Banyan Church

In western India stands a banyan tree known as Kabirvad, named after the poet-saint Kabir. It is often described as one of the largest banyan trees in the world, though such measurements do little to prepare a visitor for the experience of standing beneath it. Kabirvad spreads across more than four acres—an area comparable to three football fields laid side by side. Its canopy is held aloft by hundreds of prop roots that have thickened into trunks, creating a structure that feels less like a single tree and more like a living landscape. Paths curve between pillars of living wood, and what first appears to be a grove or forest gradually reveals itself as something stranger and more unified: a single organism that learned how to grow vast without collapsing under its own weight.

The banyan does grow upward—it has height, mass, and presence—but it does not depend on height alone. Its most distinctive growth is outward. Branches extend horizontally, sometimes for more than 50 feet, and as they lengthen, the tree sends aerial roots downward from the branch itself—often while the branch is still light, while expansion is still unfolding. The banyan does not wait for stress before it roots. It prepares for weight before the weight fully arrives, anchoring growth early so that extension remains sustainable. Over time, this pattern alters how the tree is perceived. The original trunk often becomes difficult to identify. Visitors ask where the tree “began,” and the answer is uncertain or contested. Yet nothing essential has been lost. Kabirvad did not endure by growing taller, more prominent, or more centralized. It endured by rooting wherever it extended. Every meaningful reach was accompanied by a descent. The banyan’s vastness is not the result of unchecked expansion, but of disciplined grounding—a form of distributed strength that allows life to take hold in many places at once, even at the cost of losing a clearly defined center.

The church, too, grows. And as it grows, it faces a question not unlike the one the banyan quietly answers: will expansion be matched by grounding, or will reach begin to outrun the conditions that make life sustainable? The issue the banyan raises is not whether growth is good. Growth, after all, is a sign of life. The question is what kind of growth preserves life rather than stretching it to the point of fracture.

In the church, growth is often spoken of with an air of inevitability and virtue. Attendance increases. Buildings expand. Programs multiply. Influence widens. These developments are usually celebrated without hesitation, and when they are questioned, it is often on pragmatic grounds—financial sustainability, staffing capacity, or organizational strain. Rarely are they treated as theological matters requiring discernment. Scripture, however, approaches growth more cautiously. Growth is never assumed to be self-justifying. It is something to be interpreted. At times it signals blessing; at other times it functions as a test of faithfulness. The biblical imagination remains alert to the possibility that expansion, if left unexamined, can quietly strain the very conditions that make shared life possible.

Bodies, after all, cannot stretch indefinitely without injury. Relationships cannot multiply without cost. Attention cannot be expanded endlessly without thinning. Care does not scale automatically. It must be transformed if it is to remain care at all. When growth outruns grounding, the result is not always visible collapse. More often, it is subtle erosion. The institution may appear healthy. Participation may remain high. Resources may increase. Yet the quality of presence begins to change. What once relied on shared life gradually depends on structure. What once required attentiveness is now handled by process. Growth succeeds institutionally even as it becomes pastorally hollow.

This is why the question of scale is never merely logistical. It is moral in the deepest sense. It concerns what kind of people the church is forming and what kind of care it is capable of offering. A church can become large without becoming deep. It can become influential without becoming attentive. It can succeed in ways that quietly leave people unseen. The banyan offers a different logic. Growth is not denied, but it is disciplined. Extension is matched by anchoring. Weight is distributed before it becomes unbearable. The tree does not wait until branches begin to tear before sending roots downward. Grounding is not a reaction to crisis; it is a condition of continued life.

If the church is to grow without losing its soul, it must ask similar questions—not after growth has already strained its limits, but while growth is still possible to guide. The issue is not whether expansion will happen, but whether it will be accompanied by forms of grounding that preserve proximity, attentiveness, and care. It is at this point that the Gospels bring the question into sharp relief—not through theory or strategy, but through the eyes of Jesus Himself.

The Gospels locate this tension not in theory, but in a moment of sight. Jesus looks upon the crowds and is moved with compassion, because they are “like sheep without a shepherd.” The problem He names is not ignorance, nor unbelief, nor moral disorder. It is exposure. Sheep without shepherds are vulnerable not because they lack doctrine, but because they lack care. This distinction matters. The crowds Jesus sees are not outsiders alone. They are people who have gathered. They have followed. They are present. Yet presence without shepherding leaves them unprotected. To be without a shepherd is not to be absent from religious life, but to be unattended within it.

