Thank you for tuning into Pew Talk on The E.A.R. Podcast! In this episode, host Brandon Queen continues his conversation with Rev. Bill Crawford on survival strategies for the small church. From fostering tight-knit communities and leveraging creativity to adaptive leadership and forging strategic partnerships, we’ll unpack the resilience and resourcefulness that define small churches. How do they overcome obstacles and remain faithful to their mission? We’re bringing real storie,s actionable insights, and celebrating small churches' enduring impact. Tune in for a 25–45 minute deep dive that inspires and equips small church leaders, members, and supporters alike. Whether you’re part of a small congregation or simply curious about their unique strengths, this episode will encourage you to embrace the power of community, leadership, and faith. Meet the Guest: Reverend Bill Crawford is the pastor at Bayou Christian Church and has been for the last 23 years. He and his wife Julia are the parents of three children: Timothy, Deborah, and Benjamin. Please listen to Episode #1 of this season to learn more about Reverend Bill Crawford. Don’t miss this engaging conversation—grab a seat and join us as we celebrate the mighty mission of small churches! Call to Action: Share, subscribe, and connect with us on social media to join the conversation. Let’s celebrate the big impact of small churches together!
The Ear, Evangelical and Reformed, Christian Podcast. Welcome to The Ear, the Evangelical and Reformed, a Christian podcast that urges you to think deeper and draws you closer to God through faith. Through powerful sermons, teaching segments, and discussions, The Ear hopes to give you a different perspective on secular topics from a Christian worldview. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
Please welcome your host, Brandon Queen.
Good morning, everybody. Welcome back to part two of surviving strategies of the small church. Today, we're going to dive right into the conversation with Pastor Bill Crawford to continue what we started last week. Join in.
you know, God moments. I found myself with the opportunity to begin a committee to found a charter school here in Thibodeau, and that was back in 2007. The school was actually chartered in 2010. I really can't fully express to you how difficult it was. We had a... would put together a team and they would disappear and I put together another team and they would disappear.
Got to the point where we were down to approval and I had to take out a $35,000 loan to make the first payroll payment with my own credit. And we were able to do that. We were able to pay everybody's first round of salaries and finish out the process. And today, I think it's 13, 14 years later, Bayou Community Academy is the 27th highest rated school in the state of Louisiana.
We are an open enrollment school that competes with closed enrollment schools for that ranking. And so it's quite, quite an accomplishment. So that's not a Christian school. It's a public school. And we have leaders in that school that are Christian and non-Christian.
But I believe we've attacked, back to your questions about ethnicity and inclusion, what I perceive as a systemic evil here in the state of Louisiana is that our education system stinks. It's not because the people are awful. We have wonderful educators. We have wonderful administrators here in Lafourche. We are blessed with incredible leaders in the school board system.
I'm not criticizing them, but we're just not where we should have been. And so Bayou Community Academy gets founded. Our church supported that. They have endorsed that as a ministry of my faith. My presence here is a teaching elder, so it's something I can, you know, write off the expenses. I can take work time to go and do this. And that's been a commitment for many, many years.
And I get more, I promise you, I get more hugs on my neck and more comments on the street about that school than I do most any other role in my ministry. And so, yeah. Being a small church pastor, you can engage your community in very serious ways. We're not a rural town, but we're a smallish town. A pastor is often, a Presbyterian pastor especially, is often an educated person.
They can do many things. I have management backgrounds, I have lots of skills that were able to come to play in that. Likewise, we don't have a lot of programs because we're small, and therefore many of our leaders are also leaders in other nonprofits. And so that's kind of the quiet secret about PersPres by community church, Christian church, sorry about that.
I've got the community academy in there. It's gonna happen. It's my fault. No, it's gonna happen. And but, you know, we are able to engage the community in leadership roles and support roles and then support each other as we do those things. And so we do shape the community in that way. I'm also often amazed and surprised by how people in our community view me, view our congregation.
