The Multiplying Effect: How Small Changes Create Large Impact

By W.J de Kock, ThD
Educational Consultant to Partners in Ministry
Professor of Practical Theology at Palmer Theological Seminary of Eastern University
7- minute read

It’s early morning. The Magpies are awake, and you are standing in your kitchen in pyjamas lifting a tea towel off a jar of sourdough starter, waiting to see whether it's alive.

You fed it on Tuesday. You discarded half on Thursday. You covered it, went to bed, and woke up Friday half-convinced you'd murdered it. Again.

And then — bubbles. Fragrant, active, straining against the rim. Alive.

Ministry transformation works exactly like this. Not the dramatic kind, the conference-keynote, this-Sunday-everything-changes kind. But the quiet kind. The kind where a leader starts returning phone calls the same day, because it turns out reliability is a theology. Where someone begins sitting with the bereaved member not to say something useful but just to be there, and discovers that presence without an agenda is the rarest pastoral gift in the room. Where a home group starts meeting in the house of the person who never hosts because her kitchen is too small, and she cries a little the first time, and nobody makes it weird. Tiny. Barely noticeable in isolation. Until one day, and you can never quite locate when, everything is different.

James Clear has made a profitable career from noticing what the rest of us overlook. His mathematics are simple: get one percent better each day for a year, and you end up thirty-seven times better by the time you're done. He calls habits "the compound interest of self-improvement”,  and notes that their effects "seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous."[i]

The church should have figured this out. We've had the parable for two thousand years.

"The Kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed planted in a field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but it becomes the largest of garden plants; it grows into a tree..."[ii] Then immediately, in the same breath, the parable of the leaven: "The Kingdom of Heaven is like the yeast a woman used in making bread. Even though she put only a little yeast in three measures of flour, it permeated every part of the dough."[iii] Two parables make the ame move. Same irreverent insistence that the most significant things begin in the most dismissible ways.

Jesus told these stories to people who were expecting a revolution. And he gave them sourdough.

It reminds me of Parkrun.

It began in 2006 with 13 people and a stopwatch in a London park — a free, timed, five-kilometre run every Saturday morning, with no registration fee, no membership, no fuss. Today, more than 250,000 Australians lace up their shoes every Saturday at hundreds of locations across the country.[iv] Nobody planned a movement. Nobody convened a summit, commissioned a white paper, or hired a events coordinator. Someone just said: “Come and run with us every week, and we'll time you.” That was the whole idea.

Small. Consistent. Free.

And it turned out to be one of the most significant public health interventions in a generation — not because of a grand strategy, but because of a simple, repeatable act, done faithfully, over time.

There is a quote attributed to Mother Teresa that ends up cross-stitched onto a lot of church tote bags: “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.” It’s a sweet sentiment. The only issue is, Mother Teresa never said it.

What she actually said at Oslo, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize , is harder to hear and live: "We can do no great things, only small things with great love.”[v] That is not an inspirational poster. It is a theology of small beginnings. It is a blunt refusal to let the fantasy of doing something great become an excuse for failing to do something small.

Notice what she does not say. She does not say great things are unimportant. She says they are not where you start. The bestseller, the strategic plan, the legacy that outlasts you, these are not wrong to want. But the fantasy of them, nursed long enough, becomes a magnificent excuse for failing to do the small thing that is actually, stubbornly, inconveniently in front of you right now.

The sourdough will not feed itself. The starter does not care about your vision statement.

Which brings us to a teenager in a music room in North London.

I stumbled onto Jacob Collier three months ago, not at a stadium, but on PBS’s Tiny Desk.[vi]  Which, given everything we've been saying, is almost too perfect.

He arrived the way certain musicians do, suddenly, completely, and with the faintly embarrassing effect of making everything else you've been listening to sound slightly underdeveloped. He is barely thirty-one. He has seven Grammys. He teaches stadium audiences to sing in four-part harmony, live, without rehearsal, just a multi-instrumentalist, a microphone, and an apparently bottomless faith that people can do more than they think they can.

But before any of that, he was a teenager alone in his family's music room in Finchley, North London — the same room where he had learned to walk,  layering one note on top of another, teaching himself harmony entirely by ear, uploading split-screen videos to YouTube that almost nobody watched.[vii] No record deal. No strategy. No audience. Just the next note, and the next, and the next, and the quiet, stubborn belief that the music itself was worth the effort.

He later said of those years: “I never pursued music so that I could have a career. I pursued music because I was very, very deeply interested in it.”[viii] Which is, it turns out, exactly how greatness gets made. Learn the name. Return the phone call. Layer the next note.

The music builds.

This is as old as Paul. As old as baptism. You do not merely do new things,  you become someone for whom new things feel native. Applied to ministry: you are not "trialling small groups for six weeks." You are becoming a community that does life together. You are not "adding a prayer meeting to the schedule." You are becoming people for whom prayer is as instinctive as breathing,  and as unremarkable.

The language precedes the reality. Sometimes for months. Sometimes for years. But speak it consistently enough, and one day the congregation stops performing the identity and simply inhabits it.

Say what you're becoming. Then become it. Slowly. Stubbornly. Week by week.

So, before you launch the next initiative, pick one "one percent shift" this month,  not five, only one, and let it embed before you reach for the next. You do not need a ten-point strategic plan to change your church.

You need a mustard seed.

One small, faithful act, planted in the right soil, watered by prayer, given time to do what seeds do in the dark, which is everything.

The kingdom of God has never been about big launches.

It has always been about buried things.

Rising, slowly, from below.

You already have what you need.

You just have to start.

[i]SeeJames Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones (New York: Avery, 2018), 15–18.

[ii] Matthew 13:31–32 (NLT)

[iii] Matthew 13:33 (NLT). On the quantity of flour: three seahs, approximately 20–22 kilograms, as sufficient for a large communal feast, see Allen Browne, "Hiding Leaven in Buckets of Flour (Matthew 13:33)," Allen Browne's Biblical Studies Blog, May 20, 2022, https://allenbrowne.blog/2022/05/20/hiding-leaven-in-buckets-of-flour/. See also R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007).

[iv] Parkrun was founded in October 2006 by Paul Sinton-Hewitt at Bushy Park, London. See parkrun.com.au.

[v] Mother Teresa, Nobel Lecture, Oslo, December 11, 1979, in Les Prix Nobel 1979 (Stockholm: Nobel Foundation, 1980); transcript available at nobelprize.org. The fuller phrase in context reads: "not in big things, but in small things with great love."

[vi]  NPR Music's Tiny Desk Concert series features artists performing live in a small office setting at NPR headquarters in Washington DC. Collier's Tiny Desk performance is available at youtube.com/NPRMusic.

[vii] Andy Gilbert, "Jacob Collier: Live from His Room," JazzTimes, accessed February 2026, https://jazztimes.com/features/profiles/jacob-collier-live-from-his-room/. Collier's debut album In My Room (Membran, 2016) was recorded, arranged, performed, and produced entirely by himself in the family home in Finchley, North London.

[viii] Jacob Collier, interview by Sam Sanders, It's Been a Minute, NPR, November 7, 2019, 

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/777691525