How Big Should Centered-Set Churches Be?

This may fit the category of "only pastors would possibly care about this."  But maybe not.

This weekend I talked with one of our blog-participants about whether centered-set churches should have the same assumptions as most evangelical pastors about how big their churches should be.  I don't think I know a pastor (including the one in the mirror) who doesn't guage his or her self-image on the growth of his or her church.  This gets reinforced by a certain church orthodoxy--there's a world to save, so continual church growth is just love and/or faithfulness to Jesus's parting instructions.

And yet megachurchdom strikes me as pretty strongly intertwined with what here we might call bounded-set (or maybe stage-2) modernism.  Again, realize that I'd happily take megachurchdom if offered it, so I mean no moral statement in any of these reflections.  But, stereotypically at least, the larger the church, the more a few things have to be in place.  Competence, for instance, is clearly a big value.  A broadly agreeable central message.  A thoughtful means of managing peoples' needs.  Obviously these are good things, but I wonder if they push for a kind of inevitable broad-based shallowness.  I also wonder if really large churches have to be modernist--they have to be kind of a machine.

(Again, did I mention that these are broad-based generalizations?  They're broad-based generalizations.)

I wonder if centered-set, stage-4-ish churches play under a different set of rules in terms of the most-desirable size.  To my mind, they're still advised to pray for a size of some heft if only because nobody's served when the prospect of the church folding entirely is always present.  But, after a threshold size has been reached (thresholds are subjective--I'd think God would have to set them case by case--but the thought here is that, subjective or not, they do exist), my current thinking is that going above them by a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand would only offer marginal gains, if any.

In our case, I've wondered if God is asking us to remain a vibrant, multi-textured (meaning it does a lot of things) church of some sweep and size in a very secular place.  But if, so long as we maintain that, we provide a unique offer to the secular population of greater Boston.  So long as we make sure the offer is widely-known (ads?  "meaning in a pub" gatherings?, word of mouth?) and that we're diligent to make sure we're offering real access to newcomers, I can wonder if we've done our job, at least on the size front.

What are your thoughts?  Are all churches to be encouraged to dream for megachurch status?  Is there any difference in how bounded vs. centered-set churches should think about how big they should grow?