A church in the heart of Manhattan and a congregation among the Inuit people of Northern Canada would seem to have little in common with one another. Yet in one way they are surprisingly similar: They are both apostolic congregations, churches whose every program exists for the purpose of presenting the gospel to non-Christians, and making disciples of Jesus Christ. What is the secret of churches like these; how have they learned to make evangelism central to everything they do? In studying apostolic congregations around the world, George G. Hunter III has discovered a set of perspectives and practices that they all share. With the passion and insight for which he is so well known, Hunter demonstrates how your congregation can learn to focus on the one thing that most matters: bringing people into a saving relationship with Jesus Christ.

The Apostolic Congregation

Church Growth Reconceived for a New GenerationBy George G. Hunter III

Abingdon Press

Copyright © 2009 The United Methodist Publishing House
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4267-0211-2

Chapter One

(Re)Introducing Church Growth to a New Generation

Once upon a time, in Europe's medieval Christendom period, virtually every person in every village was a baptized and catechized Christian. As that era recedes into the haze of memory, as Europe and North America (and most societies on other continents) become more and more secular, as our communities are increasingly populated by people who have no idea what Christians believe and live for, church leaders are discovering that their communities, in which confessing Christian faith and involvement in a church was once the social custom, have become secular mission fields. The United States, for instance, has at least 180 million functionally secular people who have never been substantially influenced by any serious version of the Christian faith. That makes the United States the largest mission field in the Western Hemisphere and the third largest on Earth.

The secularity of Western communities and societies is not a brand-new phenomenon. The secularization of the West began several centuries ago. Sustained cultural events—like the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the rise of science and cities, and the invasions of many religions and ideologies—slowly, but surely, removed the "home-field advantage" that the Western church had enjoyed for centuries. Secularization, however, began stampeding across much of Europe following the First World War; the process increased in North America following the Second World War and then gained momentum following the Korean War.

The chief product of secularization is secular people. More and more people, in all of our communities, have lived their whole lives beyond the influence of churches. They have never been substantially influenced by the Christian faith in any viable form; they have no Christian memory, no church in their background to return to one day. They are not, however, blank slates; they are not usually people of no religion at all. The lens through which they perceive ultimate reality and the purpose of life has been influenced by a range of religions, philosophies, ideologies, and spiritualities—from astrology to Zen, from capitalism to Marxism, from new age to Scientology, from ESP to UFOs, and so on. No one can now keep up with all of the religious options that have crowded into Western societies since Christianity lost its cartel, since the church's position in society changed from one of monopoly to one of competition.

* * * This secularized context presents a formidable challenge for Western church leaders. In the 1970s, when Donald McGavran's Church Growth thought became known in the United States, the book by McGavran and Win Arn, How to Grow a Church, demonstrated that the strategic principles for effective evangelism that McGavran (and others) had discovered in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Oceania could be adapted to North American and European fields as well.

McGavran had served as the founding dean of Fuller Theological Seminary's School of World Mission, following his first career as a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) missionary and mission executive in central India. One day, in the early 1930s, McGavran was studying the annual reports of churches in his region and he discovered that only about 5 percent of the region's churches were growing by receiving new Christians into their ranks; the other 95 percent were stagnant or declining in membership strength.

McGavran reflected upon the growing 5 percent and wondered why they were growing in a field where 95 percent were not. Over time, he refined and nuanced the question (a process that some of us have continued): Why do some churches grow? What are the causes of church growth? What are the barriers or the sicknesses that prevent growth? What are the reproducible principles that account for a congregation's growth? What do the leaders of growing churches know that leaders of nongrowing churches do not know, or at least do not take seriously? What do the growing churches do that nongrowing churches do not do? Or, if they both do it, how do the growing churches do it differently? (Those questions about knowledge, approach, and style have driven our research for several decades.)

At least three prominent mission thinkers preceded McGavran's quest. Roland Allen, an early-twentieth-century Anglican, reflected from his experience (cut short by illness) in northern China. In Missionary Methods: St. Paul's or Ours? and in The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church, he contended that a mission's policies and approaches really matter, and he anticipated some of McGavran's strategic themes. Kenneth Scott Latourette, McGavran's professor at Yale Divinity School, spent much of the second quarter of the twentieth century producing the seven-volume History of the Expansion of Christianity (and other books) that informed such questions historically. Then, a book based upon field research by a contemporary in India, Methodist missionary J. Waskom Pickett's Christian Mass Movements in India, helped focus the rest of McGavran's life. McGavran said, "I lit my candle at Pickett's fire!" He stood on Pickett's shoulders while also drawing from the behavioral science research methods he had acquired in PhD studies at Columbia University.

