So, I get to church a little late. Me & the boss spent a bit too long at the office comparing notes on a few projects before he heads out of town. Plus, I was kinda tired and lazy after a pretty long day. By the time I did arrive, I'd missed a few songs of praise & worship and knew I'd have to settle for a seat far more distant that I'd prefer.

It's amazing how God wastes nothing. I end up forcing my way to one of the sections that was really supposed to be shut off. Back row. I opted to sit through the rest of praise & worship and see what there is I can revel in while seated quietly, recovering from a day of mental exhaustion. As luck would have it, I noticed the section for the hearing impaired was rather unpopulated. Well, not entirely. There was, of course, the one lady doing sign language. But there was also one other lady enjoying the music for all it was worth. It just struck me as amazing that in this church that packs 16,000 into the seats at the Sunday 11am service and that see over 40,000 turn the virtual turnstile as they enter our doors (that is to say *if* we had turnstiles) ... here's a veritable church for one going on under the same roof. It was, by far, the most beautiful thing I think I've seen in the sanctuary in some time (with all due apologies to Cindy Cruse Ratcliff, Victoria Osteen, Dodie Osteen, Lisa Comes and scores of other astoundingly beautiful women who grace our church with their presence on a regular basis).

Anyway, point being that it made the night for me to notice that. In reading Shane Claiborne's "The Irresistible Revolution," I'm in the final pages of it and there's more than a few critical notes on big churches. Claiborne spent time as an intern with Willow Creek Church in the Chicago area. And his criticisms are one for care of the larger church community, not the more frequent juvenile attacks on display elsewhere.

But still, I had that in mind as I'm watching this - realizing that while many folks think of Lakewood as a big church, I have a hard time seeing it that way. Sure, there's a lot of people there. Even on a slow Wednesday, there's 3-4,000 in the seats. Bigger than 99% of the churches at peak time on a Sunday. But the Lakewood I see also has some great group settings that number in the hundreds (L7, Koinonia, Celebrate Recovery, etc ...). There's our groups that measure in the nearly-a-hundred range like the group that heads out to a late dinner after Koinonia on Saturdays. There's the Compass Classes and Freedom Series classes that meet in groups of twenty to sixty or so to go in more depth of Bible study and other specific topics. There are the circles of friendship that measure anywhere from two to ten ... or, if you're really popular, maybe even a hundred or more.

And then there's this occasional church for one like the one I got to see Wednesday night. It's enough to make you rethink the whole "big church" concept. I mean, maybe we're not a big church - we're just a lot of smaller churches under one roof. Or we're still a small church in the sense that all followers of Christ are called to be one church.