The condition Jesus names feels uncomfortably familiar. Many church attendees today are faithful, committed, and sincere. They attend regularly. They serve when asked. They give generously. They believe rightly. And yet, many also experience church as anonymous. They are present, but largely unseen. Known perhaps by participation or attendance, but not by name, story, or struggle. This experience is not always the result of neglect or indifference. Often, it is the quiet consequence of growth that has outpaced grounding. As congregations expand, the distance between leaders and people increases almost imperceptibly. Care does not disappear; it diffuses. What once happened through shared life is now handled through layers of mediation. The structure remains intact, but proximity thins.

Jesus’ compassion, then, is not merely emotional. It is diagnostic. He recognizes what happens when people gather in large numbers without corresponding structures of care. Sheep may remain within the flock and yet feel unheld. They may be surrounded by activity and still feel exposed. This is not a critique of sincerity or success. It is a recognition of limits. Care can be delegated; shepherding cannot. Shepherding requires presence. Presence requires attention. Attention cannot be multiplied without transformation. When growth exceeds the capacity for relational care, the result is not immediate failure, but a quiet form of abandonment.

Jesus responds to this condition not by drawing the crowds more tightly around Himself, nor by intensifying His own visibility. He names the problem where it actually resides and begins to address it structurally: by ensuring that care will exist beyond His personal reach, close enough to be real. This response—still unfolding in the life of the church—leads directly into the question of shepherding itself: how many can one shepherd truly know, and what must happen when that limit is exceeded?

Every shepherd encounters a limit, though it rarely announces itself clearly or dramatically. More often, it arrives quietly. A conversation is postponed. A name is forgotten. A pastoral visit becomes a scheduled appointment rather than an interruption of daily life. None of this signals failure. It signals finitude. Scripture never treats human limits as a defect to be overcome. It treats them as a condition to be honored. Moses learns this through exhaustion, when Jethro names what God had already made evident: one man cannot carry the weight of a people alone without breaking himself or them. The solution is not greater endurance, but shared responsibility—leaders of tens, of hundreds, of thousands—care brought closer to those who need it.

The same pattern appears in the early church. As the community in Jerusalem grows, the apostles do not attempt to remain the sole point of care. When complaints arise over neglected widows, they do not tighten control or expand their personal reach. They ask the community to choose leaders from among themselves. Seven are appointed—not because they are fully formed, but because the need for care cannot wait for perfection. Authority is distributed while formation continues.

This willingness to entrust responsibility before maturity becomes even more striking in Paul’s ministry. Paul rarely stays long in any one place. He appoints elders quickly, sometimes in communities only recently converted. By modern standards, this seems reckless. Leaders are inexperienced. Structures are fragile. Yet Paul appears less concerned with immaturity than with absence. A young shepherd close at hand is preferable to a seasoned apostle far away. Formation happens not before responsibility, but through it. Here, weakness is not a liability to be concealed, but a condition through which strength emerges. New trunks are set into the ground early, while growth is still unfolding. They may not yet bear full weight, but they are given time to thicken, to deepen, to learn what it means to hold life. The alternative—waiting for perfect readiness—leaves branches suspended too long, straining against distance and delay.

Pastoral limits, then, are not barriers to growth. They are signals pointing toward its proper shape. When a congregation grows beyond the capacity of one shepherd to know, listen, correct, and care, the solution is not the addition of ever more layers of management. It is the multiplication of rooted shepherds—people with real authority, real presence, and real responsibility, even while they are still learning to carry it. This is where many churches hesitate. Systems feel safer than trust. Oversight feels more controllable than shared authority. Yet Scripture repeatedly suggests that life is not preserved by minimizing risk, but by distributing it. Shepherding that remains centralized may appear stable, but it quietly accumulates weight until something gives.

The shepherd’s limit, rightly understood, is not a threat to the church. It is an invitation—to release control, to share authority, and to allow care to take root close to the ground. Strength does not emerge by denying weakness, but by planting it early enough for grace to work through it.

