Big juggernauts or tacking ships

There’s a bit of a circular loop bumbling around my head about the optimal size for church bodies.

With a 100 people:

you can usually form all the core components of church life, have project ministries to your neighbourhoods, have enough finance to support one or two paid staff and have sufficient equipment and skilled personnel for bands, children’s work and preaching.

With 400+ people:

the resources gathered can do significantly more, meetings have a different feel, multiple projects can be established, maintained and (crucially) passed on to another continuing the work.  There’s finance for more paid staff (including administrative) and the reach of the church can be a great deal further than the more local 100.

With 1000+:

places to gather are very constrictive and relationally connected groups are needed to create oneness.  Communication and participation can become almost solely front led, or led by department heads but the ability to launch something, staff it, resource it and deliver it becomes easily attainable. Undoubtedly the reach is further than with 100 people, is it more or less than 10x? I don’t know.  When a church body approaches 1% to 2% of a geographic location’s population the church voice can start to be heard (along side it’s actions) and the ability to shape policy and highlight social change becomes dramatically easier.

Here’s the questions:

A church body aspiring to be 100 will rarely reach bigger than 100.  - Is that such a bad thing if the contribution on the ground is effective, localised and well regarded?  - Should a key metric of effectiveness ALWAYS be numerical growth?  Is it more likely that we can build many churches of 100 or so, and that we need to work more strategically together to accomplish more, rather than building mega churches?

Moving from 100 – 400 (via the inevitable 200) is a challenge.. the processes and communication methods that can work with 100, don’t work as successfully with 200, and worse with 400. Email discussions become a nightmare with more than 3 people in them, and planning meetings (and meetings in general) seem to need to increase to get anything done.   Does relationship suffer in this process? Does the output from church life become projectised rather than loving?  is there a propensity to carry more passengers than activists?  Are the 100+ leaders the same as 400+ leaders?

Foundationally, should our church communities have bigger numbers in mind than the next numerical growth target?  for instance, is it ludicrous to act like a church of 1000 when you only have 60 people? Does there need to be consensus in the minds of leadership teams and department heads that we’re going for numerical growth, and what that growth looks like?  How do we ensure that economics are geared around how we serve, not maintaining buildings or other assets?  How does vision change as size increases?