Up, Up And Away!
Church Growth: Everybody’s Business, by E. LeRoy Lawson and Tesunao Yamamori (Standard, 1976, 152 pp., n.p., pb), Introducing Church Growth, by Tesunao Yamamori and LeRoy Lawson (Standard, 1975, 256 pp., n.p.), Your Church Can Grow, by C. Peter Wagner (Regal, 1976, 176 pp., $3.50 pb), and Your Church Has Real Possibilities, by Robert H. Schuller (Regal, 180 pp., $2.95 pb), are reviewed by Richard Allen Bodey, pastor, First Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, Gastonia, North Carolina.
A fantastic future for the institutional church in the United States of America”! This confident forecast by Robert H. Schuller, the pastor of California’s mushrooming Garden Grove Community Church, is welcome news indeed, especially at a time when, according to the many recent prophets of doom, the Church is nearly ready for last rites.
This new optimism about the institutional church is one of the tastier fruits of the church-growth movement, a “scientific approach” to understanding the principles and dynamics of church growth. Critics trace the movement to the American penchant for bigness as a sign of success. Proponents, however, claim biblical inspiration for it, arguing that the book of Acts sets forth a pattern of church growth that is meant to be normative, and is as feasible today as it was in the first century. Why, then, is it so largely frustrated? For an objective answer to that question, church-growth researchers draw heavily on the social sciences—cultural anthropology, psychology, sociology, and linguistics—as well as on biblical and historical studies.
In their neat, handy overview, Church Growth: Everybody’s Business, Lawson and Yamamori locate the genius of the movement in its insistence that the following emphases are essential to the missionary thrust of the Church: the authority of the Bible, the distinctiveness and priority of evangelism, a realistic evaluation of receptivity to the Gospel, scientific objectivity, and shared research. Of particular value to pastors and lay leaders alike are the chapters “How Do Churches Grow?” (twelve conditions), “Why Don’t All Churches Grow?” (ten obstacles), “How Can I Make My Church Grow?” (eight steps), and “Where Should the Missionary Dollar Go?”
Introducing Church Growth, a more formal textbook by the same team of writers, presents the major concepts of the church-growth school, identifies the most important publications in the field, and includes a generous selection of excerpts from the writings of authorities. The final chapters deal with the controversial issues of the relation of Christianity to non-Christian religions and the Church’s role in revolution. Church-growth leaders, while favoring a sympathetic understanding of other religions and acknowledging the validity of certain of their insights, are nevertheless committed to the uniqueness of Christ and the necessity of Christian conversion. Similarly, the movement recognizes the need to transform the social order but finds the key to social change, not in confrontation with established structures, but in individual conversion.
Discussion questions are appended to each chapter. Many of them, though stimulating and relevant, are too advanced for beginners and cannot be answered satisfactorily from a reading of this text alone. The book also has an excessive number of blank, or nearly blank, pages.
Turning from Lawson and Yamamori to Wagner is like exchanging a cuddly kitten for a belligerent porcupine. Your Church Can Grow is a disturbing book—disturbing for its truth, no less disturbing for its fallacies.
One can scarcely dispute Wagner’s thesis that God wants churches to grow. And many of us in static or dying congregations are guilty, as he charges, of taking refuge in “remnant theology.” But his idealization of the super-church lacks both scriptural sanction and empirical validity. A five-thousand-member congregation may feed a pastor’s ego and project an image of success, but comparative studies—based on criteria such as attendance, per-capita giving, member involvement, and corporate fellowship—suggest that ten congregations of five hundred members each are apt to generate greater spiritual growth among the members.
Admittedly, the big church can offer a wider variety of specialized ministries. But this advantage hardly compensates for the weaknesses that inevitably accompany bigness. Preaching, for example, has its best effect when the preacher maintains close pastoral contact with his hearers. But no one person can be a pastor to several thousand people. Nor is the quality of Christian worship, as Wagner mistakenly argues, necessarily influenced by the size of the worshiping body. Who doubts that the institution of the Eucharist in the Upper Room was one of the most moving worship experiences of all time? Yet only a dozen or so were present.
Many will find Wagner’s patronizing attitude toward pastors of “unexpansive personality” highly offensive. His allowance for various equally acceptable philosophies of ministry is debatable. And his hunch that many “dead wood” church members are really good Christians suffering from pastoral neglect or lacking the opportunity to exercise their spiritual gifts leads one to question his familiarity with the problem.
Faults and fallacies notwithstanding, the book sounds a challenge that should be taken seriously by all church leaders. Those who study its seven vital signs of a healthy church and take appropriate action in their own congregations should find the future brighter than the past.
