Learning From Other Congregations
Getting a Church Started, by Elmer Towns (Benson, 1975, 185 pp., $4.95), The Exciting Church, by Charles Shedd (three volumes, Word, 1975, 105, 122, and 88 pp., $3.95 each), and All Originality Makes a Dull Church, by Dan Baumann (Vision, 1976, 141 pp., $2.50 pb), are reviewed by William Brindley, pastor, Reston Presbyterian Church, Reston, Virginia.
Those interested in vital growing congregations have an increasing array of “case studies” to ponder. The authors of these three books have attempted to present model American churches from which others can—it is hoped—learn transferable concepts and principles.
Towns’s book is geared to the planter or organizing pastor of a new church. He features ten new, small, and prospering congregations, providing some helpful “how-to’s” on starting a church “in the face of insurmountable odds with limited resources in unlikely circumstances,” as the subtitle puts it.
Towns selected his ten churches from varying socio-economic and geographical areas with the hope of increasing the impact of his main point: different formulas may be used in church planting, but the fundamental principles remain the same. Without question the most useful portion of the book is the last four chapters, in which he draws together these principles and adds some practical tips on such matters as finding the right location, advertising, and establishing credibility.
Getting a Church Started is a helpful handbook for church planting and might be used in a college or seminary course. It certainly is a book for pastors of new churches in America to consult. However, there are a number of drawbacks. Minor ones include a penchant for the superfluous, less than the best organization, and abundant photographs of church buildings, as if the building were the church.
A more serious drawback is the American pragmatism that underlies Towns’s view of church expansion. He says, “As the population explodes and another community comes into existence, new churches are needed.” One does not find in Towns’s book the foundational biblical principles for church expansion that so need to be articulated today. Where is the biblical emphasis on the work of God in gathering to himself “a people for his name” (Acts 15:12–14), “a great multitude” (Rev. 7:9, 10)? Similarly, Towns puts too much emphasis on the pastor of the new church. While starting a congregation often does require a person with a vision, stress should be placed on God’s work in giving a vision to whole groups of people (Acts 13:1–3).
A final liability of Getting a Church Started is its limited scope. While many, if not most, new churches in America are started in “fundamentalistic-evangelistic” frameworks, Towns has neglected numerous other evangelical congregations whose style of ministry is radically different from what he described.
Shedd’s trilogy, The Exciting Church, flows from his ministry with the Jekyll Island Presbyterian Community Church in Georgia. As a creative pastor and writer he offers some fresh ideas and modes of expression in the areas of prayer, tithing, and using the Bible. His main thesis is that these are the three keys to opening up an exciting church. In supporting this theme he uses a number of interesting anecdotes and illustrations. Among the most helpful parts of each book are the appendixes, which contain a wealth of practical how-to’s. The three volumes should have been bound into one. Maybe they will be for a paperback edition.
A critical defect in this trilogy is the main thesis itself. Shedd says that “Today’s mod man won’t settle for the dull, the drab. He wants a church which can turn him on.” While his perception is valid, the pastor and his congregation should never be motivated by a simple desire to have a “turned on” church. Love for God and a desire to be obedient to his Word must always come first. That may or may not produce a church that is exciting to the modern man. Shedd would have a difficult time selling his thesis to Christians in Uganda or Czechoslovakia. The building of Christ’s church often means abuse from the unrighteous, not applause; they may be, like Saul of Tarsus, “excitingly turned on” to the demolition of the church.
The third book, All Originality Makes a Dull Church, makes for anything but dull reading. Baumann’s book is far superior in clarity and cogency to the other two.
The first chapter contains some of Baumann’s guiding principles for the pastor or layman who wants to stand on other people’s shoulders, learning from their experiences. The next five chapters give an overview of five types of church: the soul-winning church, the classroom church, the life-situation church, the social-action church, and the general-practitioner church. Each model is illustrated by two relatively well-known churches (for example, Coral Ridge Presbyterian and Peninsula Bible), except for the last model, which is illustrated only by Baumann’s own Whittier Area Baptist Fellowship.
