In light of this issue’s theme on success, we asked veteran news reporter Tom Minnery to take an assignment Visit three widely-diverse churches considered “successful” by many. “Ask questions,” we told Tom. “Listen and evaluate; then give us your impressions.”
We selected three congregations thoroughly different in methods, setting, and philosophy, yet all showing unique marks of achievement. Tom’s report follows.
The Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C., reached a crisis about five years ago, the same one many churches face. The congregation was getting too big, and its leaders felt the intimacy of the early days was ebbing away because of it. The church decided to split into smaller bodies to regain that sense of closeness. The Church of the Saviour had 110 members; they split into, not two, or three, but six smaller churches.
This church is not your usual place of worship.,In fact, it looks more like a restaurant than a church. The Potter’s House, where much of the church life goes on, is indeed a restaurant, a cozy, friendly eating place on a slightly shabby block of Columbia Road, far from the glitter of federal Washington. There is also a more conventional church building on Massachusetts Avenue. The church’s founder and spiritual shepherd is Gordon Cosby, and his vision is for a Christian community that nurtures its members in an ever-deepening walk with Christ through strong friendships, the discovery and use of spiritual gifts, and the belief that every Christian is called to a specific mission for the Lord.
Cosby was trained at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, but his vision didn’t really come into focus until after his seminary days, when he enlisted in the Army and was assigned as a chaplain with the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division during World War II.
He was sent overseas with his regiment, and on the bloodied soil of Belgium, he began to see that the brand of Christianity instilled in his boys by their conventional church backgrounds melted in the white heat of combat.
“Those three years were very intense for me,” Cosby said, recalling them during an interview amid the clatter of the lunch crowd at Potter’s House. “I began to look at what the church was producing in the way of Christian commitment and Christian character, and day to day I saw people who did not have the resources to live under combat conditions. From that perspective of 3,000 miles away, I saw that the denominations simply did not prepare people to live with the resources they needed-often their Christianity was a cultural thing rather than a real commitment.”
There was one incident during the war that brought his vision into sharp focus. One night, seven of the men entrusted to him were assigned to infiltrate enemy lines, observe what they could, and sneak back before sunup, a dangerous task from which not everyone could be expected to return. All night long Cosby waited, praying. Here’s what happened, in an account written by Elizabeth O’Conner
It was almost dawn when a lone figure came through the morning mist. Gordon thanked God. And then came another, and yet another, until all seven were back. Such a reunion he had never seen. Their words tumbled over each other. . . The night for him became a parable of the church when she authentically gathers. A group of people who know they are bound over to the power of death stumble on a treasure, and that treasure is Christ; miracle of miracles, doors open that were closed, gates of bronze are broken down. The words spill out as they try to tell one another what happened, and how it happened, and of the presence that was there.
Cosby observed the deep friendships common to all wartime soldiers: “We were drawing easily on the tremendous capacity for intimacy that is in each of us. I think this is why men sometimes romanticize war. We had that sense of community that we all yearn for, and which many of these men had never known before and would never know again.”
When he returned from the war, Cosby had two determinations about the church he would shepherd: First, it would be open to all races; he had found the military to be less segregated than many churches in the United States. Second, he firmly believed there must be more preparation before one became a member. “You cannot open the doors of a church and say you’re ready to make a commitment to Christ, and then be baptized, and have the church say, ‘Okay, come on in.’ ” Cosby believes a person simply can’t sift it all through in that short space of time.
A prospective member of the Church of the Saviour associates himself with one of the church’s six “faith communities,” and over the next two years, he takes a series of five classes, which constitute the “School of Christian Living,” given in each of the six faith communities. The subjects are Old Testament, New Testament, Christian Ethics, Christian Growth, and Christian Doctrine. At the end of the two-year internship, the prospect decides whether he wants to join or not; and if he joins, he reads a public, 260-word commitment, declaring the deity and lordship of Christ, his dedication to becoming a mature Christian regardless of the cost, and his conviction that a Christian should love all men and be a “reconciler, living in a manner which will end all war, personal and public.”
Members of the church belong to one of about thirty mission groups divided evenly among the six faith communities; each one is highly structured around a specific purpose. One is embarked on a program to provide housing for the poor, another runs the Potter’s House, still another operates the church’s retreat center in Maryland. The mission groups are small, and from their closeness spring lasting friendships. Each member believes he has been called to his particular mission by God, and he doesn’t join any group until he feels a clear call. Church members cross the spectrum of race, income, and culture, and most of the people work in conventional jobs around Washington. The Church of the Saviour has the equivalent of two-and-a-half paid employees, Cosby being one. He identifies himself as “support staff,” not as pastor, and he is available to whatever mission groups seek his assistance. The six faith communities are autonomous under the Church of the Saviour umbrella, each with its own School of Christian Living and leadership structure. Only two have professionally trained pastors, and they serve part time.
Each member of a mission group commits himself to at least four disciplines: daily prayer, daily Bible study, weekly worship, and proportionate giving, beginning at a tithe of gross income. Mission groups adopt other disciplines that might be necessary for their particular assignments. Authority in each of the groups is divided among those who have discovered particular gifts. Some of the gifts developed in the groups are: moderator, shepherd, pastor, activist, administrator, ecumenist, and teacher.
Cosby believes strongly that the Lord calls each church member to a specific mission, and it’s a vital task for the church to help every member discover that calling. Mission groups themselves are also called forth by God, he believes. “Mission groups always come into being because one or more individuals sense a call to go into it. We would never go into it because the church board said we needed to do something. This is what the Lord of the church does; he calls people. We’ve gotten so far away from the sense of call that we do it by committee, or we do it by principle, or we do it by something else. But the whole thing is call. I have no business being in the ministry unless I’m called; no one has any business doing anything unless he’s called, if he’s part of the church.”