“Grow or perish,” warns Schuller, whose formula for success combines adventuresome faith with professional salesmanship—and more than a pinch of showmanship—in ministering to clearly identified human needs and hurts. Your Church Has Possibilities expounds the techniques he has used to produce one of the greatest success stories in modern American church history, and he “absolutely guarantees” that these techniques will enable almost any church to grow.
For Schuller, the ultimate test of methods and programs seems to be their popular appeal. For the Lord of the Church, the decisive test was the glory of God. Between the two, as Christ’s wilderness temptation makes abundantly plain, an irreconcilable conflict often exists.
The books reviewed here provide a good sampling of church-growth theory. For a sympathetic, yet biblically and theologically sensitive assessment of the movement, I recommend Harvie M. Conn’s Theological Perspectives on Church Growth (1976, Presbyterian and Reformed) and J. Robertson McQuilkin’s Measuring the Church Growth Movement (1974, Moody), both of which have helpful bibliographies.
Less Is More
Church Growth Is Not the Point, by Robert K. Hudnut (Harper & Row, 1975, 143 pp., $7.95), is reviewed by Howard A. Snyder, executive director, Light and Life Men, Winona Lake, Indiana.
This book is not a criticism of the church-growth movement, at least not directly. Its thesis is that the point of being a Christian is suffering, passivity, discipleship. “Church growth is not the point, faithfulness to the Gospel is.”
Hudnut makes a number of arresting statements. God’s work “is the one enterprise which we don’t run.” “Grace is what is happening to us that we didn’t plan.” On peace and reconciliation, the author speaks cogently of the priority of “peace between” over “peace within”: “We have everyone pursuing ‘peace of mind’ when we should have everyone pursuing the peace of the world, from which pursuit you may or may not get peace of mind.… The cross is the Christian symbol, not the cross-legged contemplative.”
Hudnut is good when he speaks of the Church’s inability to do anything except by God’s grace. He is best when he speaks of discipleship. Leadership is the greatest lack in the American church today, he says, and the reason is the shallowness of our discipleship. Church leaders do their best: the problem is that “others who should be leading are not.” In the early Church, discipleship meant leadership. “Normally we focus on the charisma of Jesus. It is time to remember also the charisma of the disciples.” Following Jesus absorbed the first believers totally—and “the one who is possessed is the one who leads. The problem is that we do not have enough church people who are possessed.” Hudnut would put the emphasis here, rather than on “possibility thinking.”
Hudnut’s point about leadership is worth considering. From the world we get the picture that the key to “sucess” is a strong, individualistic leader who inspires others to work together and follow him. It is relatively unimportant what happens to these followers as persons. But the Gospel seeks to develop the Body of Christ, and in this Body each person contributes as he is renewed according to the image of Christ. Some lead more overtly and obviously, according to their gifts. But every disciple makes his unique contribution as a person. So discipleship becomes leadership.
But what about Hudnut’s thesis that church growth is not the point, that “decreasing numbers” means “increasing power”? Noting that membership and attendance are down in many churches, the author claims that “loss of growth in statistics has often meant increase in growth in the Gospel.” That may or may not be true in a given case, however. Hudnut gives no evidence—either empirical or biblical—that it is necessarily so, or that it is so today in American Protestantism.
The fact is that some churches are growing while others are declining. Hudnut seems to write exclusively from within the perspective of those that are declining. He equates decreasing numbers with increasing faithfulness, which is just as erroneous as saying statistical growth is the proof of faithfulness. Neither church growth nor church decline is the point; faithfulness to the Gospel is.
Hudnut writes for the church member who wants to be faithful but finds himself in a declining church with little evidence of spiritual vitality. He does a good job of pointing that church member to some of the basics of Christian discipleship. The title and style chosen for the book deliberately put the case in a stark either/or form. That is all right for the sake of making a point. In the final analysis, however, we may well come back and affirm a positive relationship, in most cases, between Christian faithfulness and church growth.
Transactional Analysis And Christianity
When God Says You’re OK, by Jon Tal Murphree (InterVarsity, 1976, 130 pp., $2.95 pb), is reviewed by Charles Dickson, assistant professor of psychology, Lenoir Rhyne College, Hickory, North Carolina.
This brief paperback should be of interest to anyone who is concerned about one of the newer phenomena in psychology, Transactional Analysis, and its relation to the Christian faith.
Transactional Analysis (TA) is being taught and used in hundreds of centers throughout the country and also in many seminaries. It uses individual responses called “transactions” as its units of analysis. People respond to one another in any of three ways, corresponding to the ego-states that exist in all people: as a Parent, an Adult, a Child (P-A-C). The Parent represents attitudes received as a child, primarily of a controlling, manipulative nature. The Adult ego-state is a mature, responsible response pattern concerned with decision-making and value judgments. The Child ego-state is a dependent, immature, self-seeking response, reflecting basic drives and instincts. The goal of TA is to make people aware of which ego-state they are expressing and the position into which it puts others. By moving from disruptive into complementary transactions, a person can develop more satisfying relations with others.