In keeping with Baumann’s awareness of the sociological differences among church situations, he provides a helpful description of each church’s community before he describes its essential programs and draws out some “transferable concepts.” In addition, helpful appendixes greatly enhance the value of the book.
However, the whole classification of a “success” story is extremely subjective. What God may think is successful we may not. Although Baumann gives a balanced presentation of the various models, we must remind ourselves not to oversimplify. We must realize that Coral Ridge, for example, cannot be reduced simply to a “soul-winning” church without some stereotyping. Furthermore, Baumann’s book must be seen as limited to contemporary Western expressions of God’s church. One only hopes that highlighting certain present-day American “successes” does not keep us from learning from other models either from history (for example, the Clapham Sect near London) or from the non-Western world (for example, the mission in Kalimantan Kenyah in Indonesia).
The practical value of this book is great. It provides a handbook of “successful” modern American churches in a format and with a thrust that will be helpful to the pastor as well as the congregation. It is the kind of book that elders, deacons, and church boards should be asked to read. It also should be constantly available on the church book table.
All three of these attempts to expose the modern Western evangelical to case studies in God’s renewing work today have some value. I only hope that our global myopia as well as our penchant to “get the job done no matter what” is not reinforced by reading them.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Too many books on flourishing congregations are appearing for us to review them all. Other recent titles that interested readers should inspect at bookstores and that Bible college and seminary libraries should certainly acquire include: Outreach: God’s Miracle Business by Elvis Marcum (Broadman, 151 pp., n.p., pb), on Graceland Baptist, New Albany, Indiana: God Loves the Dandelions by Roger Fredrikson (Word, 168 pp., $5.95), on First Baptist, Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Handbook For Mission Groups by Gordon Cosby (Word, 179 pp., $5.95) and The New Community by Elizabeth O’Connor (Harper & Row, 121 pp., $3.95 pb), both on the Church of the Saviour, Washington, D.C.; The Church That Takes on Trouble by James and Marti Hefley (Cook, 242 pp., $5.95), on LaSalle Street Church, Chicago; How Churches Grow by Bernard and Marjorie Palmer (Bethany Fellowship, 171 pp., $3.50 pb), on eleven congregations ranging from Dallas’s giant First Baptist to average-size Evangelical Free and Christian and Missionary Alliance congregations; and two by Mr. Palmer, Pattern For a Total Church, on Redwood Chapel, Castro Valley, California, and Peoples: Church on the Go, on Peoples Church, Toronto (both Victor, 135 and 111 pp., $2.50 each pb).
The Emergence Of Pentecostalism
Aspects of Pentecostal-Charismatic Origins, edited by Vinson Synan (Logos, 1975, 252 pp., $3.50 pb), is reviewed by James S. Tinney, Ph.D. candidate in political science, Howard University, Washington, D.C.
Long overdue is a work of Pentecostal history that comes from within the movement, gives adequate attention to its several distinct branches of thought and practice, but does not bear the official stamp of any one of them. This compendium edited by the author of The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement (Eerdmans) is a step in the right direction. It devotes at least one article to each of five branches of Pentecostals, which Synan calls “variations of one Holy Spirit movement”: “holiness,” “finished work,” “oneness,” “neo-pentecostals,” and Catholics. (There are problems with this classification; more precision could result from a classification based on differing concepts of salvation, for instance.)
Eleven writers contributed an article each; these are preceded by Synan’s own much too short introduction. The articles are about equally divided between older and newer branches, with articles by two non-Pentecostals thrown in for good measure. (The most comprehensive article is Martin Marty’s “Pentecostalism in the Context of American Piety and Practice.” On the other hand, the chapter on “The Anti-Pentecostal Argument” is not written by an outsider, and consequently is far from adequate.) A page of background information on each contributor is especially helpful.
