Evaluating the Church Growth Movement

Zondervan, Paul E. Engle, Gary L. McIntosh

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780310872153
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

What exactly is the Church Growth movement?

This timely volume in the Counterpoints series addresses the history of the movement that has become such an enormous shaping force on the Western church today, and it explores--in a roundtable forum of leading voices--five main perspectives on the classic Church Growth movement:

• Effective Evangelism View - presented by Elmer Towns
• Gospel in Our Culture View - presented by Craig Van Gelder
• Centrist View - presented by Charles Van Engen
• Reformist View - presented by Gailyn Van Rheenan
• Renewal View - presented by Howard Snyder

Each view is first presented by its proponent, then critiqued by the co-contributors. The interactive and fair-minded format allows the reader to consider the strengths and weaknesses of each view and draw informed, personal conclusions.

Evaluating the Church Growth Movement concludes with reflections by three seasoned pastors who have grappled with the practical implications of Church Growth.

The Counterpoints series presents a comparison and critique of scholarly views on topics important to Christians that are both fair-minded and respectful of the biblical text. Each volume is a one-stop reference that allows readers to evaluate the different positions on a specific issue and form their own, educated opinion.

Chapter One
EFFECTIVE EVANGELISM VIEW

EFFECTIVE EVANGELISM VIEW

Church Growth effectively confronts and penetrates the culture

Elmer Towns

Church Growth is not a title that has been used throughout church history. The Church Growth movement burst on the religious scene in the United States during the 1960s and has gone through the inevitable cycle that faces any new movement. American Christianity has gone through a cycle consisting of seven basic questions in response to the Church Growth movement:

1. a question of curiosity leading to creative insight, What’s Church Growth?
2. a question of focus, What will Church Growth accomplish?
3. a question to improve an innovative idea, What’s the latest Church Growth idea?
4. a question of application, Everyone is using Church Growth, why aren’t you?
5. a question of unappreciative benefactors, Have you heard what’s wrong with Church Growth?
6. a question of repudiation, Why do you still need Church Growth? and
7. a question of ignorance, What’s Church Growth?

Today we seem to be in the seventh phase of this cycle, asking again, What is Church Growth? Looking back, however, the Church Growth movement has given so much to contemporary American Christianity that it is hard to imagine how we did ministry before the movement was introduced.

Before the Church Growth movement introduced its workable principles of outreach and evangelism, young pastors did not have adequate resources of articles, books, and published research to give them accurate direction in reaching their “Jerusalem” with the gospel. Little authoritative direction existed to give starting pastors practical help and direction for their ministry. Much of ministry was trial and error, and often those pastors that had found a successful way of doing things took their insights to the grave with them.

Before Church Growth, young pastors did not have many different models of church ministry to motivate and guide them and to hold them responsible for effective ministry. A century ago, many may have looked up to pastors such as Charles Spurgeon of the Metropolitan Baptist Church of London, D. L. Moody of the Moody Church in Chicago, and perhaps a few other pastors. But these models did not provide insight on how a smaller church could apply the same principles of growth. There were few examples of churches that attempted to “capture their town” for Christ. Whether or not you agree with Bill Hybels, or Rick Warren, or Jerry Falwell, or John McArthur, or Robert Schuller, you will have to admit that these pastors have been able to “package” their ministry and help other churches do ministry in the same way. Many churches have grown the way these models have grown. (Note: all of these men represent a Church Growth type, each representing a different dynamic and different growth methods. The science of Church Growth has helped them develop and understand their uniqueness and communicate it to others.)

With the introduction of Church Growth thought came an explosion of megachurches. These larger churches were not necessarily better churches, but they were certainly bigger, and they had a greater influence on their neighborhoods and drew national and international attention. The megachurches inspired many church leaders to believe it was possible to carry out the Great Commission in a greater way and reach more lost people for Christ. These larger churches demonstrated to many that the power of God was still available to influence multitudes, to attract financial resources, and to do more than ever before to transform lives.