When God Says You’re OK is not a polemic against the proponents of TA but an attempt to set TA within the context of a Christian view of man. The author does not disagree with the basic categories of P-A-C, but he thinks they are inadequate to explain the totality of man’s spiritual nature. They must be expanded to include the divinely created capacity for God. We could then find in those categories the tools for understanding something of man’s sense of isolation without God as well as something of his capacity to interact with the God-personality.
For Murphree this task is not a mere adjunct to the process, a kind of theological frosting on a psychological cake, but rather a fundamental ingredient. He cleverly interweaves such diverse creatures as Charlie Brown, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Soviet scientist Dotsenko with Judy and John next door in illustrating his points.
This provides evangelical Christians with a working basis for understanding Transactional Analysis as a tool for helping oneself and others, while also underlining the necessity of a proper relationship with God if one is to maintain a balanced and integrated personality.
The OKness based on acceptance of others will dispel human loneliness, but it will never drive away existential loneliness. For this we need a relationship with a loving God who, through Jesus Christ, is the Great OKer.
Equality Or Complementarity?
Let Me Be a Woman, by Elisabeth Elliot (Tyndale, 1976, 190 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by C. E. Cerling, Jr., minister of education, Hopevale Memorial Baptist Church, Saginaw, Michigan.
What was the most significant evangelical book of 1975? Eternity suggested Scanzoni and Hardesty’s All We’re Meant to Be. Elisabeth Elliot answers this title by saying, please, Let Me Be A Woman. Her definition of what a woman is, however, is vastly different from Scanzoni and Hardesty’s.
This book takes the form of correspondence between Mrs. Elliot and her recently engaged daughter, Valerie, about her impending marriage. As a result, it is really two books; one about women’s lib, the other about marriage. The book about marriage is far and away the better one.
Four themes recur throughout the book. First, everything has its place in God’s creation. “The special gift and ability of each creature defines its special limitations. And as the bird easily comes to terms with the necessity of bearing wings when it finds that it is, in fact, the wings that bear the bird—up, away from the world, into the sky, into freedom—so the woman who accepts the limitations of womanhood finds in those very limitations her gifts, her special calling—wings, in fact, which bear her up into perfect freedom, into the will of God.” In God’s will from creation, “it is the nature of the woman to submit.” For by submitting a woman finds perfect freedom because freedom means “doing the thing we were meant for.” This is a theme evangelical feminism must face: did God create the two sexes for a reason? Is there some essential, non-anatomical difference between the sexes? If not, then why did God create two sexes instead of just one? If so, then in what do the differences consist?
Second, hierarchy is necessary for order. There is no society where order comes apart from hierarchy. The same is true of the miniature society, the family. Hierarchy, however, need not be onerous. To illustrate this Elliot uses a personal reference: she can remember only one time in her married life when her husband had to command her to do something. In marriage, an institution created by God, God gives authority to the husband. A wife’s submission to this authority then brings her true freedom because it is really submission to God. As in society in general freedom cannot be found apart from submission to God’s authority, so in marriage freedom is impossible for a woman apart from submission to her husband’s authority. No woman can be truly free attempting to be a man. “It is a naïve sort of feminism that insists that women prove their ability to do all the things that men do.… Men have never sought to prove that they can do all the things women do. Why subject women to purely masculine criteria?” By rejecting male authority in marriage, Elliot thinks, this is what women do.
Third, hierarchy is essential because equality in marriage is impossible. Complementary differences are what God planned. “Who is in a position to apportion everything according to preference or competence?… It is a naïve view of human nature to assume that two equals can take turns leading and following, and can, because they are ‘mature’ do without rank.” What in fact is happening is that “ ‘equal opportunity’ nearly always implies that women want to do what men do, not that men want to do what women do, which indicates that prestige is attached to men’s work but not to women’s.” Therefore Elliot argues the need for differences. Equality is a beautiful ideal, but women’s lib must face the question, Is it a sociological possibility or merely an ideal?
A fourth theme finds less emphasis, although it is clearly important. Marriage reflects the relation of God to Israel and of Christ to his Church. “Tremendous heavenly truths are set forth in a wife’s subjection to her husband, and the use of this metaphor in the Bible cannot be accidental.” But women’s libbers say submission is cultural, not essential. If they are right, marriage does not illustrate any longer the relation of Christ to his Church.
This book, however, is more than a book about women’s liberation. It is also a book about marriage. Elisabeth Elliot reveals great insight into the marriage relationship. For example, she warns her daughter that she will be marrying a sinner, a man, and a husband. As a sinner he will have faults. She must learn to love him for what is good and live with the faults. She will also be marrying a man; she will find that being around a man is quite different from being around a woman. Finally, she will be marrying a husband, not a father or a brother. Her husband will be able to do some things her other males could not; he will also not be able to do some things they could. This must be accepted.