In several respects this book attempts to fill gaps in past studies. Wesleyan origins of the tongues movement are re-emphasized, not unexpectedly, since Synan is largely responsible for stressing those still Wesleyan Pentecostals who are generally neglected in the movement’s literature. Charismatics, often criticized by older Pentecostalists, are also given full recognition. Blacks and Jesus-only groups are each given a chapter, although neither segment has members in the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America.
Gaps do remain. The term “aspects” in the book’s title indicates that it does not claim comprehensiveness. “Aspects” calling for more treatment include pre-twentieth-century charismatic movements, cultic groups that countenance tongues, the origins of the many multi-denominational fellowships, and non-Western counterparts. The editor’s introduction also fails to define the term “Pentecostal” for the readers, apparently making the false assumption that everyone means the same thing by the term.
The book neglects the important role of blacks in the movement’s origins despite an article by a black minister, Leonard Lovett. (Its title, “Black Origins of the Pentecostal Movement,” is identical to the title of my own article in Christianity Today, October 8, 1971, which was, as far as I know, the first article on the topic to be published anywhere. Lovett does not refer to it.) David Reed’s piece on “Aspects of the Origins of Oneness Pentecostalism” refers only casually to G. T. Haywood, the black seminal figure in that branch, as if he were a late-comer to the Unitarian doctrine. It is left to Marty, a non-Pentecostal, to raise the issue of African components of Pentecostalism.
Like many Pentecostal histories, this one overemphasizes the role of the white Topeka minister Charles Parham. One suspects that white Pentecostals are more comfortable with a white founder than a black one, but a more conscious reason is apparent here. Parham has become an essential part of the eschatological doctrine that Pentecostalism represents the “latter rain” restoration of biblical faith. The symbolism of January 1, 1901, the day when people at Parham’s Bible school first experienced tongue-speaking, is especially fitting for this interpretation. However, one wishes that scholars doing historical work might be non-doctrinal enough not to approach the subject from this perspective, as several included here do, including Lovett and Thomas F. Zimmerman (“The Reason For the Rise of the Pentecostal Movement”). It is curious to hold up unnecessarily, as a founder, a man such as Parham, who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, was shadowed by rumors of sexual libertinism (and precursor of an often-hushed “free love” Pentecostalism that took root in the midwest for a time), and was so doctrinally unsure of himself as to vacillate repeatedly on questions of the Trinity, the formula for water baptism, and the possibility of “third” and “fourth” works of grace.
In spite of its useful reemphasis on Wesleyan roots, the book (through no fault of its own) inevitably brings awareness of continuing confusion about the origins of the Pentecostal movement. What is seldom realized is that Parham is implicitly a direct rival to the holiness movement as the wellspring of Pentecostalism (even though he also espoused holiness tenets at the beginning). Either Donald Dayton is correct (in his article “From Christian Perfection to the Baptism of the Holy Ghost”) when he says, “One can find in late nineteenth-century holiness thought and life every significant feature of Pentecostalism,” or he is not. If he is, the primacy of Parham, which other contributors assert, is simply not so. Confusion is enhanced by Larry Christenson’s article, which pictures the nineteenth-century Irvingite movement as Pentecostal though it fits neither holiness nor Parhamite categories.
Someday Pentecostal historians must face the inherent contradictions and mutual exclusiveness of some of their claims. The movement has until now attempted to perform intellectual somersaults over these competing events. It has tried to use questionable “proof texts” from history that allege that prominent Christian patriarchs through the centuries have spoken in tongues; it has arbitrarily refused to recognize other more easily validated instances of tongues in non-Christian settings; it has made biblical allowances for “sporadic outpourings” between the “early and latter rains” in order to accommodate “exceptions”; and it has alternated among the holiness movement, Parham, and W. J. Seymour of Azusa Street as points of origin.
