Is Bigger Really Better?

A lovely story I stumbled over thanks to a Facebook friend.  

My question is stimulated by what happens towards the end of the article.  When the children are told of what these ladies have been doing for decades.  The kids encourage the mothers to go online to sell their cakes “so they could raise money to help even more people.”  Of course, with greater scale goes greater needs for infrastructure, so they have to utilize a different kitchen and hire someone to help them organizationally.  

There’s nothing wrong with this, of course.  It’s our natural reaction.  If something is working, if something is good, why not amp it up?  Why not expand?  More is better, right?

I dunno.  What if more – quantitatively – isn’t necessarily better?  The article doesn’t provide any details on how their expansion has impacted their activities.  But it does indicate that they had to change the way they were doing things.  Something that worked for over 30 years was tweaked – not because it wasn’t working just fine the way it was, doing everything they had intended it to do and more – but because it was possible to get bigger. 

I think that what I struggle with particularly is the assumption that is easy to make.  If something is good, it would be sinful and wrong not to do more of it, right?  I mean, if you could conceivably help twice as many people, why wouldn’t you?  Wouldn’t it be wrong of you not to?

I suspect that the answer to this question ought to be It depends.  Something that once was purely a labor of love has now become a necessity – there are orders to be fulfilled and at least one salary to pay.  There’s the necessity of keeping things going.  Which means that there could potentially be guilt for not being able to meet a certain day, or not fulfill expectations.  What once was a joy could easily become a burden.  It doesn’t necessarily have to and I pray that it hasn’t and doesn’t – but the nature of what they’re doing has altered for the sake of scale, for the sake of perpetuating what they’re doing.  Motives have begun to shift and change, and I suspect that when this remarkable group of ladies is no longer able to do what they have so faithfully done for so long, there will be a strong impetus to create a business, and the nature of what they were doing will completely alter.

Is there a lesson for the American Church in all of this?