There’s a number where familiarity ends and anonymity begins. It’s called Dunbar’s Number. Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist, hypothesizes that we have a limit of roughly 150 people we can maintain stable relationships with. Relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how they connect to everyone else. Beyond that number we might recognize faces, but we can’t know stories.
Churches hit this wall too. At around 150-200 people, additional growth becomes difficult without sustained, strategic effort. Church growth experts call it “the barrier,” and they’ve built an entire industry around breaking through it.
What Breaking the Barrier Actually Breaks
Bill Sullivan’s Ten Steps to Breaking the 200 Barrier is remarkably honest about what happens when churches push past this threshold. He writes:
“A small church is not a microcosm of a large church but a totally different kind of organization. … The church that grows beyond the 200 barrier is the church that decides to minister to its people in a comprehensive organization rather than a family-type fellowship.”1
Read that again. To grow beyond 200, you must stop being a family and become an organization! Sullivan admits churches resist this change naturally:
“Just as you would not want to change from being the person you are to being someone else, neither does a church want to give up the family atmosphere to become an organization.”2
Think about that language. While churches want to grow, they simultaneously don’t want this kind of transformation. Perhaps on a subconscious level, they resist it instinctively.
Think this kind of strategizing is not happening in your church? You may be surprised. It happens in leadership meetings and planning sessions most people never see. It’s not nefarious; these methods are just part of the air church leaders breathe, accepted as gospel with few people ever questioning it.
What Gets Lost in Translation
Let’s be frank about what changes when churches push past 150-200 people.
At 150, your pastor knows everyone by name. He knows that Sarah’s struggling with her teenager, that Mike just lost his job, that the Johnsons are caring for an aging parent. Everyone knows each other by name.
At 300 plus, pastoral care becomes delegation. The pastor manages staff who manage programs. Events replace relationships. Community becomes attendance. You can know lots of faces but not many stories.
When trying to force church size “beyond the barrier,” are we attempting something fundamentally unnatural? Are we creating an abnormal mutation? Are we turning a living family into a managed organization, and calling it growth? What if congregations don’t automatically grow beyond 200 people because it’s not in the church’s nature, it’s “DNA,” to do so?
The church growth literature admits this transformation but treats it as necessary collateral damage. It’s “the cost of doing business.” This reveals an unspoken belief: we measure growth almost entirely by numbers. But Scripture also speaks of growth in maturity, holiness, and love.
Are we really reaching more people, or are we collecting more people while actually shepherding fewer?
The Church the Apostles Never Built
The New Testament speaks of church as family. Paul tells the Ephesians they are “members of the household of God” (Eph 2:19). He instructs Timothy to treat older men as fathers, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, and younger women as sisters (1 Tim 5:1-2). This describes a family.
As far as we know, every church in the New Testament met in homes. The church in Rome met in Priscilla and Aquila’s house (Rom 16:5). Nympha’s home in Colossae (Col 4:15), Philemon’s house (Phlm 1:2). These weren’t starter churches waiting to graduate to real buildings. This was the norm.
Paul told the Ephesian elders he had spent three years “admonishing every one with tears” (Acts 20:31). Every one; every single person. He described his ministry in Thessalonica like this: “We were gentle among you, like a nursing mother caring for her children. We cared so deeply that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God, but our own lives as well. That is how beloved you have become to us” (1 Thes 2:7-8).
Can you share yourself with 500 people? Can 500 people become “very dear to us”? Can we have that same closeness of relationship with numbers beyond 150-200?
The Shepherd Who Can’t Know His Sheep
Jesus said, “I know my own and my own know me” (Jn 10:14). He calls his sheep by name (Jn 10:3). Here’s an uncomfortable question: Can a pastor know 500 congregants by name? At what number does shepherding become management? This is not about limiting what God can do, but asking what kind of shepherding God ordinarily calls human pastors to do well.
Sullivan describes what pastoral ministry becomes in a large church: focusing on “quality programming,” developing an “expansive infrastructure,” managing “changing expectations.” Where in this model is the shepherd who knows his sheep?
