Those with care of the souls at this stage of development in our beleaguered church are more and more often given to understand that physical growth - "outreach," as "churchmanese" has it - is our desperate need. But we are ordered to this task in secular and corporate, not mystical, terms. In that we're short of cash everywhere, rectors and vicars are advised to "grow or begone."

We are told, "No longer can one be a mere 'maintenance priest' ... The day of the 100-person church is over," it is unquestioningly affirmed, as if such a congregation were a quaint relic of some appreciated but best forgotten past.

Governed more by polls than theology, it is demanded that our priests become "entrepreneurs." In a financially faltering church, we are told to provide as many services for as many people as possible; the more "need-specific," the more "visitor-friendly," the more "entrepreneurial" the better. A rock band, a gaggle of kazoos - whatever is available! Meetings of teenaged unmarried mothers, tap-dance lessons, gatherings of parolees. In sum, meetings for the whole alphabetical soup of acronymic social-need groups. New meaning is given to "going out onto the highways and byways."

Suddenly, a key question arises: Are we ignoring another kind of growth, a growth which ought to be undertaken concomitant with, even prior to, "outreach"? An internal growth, a growth in the Spirit, in theological profundity, in the contemplation of, in the adoration, of God?

For the moment, ask what if a congregation dared to reach, not "out," but within, into the Spirit of God? What if it did not quail at remaining for the present "fewer than a hundred people" and devoted itself assiduously to prayer; for its diocese, for newly arriving immigrants, for problem-plagued neighboring urban parishes, for the exploding clergy, the imploding teenagers, for small children left alone, addicts, the dying - a whole litany of daily prayers?

What if each day the priest in this still small church arose to say Morning Prayer and the Eucharist? Effectively then and there the whole church, the Christ in his body mystical, would be at prayer in union with the Holy Spirit, raising to our hallowed "Abba" in heaven adoration and petition, reparation and thanksgiving. According to the doctrine of the Communion of Saints, all members of the church throughout the world and in the world to come would benefit at once and infinitely from that altar of sacrifice - though there be at first but a single parishioner joining with that priest!

If again at midday, in that same undersized but infinitely productive church, its members gathered for Noonday Prayer, and again in the late afternoon for Evensong, and if, as a part of their evening class or meeting Compline were recited, would not the members of such a parish be in fact the mystical body of Christ officially at prayer in the traditional Anglican manner?

What would be a more appropriate work and what more could that congregation do? Though such a church remain "unimportant" on the graphs and polls of the corporate world called "dioceses," it would in time confound the strong by wielding a power of which the world knows nothing - the power which we as a church are not sufficiently wielding at this crucial time in history.

Power in the small church is found in its quietude, strength in its serenity. The kind of intimacy which was known in tiny, out-of-the-way Nazareth is the intimacy one can find in the small parish. Just as there was in the early years of our Lord's life a need for the gentleness of a small village, so nowadays there might well be set aside a similar place for people to be with their Lord in prayer. Not in the bustle of the city, nor in the mad fury of urban streets, but in the gentleness of a small church.

Some churches, by the accident of their geographic location, have to accept the challenge of giantism. Blessed are the congregations which have so far been spared that fate. They are not unlike the home of Martha and Mary in the gospel, not unlike the monastics and eremitics who have long served the church so well. Such small communities have been through the centuries vigilant altars of prayer supplying the underpinning for their brothers and sisters throughout the maelstrom of history, the foundation which is sanctifying grace mightily shared.

This suggestion is, of course, "impractical," unless we truly believe that God alone gives all increase. There is much more about church growth to be learned from contemplatives than from the activists in the church-growth industry, as assuredly there is far more to be learned on this subject from the study of the communion of saints than from "mega-church" seminars.

Too often, confusing polls and business practices for theology, we hear as current wisdom: "Build it and they will come." Satisfy popular demands and they will pour numbers into your pews, funds into your coffers - guaranteed!

At what point shall we cease merely entertaining, currying people's favor, gathering great crowds of handouts of parapsychological pablum? When will we give them the stuff of mature Christian life? Or is the question rather, Do we ourselves know what the stuff of mature Christian life is?

"Martha, Martha," chided the Lord, as if to tell her to consider the truer picture there at Bethany, where the arrival of many guests threw her into panic and she lost sight of the meaning of the arrival of Jesus at her house. "Mary has chosen the better part," our Lord said, pointing out the more important meaning in his visit.

Mary is also correct in what she is doing, he tells Martha, so her role shall not be taken from her. Can these words apply to the small church in today's world? If fact, could they not make "all the difference"? o