An interesting phenomenon exists in the U.S. church: unless your congregation was started by some missional expression such as GSE – regardless of size – it was based on an elephant church model. The founding pastor model has been the most used approach to starting churches since at least the 1960s. This model hopes to produce numerically large churches. Even if your congregation is numerically small, it was birthed and grown within the elephant/ founding pastor system. It is all you know.

Because it is all you know, a church of 20 holds itself accountable to similar expressions as a church of 2000. But they also have the inferiority complex that it breeds. Since this is systemically true, what can we do about it and how can we move into Jesus’ harvest field more effectively and aggressively?

First, we need to move away from the elephant church model and toward the rabbit church model. For example, the columns below show structures of elephant churches compared with rabbit churches and how those structures impact the harvest.