Karl Vaters > Quotes

“Your biggest problem in ministry and in life isn’t that you'll make a mistake, but that you'll be consumed by the fear of making a mistake.”
― Karl Vaters, The Grasshopper Myth: Big Churches, Small Churches and the Small Thinking that Divides Us

“A Small Church that tries to act like a big church will miss out on all the great things that only a Small Church can do.   This”
― Karl Vaters, The Grasshopper Myth: Big Churches, Small Churches and the Small Thinking that Divides Us

“Instead of being problem-oriented, we need to be (here it comes) strengths-oriented.”
― Karl Vaters, The Grasshopper Myth: Big Churches, Small Churches and the Small Thinking that Divides Us

“For the last several decades, the church leadership culture as a whole has despised Small Churches.”
― Karl Vaters, The Grasshopper Myth: Big Churches, Small Churches and the Small Thinking that Divides Us

“Life doesn’t go where you want it to go – it goes where you tell it to go. And you tell it where to go with every decision you make – large and small.”
― Karl Vaters, The Grasshopper Myth: Big Churches, Small Churches and the Small Thinking that Divides Us

“Jealousy is no way to build a great church of any size. Neither is fear, doubt or self-loathing.”
― Karl Vaters, The Grasshopper Myth: Big Churches, Small Churches and the Small Thinking that Divides Us

“Warren Wiersbe wrote, “Ministry takes place when divine resources meet human needs through loving channels to the glory of God.”1”
― Karl Vaters, Small Church Essentials: Field-Tested Principles for Leading a Healthy Congregation of Under 250

“Maybe, instead of Small Churches taking their lead from big churches, New Small Churches ought to get healthy and vibrant and start doing some leading of their own.”
― Karl Vaters, The Grasshopper Myth: Big Churches, Small Churches and the Small Thinking that Divides Us

“What if Jesus’ idea was for churches of all sizes to work together, with mega, big, small, and house churches each contributing something special to the whole? What if by trying to fix a problem that isn’t a problem, we’re actually working against a strategy that God wants us to enact?”
― Karl Vaters, Small Church Essentials: Field-Tested Principles for Leading a Healthy Congregation of Under 250

“Today, we can market to ever-smaller niches of people without any top-down bureaucracy. It seems the world is ready, more than ever, to be impacted by the kingdom of God through Small Churches with little or no official denominational connections to each other, linked together to change the world.”
― Karl Vaters, The Grasshopper Myth: Big Churches, Small Churches and the Small Thinking that Divides Us

“There is no ideal church size. Every size meets the needs of the people who seek them out.”
― Karl Vaters, The Grasshopper Myth: Big Churches, Small Churches and the Small Thinking that Divides Us

“Sometimes what we call a plateau is simply a church reaching its optimal size, then using that size to grow healthful fruit.”
― Karl Vaters, The Grasshopper Myth: Big Churches, Small Churches and the Small Thinking that Divides Us

“What makes a family healthy and loving has nothing to do with numbers. It should be the same in the family of God.”
― Karl Vaters, The Grasshopper Myth: Big Churches, Small Churches and the Small Thinking that Divides Us

“God has this annoying tendency to do things his way, not ours.”
― Karl Vaters, The Grasshopper Myth: Big Churches, Small Churches and the Small Thinking that Divides Us

“The world needs all kinds of churches. Big, small, house, multi-site, ethnic, cross-ethnic, Pentecostal, high liturgy, low liturgy, teaching centers, salvation stations, independent, denominational, online, traditional, non-traditional and new types no one has thought about yet.”
― Karl Vaters, The Grasshopper Myth: Big Churches, Small Churches and the Small Thinking that Divides Us

“what do you think God might do through a city whose pastors and churches decided they were finally going to set aside their territorialism, their petty jealousies and their denominational prejudices?”
― Karl Vaters, The Grasshopper Myth: Big Churches, Small Churches and the Small Thinking that Divides Us

“Jesus’ model of leadership was shockingly collaborative. In fact, it would be easy to argue that Jesus’ entire ministry was about team-building. From gathering the Twelve, to sending out the 72, to the “go and do” mandates in His teaching, to His command to wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit, everything Jesus did was collaborative—making disciples who would work together to change the world.”
― Karl Vaters, Small Church Essentials: Field-Tested Principles for Leading a Healthy Congregation of Under 250