Before the influences of Church Growth, young pastors often focused primarily on programs, committees, office duties, marriages, hospitals, burials, counseling, and a thousand other perceived duties that kept them from the priorities of evangelism, leadership strategy, and establishing vision. The research that has come from the Church Growth movement has given pastors great vision and confidence because it has provided tools, priorities, and the motivation to give aggressive spiritual direction to their churches.

WHY TAKE CHURCH GROWTH SERIOUSLY?

Young ministers entering ministry should eagerly take Church Growth seriously and keep up on the latest in Church Growth for several reasons:

1. to give them focus to carry out the Great Commission—effective evangelism—through their church and ministry;
2. to ground them in the biblical and spiritual principles of building a New Testament church in a modern technological world;
3. to give them a big view of ministry so they will know how and when to use their talents and to lead in the employment of the spiritual gifts of their members in the face of varied and ever-increasing challenges in ministry;
4. to help determine the best ministry strategy for a particular geographical and cultural setting;
5. to help them avoid making mistakes based on wrong preconceptions or ignorance;
6. to help them identify and deal with all the reasons churches do not grow, stagnate, and die; and
7. to help them build a Bible-based and data-driven ministry, a ministry that is based on the eternal truth of the Word of God yet is relevant to the modern challenges of the world in which we live.

THE FOUNDATION

The modern Church Growth movement was not born in an academic environment where scholars devised principles in an attempt to be more effective in evangelism. Rather, Church Growth was born and grew out of the experiences of those doing evangelism in the field, who wanted to do it better and to do it more effectively.

While there have always been spurts in the growth of churches throughout history (for instance, in the times of the early apostles, St. Patrick [385–461], John Wesley [1703–91], and the Southern Baptists in the twentieth century), the unique movement given the technical name Church Growth¹ was brought to life more by Donald McGavran (1897–1990) than by any other modern individual.

George Hunter III, professor of Asbury Theological Seminary, says of Donald McGavran, “History will probably see him as the most influential missionary statesman of the twentieth century.”² Hunter’s statement might be correct, in view of McGavran’s influence and what has happened in the past century. Before the twentieth century, much of foreign missions work was done by Western missionaries, and the success of foreign missions was judged by what those missionaries did.³ Several changes have been observed since the introduction of Church Growth thought:

• A shift of authority and leadership in local and mission churches to indigenous leadership and ministry by Christian nationals.
• A distinct surge in church planting as a missionary strategy.
• The worldwide emergence of the megachurch movement as a source for church planting, ministry communication by media, development of innovative strategies that influence smaller churches, educational and training development, vision stimulation, and the like.
• An evangelistic focus on receptivity among ethnic and cultural groups.
• A recognition of barriers that prohibit evangelism and the application of principles to overcome barriers and make evangelism more effective, including contextualization in missionary strategy.

While McGavran and the Church Growth movement did not accomplish all the above developments directly, a cause-and-effect relationship is perceptible. The ideas, principles, and strategies that grew out of McGavran’s thinking and the Church Growth movement have made a distinct positive contribution to the continual growth and effectiveness of the international ministry of missions and evangelism.

HISTORY OF THE CHURCH GROWTH MOVEMENT

Donald McGavran and his wife, Mary, went to India in 1923 as missionaries with the Disciples of Christ. At that time, the Disciples of Christ had only twenty to thirty small churches, which were experiencing little or no growth. It seemed to McGavran that his denomination focused on all types of ministry except evangelism. When McGavran saw other denominations converting people to Jesus Christ—primarily the “untouchables,” the lowest caste in India—he wanted to examine their methods carefully.

J. Waskom Pickett, a Methodist missionary, was sent by the National Christian Council of India to investigate the mass movements of people to Christ. Pickett publicized the Christian mass movements in India and indelibly influenced McGavran’s view of evangelism.⁴ “As I [McGavran] saw a thousand people being baptized at one time, I said, ‘This could happen to us, too.’”⁵ Donald H. Gill gives this commentary in an article titled “Apostle of Church Growth”: “This led McGavran to further research which indicated many of the reasons why the church in 136 districts had grown by 11 percent in 10 years while in 11 other districts it had grown by some 200 percent in the same period.”⁶