This collection of essays is a worthwhile addition to Pentecostal historiography, but it also illustrates the continuing predicament.
Wilderness Insights
A Reason For Hope, by Lane T. Dennis (Revell, 1976, 189 pp., $5.95), is reviewed by Michael H. Macdonald, associate professor of German and philosophy, Seattle Pacific University, Seattle, Washington.
Lane Dennis is the son of the late founder (his father) and of the current president (his mother) of Good News Publishers, which is best known for producing gospel tracts. A Reason For Hope might be considered both a modern sequel to Thoreau’s Walden and an answer to Heilbroner’s recent question “Is there a hope for man?” (An Inquiry Into the Human Prospect). Looking for the lost simple pleasures of peace, joy, and inner harmony with God, Dennis and his family left Chicago in 1972 to carve out a new life in a remote area of northern Michigan for two years. (An interesting description of these experiences is given in chapter one.) Away from diversions like television, radio, sports events, and movies, they were able to recapture, to a degree, the deep-rooted family unity often lost in our numerous family-fragmenting activities. Ebeth and Lane learned quickly how narrow their so-called liberal education had been. By building their own home and growing their own food, the family members gained a new perspective on needs.
In chapters two through five Dennis turns to the world of ideas. He traces our modern consciousness back to the Middle Ages and notes the fundamental differences between our modern age and that one. His initial premise is that our present way of life is no longer workable, and his point of reference is “a radical orthodoxy,” an affirmation of historic, biblical Christianity. Dennis points to community, significance, meaning, and wholeness in medieval society and to alienation, meaninglessness, and fragmentation in society today. But although he finds much of value in medieval life, he is careful not to romanticize and certainly does not advocate a return to a thirteenth-century Golden Age.
Dennis subsequently probes the spirit of our age. Noting that “nothing in culture is value neutral,” he attempts to determine our value system and sort out that in it which runs counter to the Christian faith. Among the key “standard measures of well-being” in our society are the number of cars and television sets we own and the level of the GNP. Yet however high we rate according to these criteria, crime and oppression persist and modern technology has not brought us the happiness we expected. Furthermore, a person’s worth is now considered to be chiefly his monetary value; his human qualities and contribution to the community are considered only secondarily. Some may think that a reconstruction of the nature of man through genetic engineering is an answer, but the criteria for human well-being must still be agreed upon.
Of three possible futures. Dennis envisions for us, he rejects “Eco-Apocalypse” and “Techno-Totalitarianism” and chooses “The Birth of a New Spirit.” It is up to the Christian to change the direction society is going. “The Word must once again become flesh, in our lives, in our communities of faith, and in turn carry its transforming power into the whole of human affairs.” Dennis labels it “tragic” that there is no difference between the Christian’s life-style and that of anyone else. “We buy the same things, make the same things, sell the same things.” We have not sought first the Kingdom of God. The material sphere has become the object of our devotion.
Even though the Bible yields no unambiguous solutions at either the private or the institutional level, I would have liked (in chapter six) a more extensive discussion of specific things that the Dennises do differently because of their experiences in the North Woods and subsequent reading. We all will have to learn to get along without many of the things that our society deems essential. (Thoreau said “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”) Specific life-styles that combat waste and excessive consumption need to be discussed. Otherwise the danger is that when all is said and done, much more will have been said than done.
Dennis is not a particularly articulate or sophisticated writer, but he is solid. The book is well documented and brings into proper perspective the current plight of Western civilization. The things he says are important, and we are going to have to deal with them.
