Key points:
- Small churches have distinctive strengths that The United Methodist Church should embrace, argues a new report from Wesleyan Impact Partners.
- That’s important since most U.S. United Methodist churches, and Protestant churches in general, are small.
- The report profiles nine congregations across the U.S. — most of which average 50 or less in worship but excel in community impact.
- The congregations, which are thriving in both rural and urban settings, share certain qualities.
The tiny, adobe-style sanctuary of Mancos United Methodist Church only has space for 15 pews — and each pew only can seat five people comfortably.
While the congregation in rural, southwestern Colorado will never be a megachurch, it already has made a mega-impact on its community and the broader national conversation.
Just look at the experience of Rosa, a beloved local resident who found another kind of sanctuary inside Mancos United Methodist. During the first Trump administration, the small congregation sheltered and protected her from the threat of deportation. In the process, congregants also brought her case national attention that helped her eventually win legal authorization to stay in the U.S., where she had already lived and worked for more than 30 years.
“The church has been very welcoming, and I have felt the love of all of them and all of you,” she told supporters in 2022 shortly after a court granted her request to remain in the country. “This embrace has helped me in so many ways.”
Wesleyan Impact Partners, a Texas-based nonprofit that invests in ministries nationwide, sees hope for the future of The United Methodist Church in small congregations like Mancos. The nonprofit — with funding from the Texas Methodist Foundation — profiled Mancos and eight other United Methodist congregations across the U.S. in its new, 36-page report “Flourishing Small Churches.”
Most of the nine churches featured have an average worship attendance under 50. Nevertheless, the report establishes that they all have an outsized impact in representing the Kingdom of God — like the wee mustard seed Jesus described in his parable.
The Rev. Kathleen McShane, director of learning and innovation at Wesleyan Impact Partners, is also the pastor of a small congregation — First United Methodist Church in Paso Robles, California. She began the study with the question: “What if the smallness of so many churches in United Methodism isn’t a problem, but an asset?”
Why it matters
That’s an important perspective given the current U.S. religious landscape. Nearly 70% of the country’s Protestant churches — no matter whether they are part of a denomination or not — average fewer than 100 in weekly attendance.
Most U.S. United Methodist churches are even smaller. As of 2024, the General Council on Finance and Administration reports, 12,607 U.S. United Methodist churches — 64.5% of those that reported their attendance — had an average of 50 or fewer people in either in-person or online worship each week.
Wesleyan Impact Partners gave McShane the go-ahead to explore how these small United Methodist churches can thrive. To do so, McShane and her team first gathered nominations from other church leaders of already-thriving churches. They then recruited the pastor and lay leader from each congregation to join a cohort that met periodically with three facilitators in-person and online throughout 2025 and into January 2026.
In addition to Mancos, the cohort included Bryson City United Methodist in Bryson City, North Carolina; Eastside Church in Atlanta; First United Methodist in Liberty, North Carolina; Glendale United Methodist in Nashville, Tennessee; Joseph United Methodist in Joseph, Oregon; Nehalem Bay United Methodist in Nehalem Bay, Oregon; San Marco Church in Jacksonville, Florida; and Trinity United Methodist in Memphis.
The Rev. Anjie Peek Rivers, Eastside Church’s senior pastor, said the cohort’s conversations were unlike any she had experienced before. “It wasn’t about teaching us things. It was talking about how things work at our churches,” she said. “It was a sharing and learning together, or learning from us and our churches.”
Like an ecclesial version of science’s observer effect, the Wesleyan Impact Partners team soon discovered that merely examining these congregations’ ministries ended up changing them.
“When someone said to them, ‘We see you; we see you’re doing good work,’ … it was like they were sunflowers that turned their face up to the sun,” McShane told UM News.
“There were moments when the facilitators asked each other: Are we making flourishing small churches just by using this process? Because what we heard from every one of them was that shining a light on what they do made them better, made them more confident and more expansive in continuing to do the things that they were already doing.”
With that in mind, Wesleyan Impact Partners plans for this report to be only the start of a study of small congregations with more cohorts planned for congregations in different kinds of communities and contexts that showcase the diversity of U.S. United Methodists.
By the end of this cohort’s sessions, leaders of both Eastside and Glendale United Methodist acknowledged that they now exceed 50 in average attendance. But the report concluded that small churches can be successful in nurturing deep faith and spreading the Gospel even if they don’t get bigger.
McShane and her team found vital small congregations share distinctive strengths that are often overlooked within broader denominational conversations.
These strengths include a solid sense of identity and robust relationships.
“They’re not trying to be everything to everyone,” McShane said. “They’re very, very clear about their identity — what you might call the vocation of that particular congregation.”
