Planting and Growing Urban Churches

From Dream to Reality

Conn, Harvie M.

• Editorial: Baker Academic
• Año: 1997
• ISBN:
  9781441205988
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Christian Ministry

If the church is to thrive in the twenty-first century, it will have to take on a new form as it ministers to the 120 million unchurched people in the United States. Planting and Growing Urban Churches is still virtually the only available text on church planting in North America and beyond. In this third edition, readers will find material on the importance of healthy, biblical change in our churches, updated appendices, insight on our postmodern ministry context, and strategies for reaching new population demographics such as Generation X and Y. Pastors, ministry leaders, and church planters will find the information and advice found in this book invaluable as they carry out their ministries.

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Part 1

Research:

Searching for the Right Questions

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Introduction

Harvie M. Conn

“Research,” says James Engel, “is the gathering of information for use in decision making.”[1] More particularly, the research introduced in this volume is applied research, applied specifically to those questions revolving around church growth and planting in the cities of the world.

How will a study of the history of the Protestant churches in Acapulco help us in developing a strategy for church planting? Why does an increase in housing construction in specific zip code areas and the replacement of old housing with new housing seem to promote growth among otherwise declining American mainline churches?

Our purpose in this introduction is to review the progress of that urban church research over the past several decades.

Urban Church Research: New Beginnings

Urban studies in the behavioral sciences have become prominent since the 1960s.[2] But similar research on the urban church has accelerated more slowly. Literature in the 1960s came largely from the United States and was oriented toward churches dealing with neighborhood transitions; the country had begun to wrestle with “white church flight” and the growing movement of African Americans and Hispanics to the cities.

Some in the mainline white churches found a model for interpreting these and other shifts in the positive motifs of the theology of secularization, emerging during this time.[3] Predicting the end of human religiosity as we knew it, the movement called for a new social activism by the church, oriented to and for the world.

The theology of secularization left a strong accent on social context for the church’s agenda but faded fast as a permanent foundation for urban mission. It had misjudged the persistence of human religiosity and minimized the dark side of secularization. And, as Harvey Cox said of himself, its perception of the city was that of “a relatively privileged urbanite. The city, secular or otherwise, feels quite differently to those for whom its promise turns out to be a cruel deception.”[4]

White evangelical churches remained largely aloof from the movement and the urban social context, self-insulated from dealing with such issues as racism by their continued division of personal from public life, of evangelism from social transformation. Fearful also of programs and theologies that sounded too much like a revived social gospel, they moved deeper into “the suburban captivity of the church,” drawn to the growth potential of the suburbs. Urban mission for many was a synonym for evangelism in the city.

Impetus from the Church Growth School

The 1970s brought a research wake-up call for evangelicals. It came from Donald McGavran (1897–1990), the father of the Church Growth Movement. His early focus on the global picture touched the heartstrings of the evangelicals’ long concern with “foreign missions” but had the unintentional effect of bypassing their massive, growing escape from the U.S. city.

He drew attention, not to the needs of American cities, but to the overseas field and to its growing urban populations as “perhaps the most urgent task confronting the Church.”[5] From McGavran’s command headquarters at Fuller Seminary, there began a slow trickle of materials by faculty,[6] students, and those he influenced,[7] calling for empirical mission surveys of church growth.

McGavran’s optimism, anchored in a call for the traditional values of evangelism and church planting, spoke to the heart and dispelled earlier fears. His emphasis on careful research to remove the fog of pietistic clichés and missionary newsletter jargon, to really see what was going on, was well received. It was a message exemplified by the work of McGavran’s Fuller colleague, Alan Tippett (1911–1988),[8] and picked up and amplified by research specialists such as Edward Dayton and James Engel.[9] His call to reach “winnable people groups” turned the direction of missionary interest from picking up individuals one-by-one “against the stream” to a deeper focus on ethnic and socio-cultural influences in evangelism and church planting.

It was McGavran’s attention to “winnable people groups” that gradually moved to the center of research interest. The concept was refined by ongoing discussions that moved the focus from the winnable to definitions of the “unreached,”[10] And World Vision’s Missions Advanced Research and Communication Center (MARC), in collaboration with the newly formed (1974) Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization (LCWE), pioneered in the development of a growing computer database on unreached peoples. At this stage its database remained demographically oriented to larger geographical and social units, rather than to cities. More recently, some efforts are beginning to appear with a more urban focus. The Foreign Missions Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, for example, has undertaken a database survey of cities with populations over 100,000.

