Nice is not a growth strategy.



When I was a young adult, I worked at a Christian summer camp called Camp Mini-Yo-We. You know the place; canoes skimming across a glassy lake, worship songs around a campfire that somehow made the stars feel closer, friendships soldered together over bug juice and burnt marshmallows. It was the first laboratory where I learned leadership, not from a book, but from a cabin of eleven-year-olds who expected their counselor to be part sherpa, part coach, part mom.



Six campers. That was our number. Six guys barely fit around the heavy pine dining-hall tables. I could sit at the head and scan the whole universe in one glance, who needed seconds, who needed sleep, who needed a nudge to apologize. At night, everyone got airtime as conversation slid into the delicious randomness only Summer Camp can produce. Six names? Between the 10 a.m. opening-day staff huddle and the 2 p.m. arrival window, I could have them down cold, name and hometown, hopefully making those first few moments of my campers’ time at Summer Camp a little easier by knowing their names.



Then I moved up to an older program. Ten campers.



Ten changed everything. Now we needed two tables. Walking around Camp, I had to count in my head like a security detail, “one, two, three…” because a head swivel no longer covered it. Ten names felt exponentially harder than six, not 33% harder … impossibly harder. The inside jokes multiplied faster than I could track them. Dynamics shifted. I couldn’t “pastor” each kid in the same way anymore; I had to build systems … ask guys to look out for each other, delegate a table leader, plan check-ins, and enforce lights-out like clockwork.Leading six was craft. Leading ten required architecture.



I learned young: group size changes everything; the experience, the culture, and the leadership it takes to keep people safe, growing, and moving together. Scale doesn’t just add complexity; it alters the physics. And that truth doesn’t stop at the lake.



“Niceness Trap”: How Healthy Cultures Turn Hazardous at 800



Let’s be blunt: 800 is a trap size. Only a sliver of North American Protestant churches ever hit 500–1,000 in attendance, roughly 4 percent, and fewer than 2 percent ever break 1,000. [ref]



That’s not random; it’s structural. At 800, what got you here, tight relationships, consensus leadership, and that beloved “family feel”, quietly becomes the lid on what God could do next.



Tim Keller called this “size culture.” Every size behaves differently, and if you impose small-church expectations on a larger body, like expecting the senior pastor to be personally available to everyone, you wreak havoc. Decision-making slows to a crawl, six-hour elder meetings become normal, and leaders burn out doing shepherding that should be owned by teams and systems.



How the Niceness Trap shows up:




* Consensus as a creed. “We won’t move until everyone’s on board” sounds godly; it’s actually institutionalized paralysis at this size.



* The family becomes a club. Insider language, cliques, and a crowded calendar built around the already-committed signal to newcomers: this isn’t for you.



* Comfort over clarity. Leaders avoid disappointing legacy members, so innovation dies in committee.