forest University and Duke Divinity School. Allen lives in rural Tennessee with his wife and two daughters.

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