“Many of us are convinced we’re great speakers and leaders. We have revolutionary ideas no one has ever heard of before. We have faith to move mountains. But what if …? What if God’s plans for our ministry are different than our plans? What if He wants to use us in the service of a smaller congregation? Can we be okay accepting God’s will, if that’s what His will is? And if a lifetime of small church ministry is possible, even likely, shouldn’t we spend time preparing for it?”
― Karl Vaters, Small Church Essentials: Field-Tested Principles for Leading a Healthy Congregation of Under 250

“Small Churches need to think like Small Churches.   But thinking small is not the same as small thinking. And it’s definitely not an excuse for having a small vision.   For”
― Karl Vaters, The Grasshopper Myth: Big Churches, Small Churches and the Small Thinking that Divides Us

“Let’s stop arguing about which size is best, and start seeing what’s best about each size.   Specifically,”
― Karl Vaters, The Grasshopper Myth: Big Churches, Small Churches and the Small Thinking that Divides Us

“This is a great way for churches to start new ministries or programs—try it for a season. If it doesn’t work well, the program didn’t fail, it finished.”
― Karl Vaters, Small Church Essentials: Field-Tested Principles for Leading a Healthy Congregation of Under 250

“we’re always working on at least two improvement projects at all times:”
― Karl Vaters, Small Church Essentials: Field-Tested Principles for Leading a Healthy Congregation of Under 250

“If the church is ever going to have a new Reformation, the spark for it will almost surely be provided by a Small Church or a network of Small Churches.”
― Karl Vaters, The Grasshopper Myth: Big Churches, Small Churches and the Small Thinking that Divides Us

“from the outside in. We’ll begin with the first-time guest, move to discipleship and leadership, and then close the loop with outreach.”
― Karl Vaters, Small Church Essentials: Field-Tested Principles for Leading a Healthy Congregation of Under 250

“Malcolm Gladwell book, Outliers. In it, he notes a well-documented Canadian study that shows kids born in January tend to make better grades and score more goals in sports than those born later in the year. The reason, he deduces, is that grade-school kids who were born just after the cut-off date for the school year (January) are always a year older than the kids who were born just before it (December), thus having a full year of mental and physical advantages.   The January kids aren’t naturally brighter and more physically capable than kids born in November and December. They’re just a year older. In elementary school, one year is a lot.   The school system doesn’t see that, so the January kids get labeled as gifted, while the December kids are called slow. Once established, those categories are hard to break out of. The gifted kids get enrolled in advanced classes, increasing the pace of their education and making the gap between them and the December kids bigger.   The physically larger January kids are recruited by better PeeWee teams, then better High Schools and colleges. That’s why, as shown in Gladwell’s book, professional sports leagues – and hockey leagues in particular – have an inordinately high percentage of athletes that were born in the first three months of the year and a much lower percentage of December birthdays.”
― Karl Vaters, The Grasshopper Myth: Big Churches, Small Churches and the Small Thinking that Divides Us

“Loving God and loving others is not a church growth strategy. It’s not a means to an end. It is the means and the end.”
― Karl Vaters, The Grasshopper Myth: Big Churches, Small Churches and the Small Thinking that Divides Us

“Rather than feature our best ministry, we often let it get lost in the clutter of tired events, high-maintenance buildings, irrelevant programs, and arcane language.”
― Karl Vaters, Small Church Essentials: Field-Tested Principles for Leading a Healthy Congregation of Under 250

“There comes a time when you have to lay the book down, stop thinking, talking and planning, and start doing.”
― Karl Vaters, The Grasshopper Myth: Big Churches, Small Churches and the Small Thinking that Divides Us

“Worshipping only with people who look like us is not healthy or biblical.”
― Karl Vaters, The Grasshopper Myth: Big Churches, Small Churches and the Small Thinking that Divides Us

“The body of Christ needs to be more conscious of what healthful growth looks like. In fact, a church can’t truly call itself healthy until it is healthful as well. And in Small Churches that awareness has to start with pastors being OK with who God has called us to be and what he has called us to do.”
― Karl Vaters, The Grasshopper Myth: Big Churches, Small Churches and the Small Thinking that Divides Us