Research Encouragements along the Way

At the same time, within evangelical research circles in the 1980s, attention to the urban focus has developed on other fronts. A mini-track of the LCWE-sponsored Global Consultation on World Evangelization, held in Pattaya, Thailand, in 1980, was structured around “Reaching Large Cities.” Out of it came a follow-up program oriented to world-class cities. Its coordinator, Ray Bakke, with the support of MARC and the LCWE, has traveled extensively since then, promoting the urban cause around the world through consultations. Lausanne II, in Manila in 1989, pushed the urban dimension even more strongly, serving as a platform for dialogue and consultation “oriented specifically toward urban mission.”[11]

During this time there appeared a growing body of literature, focusing on the macro-level and on the institutional church. World-class cities of a million people or more have received dominant attention.[12] City-wide surveys, centered on the church and produced by large-scale, team collaborations, have appeared on Brisbane[13] and Auckland,[14] and on Nairobi[15] and Mexico City.[16] An ongoing, in-depth study of Miami is nearing completion under the direction of Latin America Mission;[17] nine other cities of Central and South America are also being surveyed under their Christ for the Cities program. The Caleb Project, whose methodology is described in chapter three, is an excellent sample of how this city-wide research can also be undertaken by smaller teams oriented specifically to unreached peoples.

Modifications, Directions, and Shifts

New agenda concerns, a growing global interest in the urban church, and a call for increased sophistication in methodology have affected urban church research in the 1980s and 1990s.

The world church recognizes the need for urban mission and research as preparation for that mission.

Urban church thinking in England has been greatly stimulated by the extensive study initiated in 1983 by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission on Urban Priority Areas. Published in 1985, the commission report is a rich study, especially strong in its exposition of the national and institutional context.[18] It has stimulated many organizations in the United Kingdom that have moved through often-turbulent transitions in urban mission.[19] The Evangelical Coalition for Urban Mission (ECUM), founded in 1980, is one such networking focal point. It is among many worthy of attention for their promotion of mission and research.

The Australian continent was the setting for a massive church survey in 1991. With the cooperation of more than 6,000 congregations from 19 denominations, a nationwide National Church Life Survey was conducted. Though the survey was not explicitly limited to urban areas, Australia’s deeply urban population base of 85 percent makes it an exemplary model for such full-scale studies, one of the first to tackle an entire nation. The database remains one of the most comprehensive of its kind in the world. Results of the study are beginning to appear.[20]

Monitoring such research since the 1970s has been Scaffolding, an interdenominational support and resource network. Not primarily oriented to urban church research, it nevertheless plays a significant role in encouragement, information dissemination, and exchange and collection of resources.[21]

The picture in Africa, Asia, and Latin America is less developed. The need for urban church ministry and research flows out of rapid urbanization and its related problems.[22] Scattered individual research results circulated outside the regions have been published, some substantial,[23] others more oriented to expectations.[24] But financial problems must be overcome before more surveys like those of Daystar University College on Nairobi or the research project on Mexico City and those of Latin America Mission are repeated and implemented.

Encouraging further networking and mission explorations in these regions is the work of International Urban Associates (IUA), founded in 1989 by Bakke. IUA aims at the empowering of regional partnerships and resource networks through leadership consultations and strategic planning.

An interest in the American context has resurfaced with new vitality in the American churches.

Some of this has come from the growing attention of C. Peter Wagner and Church Growth School-related institutions to applying church growth principles to the United States setting.[25] But, until recently, these studies have been more generic than urban-focused.[26] American mainline denominations, whose research interests in the past have been more structured around wider social and pastoral issues,[27] are also turning their attention to issues of growth.[28]

More directly influential and more urban in focus has been the concern of America’s ethnic churches, which were energized by the civil rights movement of the 1960s into vibrant African American and Hispanic communities. Against the background of the country’s increasingly multi-ethnic cities,[29] they have wrestled with issues of church growth as they are touched by problems of racism, poverty, and powerlessness.[30] Some of the richest of these studies have drawn their strength from pastoral experience in, or case studies oriented to, congregational life.[31]

Issues of theological education for the city are now being addressed out of this new sensitivity. Can traditional institutions, their curricula oriented to a white and (increasingly) suburban agenda, meet the needs of the city?[32] Is research ever “urban-neutral”?