Try this test right now. If you’re a pastor, can you name every member of your church? If someone walked into your office hurting, would you know their story before they told you? If not, are you their shepherd or their CEO?
The Cost Nobody Counts
Sullivan is honest about what breaking the barrier costs the pastor:
[Leading a church in growth] “will require rising early and working late as a regular schedule. Responding to impossible demands for ministry will require enormous amounts of energy, far more than the pastor anticipated… he must find a way to preserve his health, to save his family, and to save his own soul, but he must persevere in pursuit of the dream.”3
Notice what the list demands he preserve: health, family, soul, pursuit of the dream. But notice what’s missing: tending to the sheep he already has. They’ve become means to achieve his dream, not the reason for ministry.
This is the quiet tragedy of growth driven ministry. Pastors become so focused on gaining more people that they neglect the people God has already entrusted to them. The sheep in front of them receive less attention than the sheep they hope to collect next. There are pastors who labor heroically in large churches, but the question here is whether the structure itself helps or hinders that stewardship.
Here’s what should haunt us: every hour spent strategizing how to break the barrier is an hour not spent focused on the people God already entrusted to the pastor. What are we actually pursuing? And what are we sacrificing to pursue it?
What If the Barrier Is a Gift?
What if the resistance churches feel at exceeding 150-200 people isn’t an invisible barrier, but the organism protecting what it is? The body is signaling that we’re about to lose something essential. What if Dunbar’s Number isn’t a limitation to overcome but a reality to honor? Did God design us to thrive in communities of this size?
When trying to force church size “beyond the barrier,” are we attempting something fundamentally unnatural? Are we creating an abnormal mutation? Are we turning a living family into a managed organization, and calling it growth? What if congregations don’t automatically grow beyond 200 people because it’s not in the church’s nature, it’s “DNA,” to do so?
A Different Vision
Wanting numerical growth is not a bad thing. Some churches grow large in a faithful manner through intentional structures like small groups, though the challenge of maintaining genuine community increases with scale. But scriptural growth comes through evangelism and shepherding, not marketing. It flows from witness and discipleship, not branding, programs, or strategic positioning.
Imagine a church that reaches 150 and celebrates. Not because they’ve given up on growth, but because they’ve achieved something precious: a community small enough for everyone to know each other, but large enough to divide into two separate congregations.
Then imagine they plant a daughter church. Not because they have to, but because living things reproduce. What was one becomes two. Both remain small enough to maintain the closeness that makes “one another” commands possible.
What if success looked like five churches of 100 instead of one church of 500?
Think about what that creates:
- Five groups of pastors who actually know their sheep
- Five communities where everyone matters
- Five locations reaching five neighborhoods
- Five families, not one organization
Which model looks more like Jesus with the Twelve? Which honors how God made us? Which makes “bear one another’s burdens” possible? Which allows the pastors to actually be shepherds instead of a CEOs?
The Question We’re Not Asking
Church growth experts have spent decades asking, “How do we break the barrier?” What if the real question is, “Why are we trying to?”
Maybe we don’t need bigger churches. Perhaps we need more churches. Maybe the barrier we keep trying to break is actually protecting something we can’t afford to lose: the possibility of being known, of mattering, of belonging to a family instead of joining an organization. Faithfulness may sometimes look like slower growth, but it never looks like neglect.
This is not a judgment on every large church or the faithful shepherds who serve in them. It is an invitation to examine our motives for pursuing size and to question whether bigger is better, and whether the barrier we keep trying to break might actually be worth honoring. Maybe God isn’t calling us to break the barrier. Maybe He’s calling us to honor it.
References
- Sullivan, Bill M. Ten Steps to Breaking the 200 Barrier: A Church Growth Strategy. Kansas City, Mo: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 1988. 14.
- Sullivan, Bill M. Ten Steps to Breaking the 200 Barrier: A Church Growth Strategy. Kansas City, Mo: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 1988. 14.
- Sullivan, Bill M. Ten Steps to Breaking the 200 Barrier: A Church Growth Strategy. Kansas City, Mo: Beacon Hill Press of Kansas City, 1988. 57-58.