And I've had several people say when they ask me how large our church is, and I tell them 60 members, they're just stunned. And that's because we have influence. And so the small church can have influence in the small town, and we can have influence far beyond our size. And we should take advantage of that.
And we need to for the kingdom, because even if we're not drawing people into our facility, we are impacting the kingdom all the time. And the small church is part of a glorious story that is going on all around us. And we have a role in that story, regardless of our size. And so Karina Gambrell, lay pastor in the EPC, talks about the great big small church.
And she gets so excited when she talks about it. And I will borrow her phrase. There is this effect that we can have where we're the great big small church. And we do have an impact beyond our size because the Holy Spirit is in us and the gospel we're presenting is more powerful than us. And so we need to live in that truth, even though it's a dark time in many ways. It's a troubling time.
We're battling for sustainability. Pastors are having a hard time paying their bills. All those things can be true and the gospel can be advancing. The kingdom work can be getting done. And so we want to be honest on both sides of that equation, not get too caught up in the hard stuff. We need to know the hard stuff, but we also need to never forget the good stuff.
I like that. Now, I do want to ask more of a personal question, but it's also a question that you can probably give to younger pastors coming into the ministry. So how do small churches provide pastoral care and emotional support to their members during hard times or crises or, you know, whatever personal hardships they may come up with?
Well, I think it's different for every church. And again, that's the thing about small churches is they're weird. They're all different. And so, you know, traditionally small churches would come in. I think many, many, many, many small churches still do this. Someone will start coordinating meals. Somebody will do this. Somebody will do that. So All of those things happen.
These informal systems happen in a small church. They carry a lot of weight and they get a great deal accomplished. And so I think the role of a teaching elder that comes into a small church is to kind of tease out all of those informal systems and certainly not get in the way of any of them, certainly not ruin any of them by trying to make them too formal.
but also being able to utilize them and make sure they're not missing anything. And so you don't wanna miss a member because they're not in a certain group or a certain clique or somebody doesn't have their phone number. But you wanna utilize, if you have deacons, you wanna be utilizing them. If you have elders, you wanna utilize them.
So we have had conversations over 23 years in the eldership and deacons about just doing the work. Don't wait for me to call. And more and more, Brandon, you've seen it. I've seen it. A member will be in the hospital. And by the time I get there, two elders have already been there. you know, our deacons have already been in house.
I didn't even know about something and the deacons were there, took care of it, didn't even call me because it didn't require my attention. Those are all things that should be happening. And if they're not happening, then you need to work that direction. And again, in a small church, as a leader, you need to be careful how you move that ball.
You don't want to come in criticizing because one of the things I learned, and I think younger pastors need to know this, whenever you come into a church and criticize something, that's in play, especially if it's a formal system, you are criticizing someone. See, in a big church, you change a program, it's a committee, it's a group, it's a this, it's a that.
In a small church, when you change something, someone initiated that, and you're telling those people that someone is wrong. Now, what if that's their grandmother? What if that's some famous pastor? Well, you need to address that no matter how wrong you think it is. You need to address that very carefully and pastorally and with care.
And so sometimes there are systems that are unhealthy in a small church around this caregiving thing. But again, you need to start, one, make sure you're showing up, make sure you're doing the work, make sure you know who's sick. And then also... My word to all the elders, all of the deacons is, if there's something going on that I need to be involved in, I need you to get me involved.
If you think I know and you don't see me, Make sure I know, because maybe I don't. And that has happened as well.
Now, I do, briefly, because this is a whole other series, if you will. We've been a huge part of disaster relief. And when I asked that question, I was actually trying to wade into that a little bit. So we've had some major hurricanes and they can get tiresome, they can get annoying. If you live in South Louisiana, you know what I'm talking about when we say hurricanes. We hate them.
several small churches around here has stepped up their game as far as being there for people whenever hurricanes hit. And I know we've done a decent job at that.