Pickett had surveyed thousands of India's converts and interviewed hundreds. McGavran did not rely on surveys as much as Pickett did; he employed more historical analysis, field observation, and extensive interviews with converts. McGavran collected data and reflected for twenty years before he published much. Then the 1955 publication of The Bridges of God exploded into the world of mission thinkers and leaders who were abandoning the earlier "colonial" approach to mission and were open to alternative approaches. The three editions of Understanding Church Growth (1970, 1980, and 1990) distill McGavran's enduring perspective.

In addition to Pickett, other McGavran contemporaries contributed to the Church Growth school. Eugene Nida and Alan Tippett advanced the knowledge from anthropological research. Ralph Winter contributed major historical and strategic perspectives. C. Peter Wagner explored Pentecostal growth for its insights and became the leading public interpreter of the field. Several writers advanced our understanding of church growth in specific cultural regions, such as Roy Shearer (Korea), Tetsunao Yamamori (Japan), J. T. Seamands (India), William Read (Latin America), Roger Hedlund (Italy), and Jim Montgomery (Philippines).

Somewhat later, a range of people reflected upon Church Growth in the West. Their contributions are too important to hide their names in a footnote. This range of people includes Win and Charles Arn, Wendell Belew, Charles Chaney, Francis DuBose, Bill Easum, Carl George, Eddie Gibbs, Kirk Hadaway, Kent Hunter, Dean Kelley, Robert Logan, Gary McIntosh, Thom Ranier, Dan Reeves, David Roozen, Ebbie Smith, Ed Stetzer, Elmer Towns, John Vaughan, Waldo Werning, Bob Whitesel, Flavil Yeakley, and the present writer. From the perspectives of other disciplines, other scholars have addressed some of the same questions, including Michael Green (early church history); Stephen Neill (mission history); Roger Greenway, Harvie Conn, and Ray Bakke (urban mission); David Barrett (world Christianity); Dean Kelley and Rodney Stark (sociology); and Lyle Schaller (congregational studies).

What Do We Mean by "Church Growth"?

As suggested in the preface, we need to introduce Church Growth principles to younger church leaders—and also to some senior leaders who did not "get it" the first time around. People have often misunderstood and resisted what Church Growth thought can do for their mission. One cause of the confusion (and resistance) is semantic; when people first hear of a field like "Hermeneutics" or "Symbolic Interactionism," the terms trigger no meaning in their minds, so they have to look them up. When, however, they hear of a field like "Organization Development" or "Church Growth," the terms do connote some meaning in their minds and, if two or more agree on what it must mean, they assume they are right and they react from the meaning they attach to the term. Most often, when people hear "Church Growth," they think of numbers, and their grapevine says, "Church Growth is just about numbers." (In the American Society for Church Growth, after a quarter century we know we have lost the semantic battle; so we may change the organization's name to something like the Great Commission Research Network.)

Unconscious semantic confusion is not, however, the only cause of confusion and resistance. Some church leaders, for instance, dislike the fact that Church Growth people may employ statistics and even graphs to help make sense of a church's (or a movement's) growth; statistics and graphs remind them of business—and business methods, they say, are incompatible with Christianity. Since they usually believe that church leaders only need to know theology, they also resist insights from other fields. In the real world, however, effective leadership's knowledge base is increasingly interdisciplinary. Theology is not all one needs to know to be effective in ministry or mission, any more than anatomy is all one needs to know to do brain surgery, or political philosophy to manage a city, or botany to grow a flower garden.

People from the other side can also take their shots. Some church leaders dislike the fact that Church Growth people mainly do qualitative field research, such as historical analysis, observation, and interviews. (McGavran interviewed thousands of converts and said he learned more from them about what actually happens in effective evangelism than from most of the books that prescribe how evangelism "ought" to be done!) These detractors say that Church Growth needs to be more scientific; and they decree that only quantitative data (expressed in statistics and graphs) is worthy of a science.

Again from both sides, two more reasons for resistance to Church Growth are more or less theological, and both sides react to McGavran's teaching that Christianity's main business is the kind of evangelization that reaches, and makes disciples among, pre-Christian populations. One side insists (or assumes) that a church's main business is not evangelizing pagans; it is shepherding church members and their children, and protecting churches from pagans, a fallen world, and heresy. The membership goal of such churches is to maintain their current membership, but they typically decline. (They lose 5 to 8 percent of their people per year as some people transfer to other churches, or die, or revert to the world. If a church is not reaching out enough to replace the members it loses, it declines.)