Briefly Noted
SPIRITUAL GIFTS What is intended by God “for the common good” of the body of Christ is in our time (as was the Eucharist in an earlier time) one of the major occasions for division. The Dynamics of Spiritual Gifts by William McRae (Zondervan, 141 pp., $1.75 pb) treats the various aspects of the gifts in general (distribution, discovery, development) and comments on and classifies each of them. His distinction between temporary and permanent gifts will not be accepted by many, but he does seek to be biblically based, not just traditional. A similar position is more briefly expressed by W. T. Purkiser in The Gifts of the Spirit (Beacon Hill, 77 pp., $1.50 pb). Kenneth Gangel examines eighteen gifts one by one in You and Your Spiritual Gifts (Moody, 96 pp., $.95 pb) and, with significant qualifications, sees them all available today. Kenneth Kinghorn in Gifts of the Spirit (Abingdon, 126 pp., $3.25) is somewhat more open to the continued operation of all the biblical gifts. Perhaps the most interesting of this batch is Let the Tide Come In! by C. Ernest Tatham (Creation House, 150 pp., $2.95 pb). Tatham is a prominent older Bible teacher who for most of his life expressed the kind of position ably represented by McRae. He even wrote a very widely circulated correspondence course on the subject. But over the past few years he has changed his mind and now embraces much, but not all, that is characteristic of charismatic theology. Even more involved with the movement, yet stopping short of complete identification, is Kurt Koch. The latest of his numerous books, Charismatic Gifts (Kregel, 174 pp., $1.95 pb), treats all of them, not just the “sign” gifts. From within the charismatic movement: Jim McNair gives verse-by-verse comments on First Corinthians 12–14 and numerous related portions in Love and Gifts (Bethany Fellowship, 173 pp., $2.45 pb); R. Douglas Wead focuses on the gift of the “word of knowledge” in Hear His Voice (Creation House, 172 pp., $1.95 pb); and Bruce Yocum discusses Prophecy as a continuing gift (Word of Life, 148 pp., $2.50 pb).
Honor Thy Father and Mother by Gerald Blidstein (KTAV, 234 pp., $15) is a thorough study of the understanding of the fifth commandment in Judaism over the centuries. For seminary libraries.
MISSIONS Crucial Dimensions in World Evangelization by Arthur Glasser and others (William Carey, 466 pp., $6.95 pb) and Christian Missions in Biblical Perspective by J. Herbert Kane (Baker, 328 pp., $9.95) are comprehensive treatments that complement each other. Kane, of Trinity seminary, stresses the biblical and theological underpinnings. Glasser and nine others, many of them his colleagues at Fuller Seminary, combine original and reprinted materials to survey contemporary and potential aspects of missions. Aimed at a broader audience are Everything You Want to Know About the Mission Field But Are Afraid You Won’t Learn Until You Get There by Charles Troutman (InterVarsity, 114 pp., $2.95 pb), which takes the form of letters to a prospective missionary, and A World to Win edited by Roger Greenway (Baker, 135 pp., $3.95 pb), consisting of eleven sermons by six men seeking to promote missions-mindedness among all Christians.
PREACHING Recent offerings on the practice of preaching include A Guide to Biblical Preaching by James Cox (Abingdon. 142 pp., $6.50) of Southern Baptist Seminary; The Sermon in Perspective (Baker, 116 pp., $4.95) by James Earl Massey of Anderson School of Theology; The Ministry of the Word by R. E. C. Brown (Fortress, 128 pp., $3.50 pb), a reprint of a widely commended 1958 work by a recently deceased Anglican rector; and Capers of the Clergy (Baker, 140 pp., $4.95) by DeWitt Matthews of Midwestern Baptist Seminary, which uses a light touch to help preachers in their overail congregational relationships.
HINDUISM is most conspicuous in America through the Transcendental Meditation movement, which disguises its origins, and through the undisguised Hare Krishna devotees one encounters at airports and other public places (Hare Krishna claims 10,000 full-time and five to ten times that many part-time members). An anthropologist reports on them in The American Children of Krsna by Francine Jeanne Daner (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 118 pp., n.p., pb). For those who want to study the sources a handy compendium is available: Hindu Theology: A Reader edited by Jose Pereira (Doubleday, 558 pp., $3.50 pb).