Apart from the ideas about marriage, the strength of this book is its criticism of evangelical women’s liberation. The statement of the traditional women’s role is adequate but rather limited by the form chosen.
Briefly Noted
Many pamphlets have appeared on the Unification Church and its prophet (of which InterVarsity’s forty-four-page The Moon Doctrine by J. Isamu Yamamoto is probably the best), and it’s time to expect books. One of the first is The Spirit of Sun Myung Moon by evangelical author Zola Levitt (Harvest House, 127 pp., $1.75 pb).
Have you ever been exasperated by Robert’s Rules of Order and wondered if there were some alternative other than chaos or an informal consensus that might owe more to personality strengths than the merits of the issue? If so, try Deschler’s Rules of Order by the late Lewis Deschler (Prentice-Hall, 228 pp., $10), who served as parliamentarian of Congress 1928–74. He does not simply give Congress’s rules, but simplifies and generalizes them so that any organization that has members, especially if it is incorporated, can have up-to-date, fair guidelines for getting started and then doing things “decently and in order.” Obviously many religious organizations can find this helpful.
PSALMS Three mid-nineteenth-century commentaries on all 150 psalms are now reprinted in comparatively convenient one-volume editions: Perowne (Zondervan, 1,099 pp., $19.95), Plumer (Banner of Truth, 1,211 pp., $18.95), and Spurgeon, abridged from seven volumes by David Otis Fuller (Kregel, 703 pp., $14.95).
Yet another religiously oriented paperback line has begun to send forth titles, the Fountain Books imprint of Collins + World. Among its initial offerings is well-known writer William Barclay’s translation of The New Testament (576 pp., $2.95 pb). It was first issued in a two-volume hardback nearly a decade ago and would be a worthwhile addition to the shelf of translations in many an English-speaking Christian’s home.
Stephen Neill presents the seminary student or educated layman with a lucid, comprehensive introduction to New Testament theology from a moderately critical point of view in Jesus Through Many Eyes (Fortress, 214 pp., $4.50 pb). He assumes no knowledge of Greek or previous theological study on the part of the reader and leads him through all the books of the New Testament, grouping them by genre and date. A selected, annotated bibliography, which includes many conservative works, guides the student into further study.
Books giving principles of biblical interpretation (“hermeneutics”) abound. One of the most helpful is Understand by Walter Henricksen (Navpress [Box 1659, Colorado Springs, Colo. 80901], 107 pp., $1.95 pb), a leader in The Navigators. He describes and illustrates twenty-four “rules” of interpretation such as, “Biblical examples are authoritative only when supported by a command,” and, “Interpret words in harmony with their meaning in the times of the author.”
EVANGELISM Along with the more technique-oriented manuals, it is helpful to read biblical and theological reflections on evangelism. Of course, very practical ideas are also imbedded throughout the following recent releases: Dynamics of Evangelism by Gerald Borchert, New Testament professor at North American Baptist Seminary (Word, 146 pp., $5.95); Evangelism in Perspective by Robert Coleman, evangelism professor at Asbury Seminary (Christian Publications, 109 pp., $3.95, $1.75 pb); Word in Deed: Theological Themes in Evangelism by Gabriel Fackre, United Church of Christ minister and theology professor at Andover Newton (Eerdmans, 109 pp., $1.95 pb); Evangelization and Catechesis by Johannes Hofinger, a Jesuit (Paulist, 153 pp., $4.95 pb); Love Leaves No Choice: Life-Style Evangelism by C. B. Hogue, evangelism director for the Southern Baptist Convention (Word, 160 pp., $5.95); Bringing God’s News to Neighbors by Carl Kromminga, practical-theology professor at Calvin Seminary (Presbyterian and Reformed, 162 pp., $4.50 pb); Going Public With One’s Faith edited by R. James Ogden, focusing on biblical models (Judson, 128 pp., $2.50 pb); Contemporary Problems of Evangelism by Wendell Price, pastor of North Seattle Alliance Church (Christian Publications, 111 pp., $3.95, $2 pb); and Christian Mission in the Modern World by renowned Anglican Bible teacher John Stott (Inter-Varsity, 128 pp., $2.95 pb). None of these books is overly technical. Although the range of the authors’ denominations is wide, there are many common concerns.
The enigmatic figure of Melchizedek has been interpreted in a variety of ways since the Reformation. Bruce Demarest of Conservative Baptist Seminary catalogues these by period, school, and exegete in readable, exhaustive detail in A History of Interpretation of Hebrews 7:1–10 from the Reformation to the Present (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 146 pp., 32 marks, pb).
