2003
William Thomas Warne
“O Lord, My Boat is So Small and the Sea is So Great”: A Small Church’s Story of Growth and Revival.
This thesis seeks to examine how the faith/spirituality of parishioners at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, has deepened, and to examine if this deepening directly relates to the growth and revival of the parish over the past five years. The thesis also posits that churches which are growing rapidly and showing significant signs of revival are churches which at the same time are deepening their people’s faith/spirituality. The importance of helping people in the pews to open themselves up to the presences and power of the Holy Spirit in their lives as it leads to congregational growth and revival will also be addressed. The purpose of this paper will be to show how these factors play-out in the context of a small congregation located in a small college-town, in central Pennsylvania; and to help the wider church see how growth and revival are possible even in the small sized church.