Yeah. So again, that's every church is different. Every approach is different. You know, I was on the National Disaster Relief Committee for its first year founding, worked with that committee, very proud of their work, very proud to be involved with the group that they collected, Whitney Alexander and one of the co-chairs at this point. He was the chair at that point.
And what I learned there, and I'm gonna get to your question, is that disasters are something that happened to me, to my community. They're not something I go looking for. So a lot of people that do disaster relief, do disaster relief work, that they are in the missions of doing disaster relief, it's actually something they go looking to do because they have a heart to help people.
It's not that I don't have a heart to help people, but that's not really my calling. I'm a pastor. It's funny because I've become known as a disaster relief guy. So the nickname is the pastor of disaster. And the reality is I've been through over 20 named hurricanes, storms, I guess, tropical storms and hurricanes since I've been here, probably without any kind of bragging.
I think it'd be very honest. I've been here 23 years. have been through more name storms than any other pastor in the EPC. The only one close would be Whitney Alexander, but Whitney is someone who goes after this and he goes into it and he does the work in an amazing way.
So I want to be careful with that because it's not that we as a church have made this conscious decision to go chase down disasters all over the world and be involved. When a storm happens, we engage. Now, we've engaged at all kinds of different levels. And so the small church can engage at all kinds of different levels. They can have a dramatic impact in a disaster or a very small.
So it needs to be discerned in each church what their engagement would be, how they would approach it, how they would engage. Often that happens very organically. My friend Rob McClellan is in North Carolina right now. And they ended up cooking in the church because they had gas stoves and gas hot water heaters.
And so they got going and restaurants were like, look, our freezer is about to thaw out. You want this food? And so they just kept cooking. That wasn't a plan. They didn't have a contingency. Oh, if North Carolina gets wiped out by hurricane, like anybody was thinking that, that we'll cook. No, they started into that. And so that's the beauty of the organic food.
the informal systems that a small church can dive into. Now for us, there's a, there's much more intentionality. I'm into it. Like I personally have a calling in this area. It's something I am personally really pretty good at. And the church has often at times just let me go and have my fun, you know, and over the years have more and more gotten heavily engaged in it.
And so like the last hurricane, I did not really have to lead all of our efforts. We had a room in the church, the fellowship hall turned into a food pantry and we had people running that. I was hardly involved in it other than the supervisor talked to them about what they were doing. We had disaster relief work going on that I got up and running.
But then we were able through First Presbyterian Roots to have somebody come in and help coordinate that. We had teams that were going out without me being there. And so Ida was probably one of our, not our largest operation, but probably one of our healthiest teams. more involved across the church spectrum.
And that is certainly something small churches can do because we don't wait for a formal proclamation to occur to begin to act. Yeah. And then it's incumbent on those leaders, whether it be the ruling elders, teaching elders, to go, hey, there's something happening here. Let's grab this and run with it.
But I will say, as a caveat, because we've been talking around church growth stuff, disaster relief work does not really grow a church numerically. No, it doesn't. It has the potentiality to significantly grow a church spiritually, and certainly in the sense of its trust in the sovereignty of God.
But that work is challenging and hard, and people do not, fortunately in a way, I guess, people do not respond to your church's ministry and disaster relief as your church's ministry and disaster relief. They see it as the body of Christ, which is beautiful.
So that person that you help, they may come into the kingdom as a result of the work, but there's no guarantee at all that they're coming to your church. So this is, again, one of those things you don't do because it's effective to grow the church. You do it because it's the right thing to do.
And we do see people deeply impacted. What I will do for all my small church pastors out there and to all the elders and if you're even not Presbyterian in other denominations, if your pastor goes out and does the work of disaster relief, I'm going to urge my elders to step in and help fill the pulpit whenever he's doing that work or be able to call other people in, pastors in to help preach.
Because one of the things that happened for Ida was, and I was very big on this, like, okay, Pastor Bill, you need a break. Like, I know you're doing a lot. I know you love preaching. I know you love helping with disaster, but let's get some people in to help, you know, help you keep going. active at the disaster relief.