New training centers are appearing, as answers to these questions are sought. Some, such as Chicago’s Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education (SCUPE) and Boston’s Center for Urban Ministerial Education (CUME), build on more relational, historical ties to established theological schools and their models; others, such as Boston’s Emmanuel Gospel Center (EGC), are modeling more informal, more directly church-related training methods. Substantive research results have already appeared from the EGC, focused on Boston and its churches.[33] SCUPE’s biennial Urban Congress has become a focal point for global networking.

A more holistic concern, long a feature of cultural anthropology, has begun to augment urban church research.

Earlier compartmentalization of evangelism and social transformation in the white evangelical camp has begun to erode under pressure from several directions. Third World churches saw early on the social and cultural dimensions of evangelism. And the explosion of urbanization in their countries only reinforced that perception. Cities were more than merely large numbers of people; they were interacting networks shaped by social, political, and cultural movements.

At the 1974 Lausanne Congress, those socio-cultural perceptions were articulated by leaders like Orlando Costas, Samuel Escobar, and René Padilla.[34] For evangelism to be effective, those networks must be understood. For church growth to be full dimensioned, those organic connections must be tapped.

Minority churches in the United States sent similar signals. Long feeling the pressure of life on “the underside” of urban systemic structures, they could speak with more ease of the evil side of those structures, of poverty, racism, and oppression. The continuing role of African American and Hispanic churches as voices not only of their fellowships but also of their communities has kept them, for the most part, from building a high wall between the church and the world or the public and the private.

Reinforcement has also come from a third, perhaps surprising, source. America’s mainline denominations, pushed by serious membership declines in recent years, have undertaken extensive studies of their own growth patterns. Deeply oriented to sociological research methods and to theological pluralism, they have questioned what they perceive as the simplistic theological[35] and unbalanced institutional[36] emphases of church growth ideas in the past.

In doing so, they appear to be moving toward a clearer recognition of the significance of evangelism for church growth. And their own emphasis on the social context in shaping institutional growth may be supplementing and balancing what they see as a weakness of past church growth research. Through the sophistication of research methodology, they are underlining by another route the socio-cultural dimension crucial to church growth. And with their emerging acknowledgment of the place of evangelism as a major factor in church growth,[37] the studies may be coming closer to a holism from the opposite direction. Their own minimizing of biblical and theological direction in their reflecting, however, leaves an imbalance in that support.

In the meantime, old patterns of a more restricted view of evangelism and church growth have continued. And debates go on.[38] But even within the Church Growth School, such 1994 titles as God So Loves the City appear to move toward a wider understanding. And more now hope that the global city will provide the contextual and social instrument for seeing that larger picture.

Adding their distinctives into discussions of urban church research are the Pentecostal and charismatic communities.

These churches have long been a dominant force of church growth both in the minority churches of America’s inner cities and of the urban churches of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. But only recently has their strong emphasis on healing, exorcisms, prayer, and spiritual warfare found growing support in the larger Christian community. The 1989 Lausanne II Congress at Manila helped to open that door.[39] And the 1995 Global Congress on World Evangelization held in Seoul opened it farther.

Wagner has played a significant part in legitimizing that merger with church growth thinking.[40] And others, many closer to these communities, have articulated for a larger church the connections between church growth and the city,[41] between urban mass evangelism and gifts of healing and power.[42]

In the process, research has been linked to strategy in what is called “spiritual mapping,” an instrument for identifying the spiritual principalities and powers over the different cities and regions. Coined by George Otis Jr. in 1990, the term involves ...

Índice

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Content
• Preface
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 Research: Searching for the Right Questions
• Part 2 Strategy Planning: Searching for the Right Answers
• Part 3 Targeting: Linking Church to Urban Community
• Part 4 Samples: Linking Strategy to Model
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Names
• Index of Biblical References
• Notes