Prior to his experience with Pickett, McGavran had considered the individualistic, “one-by-one” approach to evangelism as the most biblically based and pragmatically fruitful approach. He had heard of large groups of people claiming to have undergone Christian conversion and baptism but was skeptical about whether these claims were biblical. In fact, his term for these mass conversions was “half-baked mission work.” In an interview with John K. Branner for Evangelical Missions Quarterly, McGavran confided: “In 1934–35 I began to see that what we had heard was quite wrong. What we had deemed ‘unsound, half-baked work’ was really one great way in which the church was growing quite effectively. God was blessing that way of growth. They were becoming better churches than ours. It was heresy to say that in 1935.”⁷

Earlier, in 1930, McGavran had written How to Teach Religion in Mission Schools, and in 1936, he collaborated with Pickett and G. H. Singh in writing the early classic on people movements, The Mass Movement Survey of Mid-India. This title was revised in 1956 to Church Growth and Group Conversion.⁸

Because McGavran had been elected field secretary for the Disciples of Christ but kept emphasizing evangelism, he was not reelected as field secretary. Instead he was appointed as an evangelist in a remote central India region. Some saw that as a demotion, but in God’s sight, it laid a further foundation for the Church Growth movement. McGavran was able to put into practice some of the ideas he was developing about evangelism.

In 1953, Donald McGavran spent a missionary furlough writing The Bridges of God, considered by many as the first book on Church Growth because it contained several embryonic elements of the future Church Growth movement.⁹ Rather than being an evangelistic thunderclap, it was largely ignored by the evangelical world.

After thirty years in India and while on a furlough, McGavran received a research fellowship from Yale University. Through the United Christian Missionary Society, he traveled to fields such as Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Thailand, Formosa, Japan, and Jamaica, studying the evangelistic endeavors of Baptists, Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, and others. Out of this came his second major book on church growth, How Churches Grow, in 1959.¹⁰

In an address to the North American Society for Church Growth,¹¹ McGavran said he was searching for a new term to replace the word evangelism, because it was often confused with catechism classes, baptism, and/or church membership. McGavran chose to use the new term church growth, because it described what should happen when evangelism and the Great Commission were carried out: people were won to Christ, baptized, and taught the Word of God, and as a result, churches grew. He said that evangelism is an input term, gospelizing the lost, but church growth is an output term, meaning that when the lost are properly evangelized, churches grow.¹²

AMERICAN CHURCH GROWTH

In 1969, I wrote The Ten Largest Sunday Schools and What Makes Them Grow,¹³ a volume that C. Peter Wagner has called the first American Church Growth volume because I applied the scientific principle of social research to determine the principles that made these churches grow. He also said it was the first book to identify and examine the emerging megachurch phenomenon.¹⁴ I was doing graduate work at Garrett Theological Seminary (Evanston, Illinois) and was examining the influence of sociology on the church. Ernst Troeltsch’s work The Social Teaching of the Church motivated me to develop the “sociological cycles of church growth and death,” examining the church as a social institution, not just as a theological body.¹⁵ To carry out my research, I examined the ten largest churches, drawing from them a data pool that could be examined for workable principles that, if applied to other churches, could lead them to grow. Therefore, I visited these ten churches, interviewed the pastor and staff, and tried to determine the dynamics that made them grow. I was thrilled with the evangelistic results I saw at their altars, the large auditoriums built to reach the masses, the influence these churches had on their cities, and the faith they stimulated in others. Using a lengthy questionnaire, I questioned the church leaders and compared the findings from the ten churches, trying to find causes for growth.

Even though The Ten Largest Sunday Schools and What Makes Them Grow was viewed as a popular book, I felt cha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Books in the Counterpoints Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• WHY CHURCH GROWTH CAN’T BE IGNORED
• Chapter One EFFECTIVE EVANGELISM VIEW
• Chapter Two GOSPEL AND OUR CULTURE VIEW
• Chapter Three CENTRIST VIEW
• Chapter Four REFORMIST VIEW
• Chapter Five RENEWAL VIEW
• Chapter Six PASTORAL REFLECTIONS
• AFTERWORD
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
• DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
• About the Publisher
• Share Your Thoughts