So I do want to encourage whenever disaster hits, and don't go looking for them if you don't have to, is to be available for those communities that were hit by hurricanes or tornadoes or whatever, and just be pulpit supply.
Yeah, and there's a rhythm to that. And so if you are in a small church and you're ever hit by a disaster, I actually have a decision making document that I've written that it's kind of an oral kind of document. written document that you can walk through and read through and begin to think through the process.
It actually gives you supplies you might need at the 24-hour period, 36-hour period, 72-hour period, one week, two weeks, and I kind of break it out from 20 years of doing this, but it also gives you moments to go reflect, what do I need to be doing? How do I need to rest? It's absolutely true, though, that that pastor needs to as much as possibly be in the pulpit
early on, comforting the people, speaking to the people. They need to see you. They need to hear from you. Don't worry about the quality of the message. Don't worry about the quantity of the preparation. Worry about the quality of the love and the message and the gospel in that. But then, yes, they do need time. If they're running operations, if they're involved in
daily work that they do need some time out of the pulpit so they can focus on ministering the gospel in their community. And that's a hard rhythm for pastors to figure out because they also are deeply aware of how much their people need to hear comfort and peace. And sometimes you bring people in and they missed the mark. I mean, they're not really reading the scene very well.
But nonetheless, God always works. And if they're preaching the gospel, it really doesn't ultimately matter if they made a mistake. And so, yeah, you should let that happen. But I do understand the challenges of it as well. Do appreciate that.
Yeah. Okay. Bonus round. This is just questions. Okay. All right. How can a small church pastor or how can small church pastors balance their personal duties? Correction. How can small church pastors balance their pastoral duties while engaging meaningfully with their congregation?
So you have to set a rhythm of life. You know, my rhythm of life right now, and it adapts it from time to time, is that I do work a six day week. I don't really get obsessed about how many hours I'm working. Some weeks it's more, some weeks it's less, but that you have a rhythm of life. I try to be home for dinner as much as I can. Church events tend to happen at night.
And so you have to be aware of that. And so as a pastor, you need to be dialed into, especially if you're a younger pastor with a younger family, you need to be home. You need to be with your wife and your children. in an appropriate manner. And so you need to have frank conversations with your elders about, I want to be at all these meetings, but I also need to be with my family.
Your children do not understand fully what's going on. They don't have a sense of your role. They just know that they miss their dad. And so rhythm of life. So it used to be, I would take a
every friday off and saturday mornings was soccer and then i would come in on saturday afternoon and get ready for worship that's just me that's the way i'm wired but saturday's a a day that i can either take off or show up and but it's a rhythm see it's the same rhythm it's a routine rhythm if i move off a friday then i take a different day off that's fine but so that that rhythm has changed a little bit now because i work almost a 12-hour day on sundays
And so I take kind of Monday morning off. I come in late. If I work late, often it's on a Monday. And so I kind of shift that back. But then it's Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday off. And then Saturday I work as much as I need to. And that's my rhythm because I like to come in to worship having just finished my last run through with everything. your rhythm may be different.
You may be a five day a week kind of person. Um, I'm adamant about taking a Sabbath and having a day off. And I think it needs to be a routine day off. It gives your congregation the ability to know, leave pastor alone. My phone almost never rings on Friday, uh,
There's a couple people with the superpower who call me on Friday almost every other week, but that's okay because I politely say I'm still off on Fridays and they laugh. And it's not a hostile thing. It's just a rhythm and rhythms change as they need to. But I think that is your moral obligation because pastor, your church needs you there. Small churches in particular need you there a long time.
And so you want to build a rhythm so that you can run the marathon of ministry, not the race of the next year or two. So, again, I've been here 23 years. I think this rhythm has been effective and a very important part of my sustainability in ministry. I think I answered your question maybe a little differently than you expected.