As a church grows, something subtle but decisive begins to shift. It rarely happens all at once, and it is almost never named directly. Care is still valued. Shepherding is still affirmed. No one stands up and announces that relationships will now be replaced by systems. And yet, quietly, the center of gravity moves. What was once held together by shared life begins to be sustained by coordination. Conversations give way to calendars. Discernment is supplemented by policy. Judgment, once exercised in close knowledge of people and their particularities, is gradually distributed through structures designed to ensure consistency and fairness. None of this is wrong in itself. In fact, much of it is necessary. Growth demands organization. Complexity requires structure. But something changes in the texture of care.

Pastoral attention, which depends on proximity, does not scale in the same way programs do. A pastor can know a few dozen people deeply, perhaps a few hundred with intentional effort, but not thousands in any meaningful sense. Beyond a certain point, shepherding becomes indirect. Presence gives way to representation. Relationship yields to role. The pastor is no longer the one who knows, but the one who oversees those who do. Again, this is not a moral failure. It is a human limit. And yet, churches often behave as though this limit can be indefinitely postponed. When attendance grows, assistants are added. When assistants multiply, layers emerge. When layers strain, systems are refined. The work continues, often with impressive efficiency. But the original logic of pastoral care—knowing and being known, noticing and being noticed—thins.

At this stage, something particularly delicate occurs. The pastor may remain central in identity while becoming distant in experience. Church members still speak of being shepherded by a particular leader whom they rarely, if ever, encounter. Their actual point of care is a staff member, a volunteer leader, or sometimes no one at all. Shepherding becomes symbolic—attached to a name rather than embodied in relationship. Symbols are powerful. They unify. They inspire. But they cannot substitute for judgment. Systems can distribute responsibility, but they cannot replicate the discerning attentiveness that comes from shared life. Policies can ensure uniformity, but not wisdom. Metrics can track participation, but not vulnerability. When pastoral judgment is displaced upward while proximity moves downward, authority and care begin to separate. And when that happens, belonging becomes fragile.

This separation helps explain why celebrity so often emerges in large churches, even when it is neither sought nor celebrated. When proximity diminishes, imagination fills the gap. The shepherd becomes a figure rather than a presence. Admiration replaces familiarity. The pastor becomes known about rather than known by. This is not primarily a failure of character. It is a structural outcome. When one person is symbolically responsible for thousands, charisma carries what presence no longer can. The cost of this shift is rarely paid by the most visible leaders. It is paid by the ordinary members whose connection to the church becomes increasingly abstract. They belong to something impressive, but not always to someone attentive. They are gathered, but not necessarily seen. The church may be thriving by every measurable standard, and yet still produce sheep without shepherds.

At this point, a question presses forward, though it is seldom asked openly: how much growth is too much? Not financially. Not organizationally. But pastorally. At what point does expansion begin to undermine the very care it was meant to extend? Few churches ask this question voluntarily, and fewer still act on it. The incentives point elsewhere. Growth brings resources, recognition, and influence. Larger platforms promise broader impact. Stopping, or even slowing, can feel like disobedience, fear, or failure. To choose smaller centers for the sake of deeper shepherding often appears irresponsible, especially when demand remains high and opportunity continues to expand.

When large churches collapse, the explanation is usually personal—scandal, burnout, moral failure. Sometimes those explanations are true. But often the deeper cause is structural. Too much weight has been concentrated in too few places for too long. Care has been centralized beyond human capacity. When disruption comes, as it always does, there are not enough roots to absorb the shock.

It is into this reality that Jesus speaks—not primarily by critique, but by example. When He looks upon the crowds and names them as sheep without shepherds, His response is not to consolidate authority or build a single, ever-expanding center around Himself. Instead, He multiplies proximity. He sends others. First the Twelve, then the Seventy-Two. He authorizes them not only to proclaim, but to heal, to stay in homes, to eat with people, to speak peace in ordinary places. This sending is often framed as evangelism, but the Gospels present it equally as the multiplication of care. Authority is exercised close to people, in villages and households, through shared life rather than distant oversight. Jesus does not remain the sole point of access. His shepherding is not diminished by delegation; it is multiplied by it.

Strikingly, He entrusts real authority to those who are not yet mature. The disciples misunderstand Him, compete with one another, and falter repeatedly. The communities they form are fragile and incomplete. And yet, they are entrusted with weight before they are fully ready to bear it. Weakness is not a disqualification; it is part of the formation. By sending early, Jesus allows roots to grow before the branches become too heavy. He does not guard His visibility as though it were fragile. He guards the sheep from abandonment.