The other side insists that the church does have a responsibility for the world, but its main business is to advance every Christian cause (like peace and justice) except evangelism: Great Commandment—yes; Great Commission—no. Donald McGavran was sympathetic with the social reformers. He observed, however, that to move a society toward justice, a Christian social movement needs a critical mass of people who own the kingdom vision. You cannot change a society with fewer and fewer people to work for change; and you increase the ranks of Christ-followers mainly by evangelizing in some appropriate way. In the 1960s and 1970s, these issues were so heated that McGavran wrote The Eye of the Storm: The Great Debate in Mission. Those controversies are not raging as much today, in part because the membership strength and especially the mission personnel in the mainline traditions have declined so much that their point of view is less consequential.

* * * So what is Church Growth about, and what are the reasons for its methods?

The preface suggested that Church Growth is not really about church growth. As Dean Kelley stressed in the 1970s, a church's growth is a clue or an indicator of a church's probable vitality, seriousness, and effectiveness in its mission. "Church Growth" became a shorthand term for five overlapping interests that Church Growth people share. In the 1970s and 1980s, the "Church Growth" minirevolution led by Donald McGavran featured five significant perspectives to the world's churches.

1. McGavran helped many churches recover their "main business," which is not merely serving the members of the gathered churches; churches are entrusted with the apostolic assignment of reaching pre-Christian people—and peoples. McGavran declared, "It is God's will that his church grow, that his lost children be found." (So the growth of a church, particularly its conversion growth rate, is an indicator of whether or not it is prioritizing its main business.)

2. McGavran perceived that the chief objective of both evangelism (within a culture) and mission (across cultures) is not merely to establish a loving presence among the people, or to proclaim the gospel, or to elicit decisions; rather, it is to communicate the meaning of the gospel and to make disciples, especially new disciples. This objective is essentially achieved when people experience two significant life changes: (1) They start following Jesus Christ as Lord, AND (2) they are incorporated into some community of the body of Christ. These two changes may occur in either order! (The church's numerical growth is a good indicator that the second objective is being achieved; it is a less than sufficiently reliable indicator of whether the first objective is being achieved.)

3. McGavran and his Church Growth colleagues advanced the strategy perspective in world mission. Many mission agencies would no longer blindly perpetuate their traditional activities (such as literacy, education, medicine, and agriculture) in the assumption that, of course, their activities were advancing the Great Commission. Reflective agencies became clearer about their objectives; more self-critical about whether their activities were achieving those objectives; and more strategic, flexible, and innovative in pursuit of their objectives. (When we attach specific and measurable goals to our objectives, the later numbers indicate whether we are achieving our objectives.)

4. McGavran raised the question about effective evangelism. He observed that, in evangelism, "we know what ought to reach people." He dared to ask questions like, "What approaches, methods, and ministries, in what kinds of contexts, actually reach people, gather harvests, and make new disciples?" (Again, if we are measuring the right things, such as people joining churches by confession of new faith, the numbers will indicate our relative effectiveness.)

5. Church Growth people have employed extensive field research to inform effective mission and evangelism. As Church Growth field researchers studied hundreds of growing churches, in many lands, tongues, and cultures, and as they interviewed thousands of new converts, they discovered many principles behind the Christian faith's expansion (and decline). In time, their insights have informed Christianity's outreach in unprecedented ways. (The numerical indicators of significant growth or decline point us to the places for field research!)

From Four Types of Church Growth to Six

The acknowledgment in the preface that some growth may be analogous to fat or even to malignancy, and therefore may not be desirable, has helped us become clearer about the types of Church Growth that are desirable. Donald McGavran observed that Christian movements grow in multiple ways. Collaboration between McGavran, Ralph Winter, and Peter Wagner developed one of the Church Growth field's most essential and enduring paradigms: churches grow essentially in four ways.

1. Internal Growth

2. Expansion Growth

3. Extension Growth

4. Bridging Growth

Whereas this typology has endured for forty years and has proved perennially useful, it is no longer sufficient to explain many of the growing churches and especially the Christian movements that we now observe. For instance, when a church starts a second campus, does that represent extension growth? Or when a church is growing with contagion, is that merely expansion growth, or is another dynamic discernible? Our understanding of the ways in which churches grow has evolved; with experience and reflection, we can now nuance our understandings within the paradigm in more precise and useful ways by adding two additional categories for understanding the ways churches grow:

5. Catalytic Growth

6. Proliferation Growth

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Apostolic Congregationby George G. Hunter III Copyright © 2009 by The United Methodist Publishing House. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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