You gave a lot to that question. I like that. So how can small church pastors engage growth and community engagement with resources and volunteers and availability of what their limits are?
So the EPC has this material called 50 Days of Vitality, and they have another set of materials that are kind of companions to that. I'm blanking out on the name. Church health coordinators can help you find that if your presbytery has one. Almost every presbytery has one. And in that, they talk about the elders praying for your church's ministry or mission through the church.
And at first, that really bugged me. It sounded very manipulative. But that's what in a small church you have to do is, who are your members? Those are your ambassadors to Christ. How are they wired? That's why you got to know everybody. You got to know them personally and How are they wired? What are they capable of?
How do you use that to engage the community instead of trying to pull some kind of program out of thin air and pay for it to happen? It's already there. You just have to discover it. I like that.
So last question. Yep. What advice would you give to a small church pastor or pastors that are discouraged by the challenges of leading a smaller congregation?
Yeah, well, um, I'm not going to demean that because it can be hard and it may have nothing to do with your love for the people, uh, relationships in that congregation and maybe any number of other things. Um, I would encourage you to pray very hard about it. Um,
check your own self check what you can control have you done anything wrong do you need to unwind some things do you need to unpack some past wrongs maybe you've been there a while and you've built yourself into a situation but then you need to really do some self-evaluation am i am i in the right place am i called here
um and if you are in the right place then you need to do whatever it takes um and that's that sounds trite but um you know there there are times where it gets hard and it's often more about you than it is about the circumstance um and so you have to pray through those times i think um
having an accountability partner, having a mentor that you can pick up the phone and call and talk to about what's going on. In my case, I'm very fortunate. I have very good relationships with the eldership and can call them and talk to them.
I have several of them that I'll just go and visit with them and just talk things through, not in a trying to sort out the problem way, but like, this is what I'm struggling with. What do you think about that? And so I think a lot of our struggle is that we tend to be kind of cloistered in our office dreaming about where the church can go, and we're missing what's there.
But again, Brandon, that situational awareness. So again, back to our original conversation, we're closing 100 churches a week in America. Small churches in particular are not paying their bills. They're underpaid, underutilized. Even if they are paid correctly and people love them, there's not enough work. And so they don't feel satisfied that they're even earning what they're getting.
There's all kinds of complexity to those emotions. And I can't answer for all of that. It's a hard season to be a small church pastor. There's no question about it. So it's back to the statement, how do you grow a church? You do the old things, whether they work or not, because you're supposed to do them. You need to pray. Yeah. You need to reflect and meditate on the word.
You need to think about what God's called you to and why. And then you need to assess, are you doing that? And really those are the things you have to do. And sometimes it'll take years to get through it. And maybe you don't, maybe you have to leave that church and that's very painful. And maybe you don't know what the next step is and that's very painful, but
I think if you keep praying and if you keep choosing faithfulness, then that's what really ultimately matters.
Awesome. Well, that's going to close us out. I want to thank you guys for listening into this episode of Pew Talk, our conversation on understanding the church. If you want to find out more or hear some of Pastor Bill's sermons, you can check out our YouTube page. I want to get it wrong, but I'm just going to tell you the name. The name of the church is Bayou Christian Church.
You can search that on YouTube. And actually, as of right now, we're going through the 50 days of vitality. So those sermons are powerful. Go take a listen to them and stay tuned for more episodes of Pew Talk with the small church.
And I want to encourage all of my listeners, if you are part of a small church or even part of a bigger church, I want you to reflect on the impact that the small church may have on a community. Until next time, keep loving God, keep worshiping, and I'll see you next time on this conversation of the small church. Thank you.
You have reached the end of yet another episode from the ear. We hope that God's word remains on the ears of the listeners. We pray that this podcast would urge you to go forth and spread his good news to the world. Thank you for tuning in. Please don't forget to subscribe to our podcast. See you at the next episode. God bless you and may his glory shine upon you.