What emerges here is not a rejection of growth, but a different logic of it—one that prioritizes care over scale, presence over prominence, and shared responsibility over centralized control. The question is not whether authority will exist, but where it will live—not whether leadership will be visible, but whether it will remain close enough to notice. This contrast prepares the ground for imagining a church whose strength lies not in how far it reaches, but in how it is rooted.

Here the banyan tree returns, no longer as a passing image but as a constructive vision for the church’s life. Christ Himself is the ground-source from which all life draws. Churches stand as trunks only because they are continually nourished by Him. Over time, those trunks may also sustain one another—drawing strength across seasons, sharing shade and nourishment—without becoming permanently dependent. Life flows upward from the ground and outward through branches, not inward toward a single point of control.

This vision quietly challenges the way growth is often imagined. A banyan-shaped church does not measure success by how much it can retain—how many people it can hold, how much influence it can concentrate, how many resources it can accumulate. It measures success by how faithfully life is released once it has taken root. Resources are shared rather than hoarded. Leaders are sent rather than retained out of fear. Opportunities are handed over rather than guarded, because the church trusts that life does not end at its own borders.

Such a church recognizes pastoral limits early, not as threats but as signals. When growth stretches proximity, it does not respond primarily by layering management upon management. Instead, it multiplies rooted shepherds. Elders and pastors are not merely deployed as functionaries under a distant authority; they are sent with real responsibility, real trust, and real pastoral weight. New congregations are planted, and existing ones strengthened, not as satellites orbiting a central brand but as living trunks capable of bearing the load of care in their own places.

This kind of multiplication inevitably risks loss. Influence thins. Visibility fades. The original center becomes harder to identify—much like the ancient banyan whose first trunk disappears beneath a forest of growth. But this is not failure. It is fruitfulness. Life has spread far enough that it no longer depends on being traced back to a single figure or institution.

What makes such release possible is not strategy, but faith. It requires a discipline that might be described as holding on by handing over. In Christian discipleship, believers are taught to entrust their burdens, futures, and identities to God rather than clutching them anxiously. Faith is learned not through accumulation, but through surrender. The same discipline must shape the church’s common life. Churches are called to relinquish resources, leaders, and even opportunity while they are still strong—not only when decline or crisis forces their hand. Strength, not weakness, is the moment of giving.

The original trunk does not weaken by releasing what it could keep. It entrusts itself to the same source that sustained it from the beginning. Life does not finally depend on possession, control, or visibility, but on remaining rooted in Christ. What is handed over is not lost; it is planted.

Yet this posture cannot belong only to those who send. Those who receive must be formed by it as well. New trunks must be taught that they are not endpoints. They are beginnings. They, too, are banyan trees in formation—called not to accumulate indefinitely, but to extend life outward in time. Leaders sent out must be trained not merely to lead congregations, but to release leadership again. What is received is not meant to be held forever, but stewarded faithfully and then passed on.

This kind of ecclesial generosity produces a particular kind of resilience. When leadership transitions occur, when exhaustion sets in, when scandal or death interrupts ministry—as they inevitably do—the community does not unravel overnight. Shepherding has already been distributed. Authority has already been shared. Pastoral presence does not vanish with the departure of a single figure, because it was never concentrated there in the first place. Roots already exist beneath the surface. The banyan does not implode. It redistributes weight.

This is not an argument against large churches, nor a romantic defense of small ones. It is a reminder that pastors are not infinite, churches are not weightless, and growth is never cost-free. Every expansion places new demands on attention, discernment, and care. Ignoring those demands does not eliminate them; it merely postpones their reckoning.

The question before the church is not whether it will grow, but how—and whether its growth will remain grounded in shepherding rather than concentrated in symbols. Which leaders are willing to choose smaller centers for the sake of deeper shepherding? Which churches are willing to release what they could retain? Which pastors will accept limits not as failure, but as faithfulness?

Jesus’ compassion still speaks. Sheep without shepherds are not merely unconverted. They are already present yet unattended—gathered, sincere, and exposed. The church honors the Good Shepherd not by building ever-larger centers around a few visible figures, but by ensuring that no one is lost simply because the church succeeded at growing.

Roots before reach. Care before scale. Presence before prestige.