Secondly, she added: “It’s not about programs. It’s about the trust and intimacy that builds between people inside the congregation, specifically between the pastor and the congregation.”
Strong identity
The experience of Mancos United Methodist shows how boldly proclaiming its identity helped expand the church’s ministry in the relatively conservative U.S. Four Corners region.
About a decade ago, the congregation voted to become a Reconciling congregation — joining the network of United Methodist churches that openly embrace LGBTQ people at a time when they still faced restrictions in the broader United Methodist Church.
Looking back, the Rev. Craig Paschal — Mancos’ pastor — said becoming a Reconciling church was a crucial step because “it gave us permission to love our neighbors and not to be apologetic about it.”
“It just opened up the doors of not just our church, but also our hearts,” said Paschal, the church’s pastor for the past 22 years. “This is what it means to follow Christ. And different people started coming into the church because that’s what they were looking for — what I just call a bigger God.”
In 2017, Mancos United Methodist members voted again to become a sanctuary church and soon put that decision into action. Rosa, the local Catholic church’s secretary at the time, faced deportation even though she was working through the legal process for permanent residency. Within a week of the church taking her in, a congregant had installed a shower in the church’s nursery.
For the next five years, the church and broader Mancos community provided her with food and shelter. Paschal added a bed to his office, so each night someone could stay onsite to halt immigration enforcement and unwanted visitors from entering.
Congregants also raised money for her mortgage and legal bills under the banner of “Rosa Belongs Here.” They did everything they could to draw attention to her plight — eventually getting her story on the front pages of the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post.
See report
That public attention brought wider awareness to how complex and capricious the U.S. immigration system can be even for people following the rules. It also helped her case. A court eventually granted her a stay of removal in 2022, allowing her to safely leave the church and work again.
The second Trump term is different, with houses of worship no longer safe from federal immigration enforcement even as multiple religious groups challenge that policy change in court.
However, Paschal said local immigrants know they have friends at Mancos United Methodist, and the wider community knows the congregation’s welcoming approach to disciple-making. The Mountain Sky Conference honored Paschal with an award in 2025 for his Spirit-led ministry and commitment to faith, inclusivity and justice.
“Especially with us being Reconciling and having been a sanctuary church, no one sits in our pew for a couple years trying to figure out if they like the church or not,” Paschal said.
“They can read that Reconciling statement and hear the prayers and messages, and they know really quick whether they want to be there or not. … People have become disciples at our church. But it’s not because of us. It’s literally the Holy Spirit moving through them.”
Strong relationships
Eastside Church in Atlanta’s gentrifying Eastside neighborhood is also a Reconciling United Methodist congregation and has its own strong sense of how it fits into God’s work.
Today, the multiethnic church averages about 90 people in weekly attendance— many of them young families. A quarter of those coming each week are children or youth under the age of 18. Some 60% of the congregation is involved in one of the church’s small groups.
Many of the adults who come to Eastside have seen the church at its worst, said Peek Rivers, the church’s pastor for the past two years.
Inspired by a poem by the recently deceased Wendell Berry, the church has declared its mission is “Practicing Resurrection.” By that, the church means, “practicing a transformed way of life to embody God’s love and liberation for all people.”
Peek Rivers said congregants know they can’t fulfill that mission alone. They help each other out and build community relationships.
The church is deeply involved in Eastside Community Hub and Outreach, called ECHO for short, that with community partners provides an outdoor 24/7 food pantry, free fridge and clothes closet. The church also works with a local homeless service to have a case worker onsite.
“We’re offering the resources we have and continuing to try to grow in our capacity for sharing more resources and more of our time and energy,” Peek Rivers said. “But it is the community volunteers who make that pantry happen.”
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Many of the adults at Eastside have seen church at its worst. Peek Rivers said she is in awe of the willingness of parishioners not just to deconstruct the harm they’ve experienced but reconstruct something better from the building blocks of faith. Being in a small church helps them do that reconstruction.
“These folks are really committed,” the pastor said. “They’re saying, ‘I’m not giving up on God. I’m not giving up on church. It’s something I still want or need, and I think it could be different.’”
All involved in the Wesleyan Impact Partners study acknowledged that financial sustainability remains a real challenge for small churches.
However, McShane sees value in releasing churches from the compulsion to grow larger. Such a move, she said, would empower congregations to live out The United Methodist Church’s new vision to love boldly, serve joyfully and lead courageously.
After all, early Christianity first grew across the Roman empire through small, intimate gatherings of worshippers.
“There are things that are possible in these small churches,” McShane said, “that are not possible in larger settings.”
Hahn is assistant news editor for UM News. Contact her at (615) 742-5470 or [email protected]. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digest.