There is no conventional program of evangelism at the Church of the Saviour. Cosby believes that outward action to spread the faith should be a logical result of the Spirit at work on the inside.
David Dorsey, a graduate of the Harvard Business School, a former Peace Corps worker, and, at the time, an executive with a large chemical company, visited the church one summer and was struck by its uniqueness. In a written testimony he said, “I saw a group of people, unsuccessful by the world’s standards, find three foster homes for Junior Village children one Saturday afternoon. It reminded me of another group of culturally and socially disadvantaged persons led by a dense and cowardly fisherman (Peter). It seemed to say that the church of Christ is built more on the rock of commitment than the sands of intelligence and training.”
Dorsey wound up quitting his job and becoming executive director of Wellspring, a mission group whose task is to share the church’s experience with the many churchmen who come regularly to Washington to learn more about it. Cosby said Wellspring deals with about a thousand visitors every year or so, and he himself spends much of his time with these people and in conducting retreats. He finds that many appreciate what’s been accomplished, but find the spiritual commitment too rigorous for them and their own congregations. His belief is this: “To give leadership that is going to move a congregation into greater faithfulness to the gospel is a very costly sort of thing, and a lot of people aren’t willing to pay the cost. They will say that to me when they’re honest.”
One cost of the commitment the church requires is in numbers. After so many years, with just a little over a hundred members, Cosby’s church has not prospered by the world’s measure. Yet he’s convinced most churches are too large, and they diminish the chance for Christian nurture as they struggle to grow even larger. But other than that, he’s not willing to say who has the right approach. “I could very seldom say that I’m right. We’re just trying to discover what is a faithful mission. And that faithfulness is always dimmed by our sin and our ignorance and our partial seeing. I don’t know anybody who’s doing it right. I know a lot of people doing it wrong, and that often includes myself.”
The word “boldness” keeps coming to mind in describing Grace Community Church in Chantilly, Virginia, but it isn’t that exactly. The members didn’t set sail with all flags flying and then pray God would keep them on course. They tried to see the leading of the Lord first, and then to follow that leading. They have followed it-boldly and well.
The church started from scratch in 1979 with twelve interested families and a pastor, but with no money and nowhere to meet. Now, attendance is crowding 175 on some Sundays, and the church owns thirteen acres of financially-inflated property in Chantilly, a booming suburb about an hour out of Washington on the commuter bus. Its subdivisions house many mid-level federal workers and military people.
Those who started the church had been driving to Faith Bible Church in nearby Sterling, but they had been praying for a church in their own vicinity. Stephen L. Austin was assistant pastor at Faith | while attending Capital Bible Seminary in Lanham, Maryland, and he had a vision for a church in Chantilly as well. His I prayer was that God would shut the door if such a church were not in his will, and with that in mind, planning went ahead in the fall of 1978. A post office box, of all things, was an item the new church needed immediately, but those were hard to come by in fast-growing Chantilly. As it happened, when Austin stopped to inquire, the postmaster had been holding one open for someone who hadn’t shown up to claim it, and he decided to let him rent it. There was an elementary school in Greenbriar, the subdivision where most of the interested families lived, and another congregation that had been using the facility for Sunday services was just about to move to another part of the community. The door didn’t seem to be shutting.
The first service was held on the first Sunday in 1979, in the school cafeteria. The tiny congregation had set the pastor’s salary at $24,000, the minimum he needed to qualify for a mortgage on a home in the area. His first paycheck was actually handed to him before the collection box was opened that first Sunday, but there wasn’t any hoopla about it-God had guided the people, that’s how much the pastor needed, and everyone assumed enough would come in to cover the check. (There was no collection, just a box in the back.) Enough did come in, and it did on successive Sundays as well.
Attendance rose slowly but steadily, and almost immediately the leaders began eyeing property. The school district rules being what they were, they knew they’d have to be out of the school in five years, and that didn’t leave extra time for finding land and getting a building up. They found eighteen and a half acres that they could get for $211,000, which was actually rather cheap, as close as it was to Dulles International Airport and all the hot building sites for new subdivisions in the area. The church wanted only thirteen acres, but the owners wouldn’t subdivide. About that time, someone anonymously promised $20,000 for a down-payment, and negotiations became serious. The owners agreed to take the $20,000 down for all eighteen and a half acres, and the people at Grace suddenly found themselves with a building site and a mountainous mortgage.
The first payment was $8,225 due on December 15, 1979, only a few months off. This was interesting because the weekly giving was barely meeting the operating expenses. A special offering at deadline time fell short by $2,000, and on the very evening the building committee met to wring its hands, the money came in “to the dime” from two parties, neither of whom knew how much was lacking.
The second payment was easier: $3,581, due in February 1980. This time the special offering fell short by only $750, but it might as well have been a thousand because it wasn’t enough. Again at the deadline, someone phoned who didn’t know about the deficit; he had decided to give something to the building fund and was merely calling the pastor to tell him how much. It was $750.
The next payment was a whopper: $22,000 due in June 1980. “We were just a tad short,” laughs Austin. Less than half had come in. But now there was a new development. Someone wanted to buy the five and one half acres the church hadn’t wanted in the first place. They decided to sell, and did so at a profit, which covered the August payment and the February payment, and reduced the total indebtedness to $92,000.
Looking back on it, the members believe God worked miracles to allow the church to keep its property, but at the time-for a few-the Lord’s leading wasn’t evident at all. To them it looked a lot more like the church had done nothing more than come very close to losing the building site for which so many families had sacrificed.
Thus, there was a feeling in some corners of the congregation that weekly allotments should be set aside for land payments to forestall any more eleventh-hour crises, but Austin said he didn’t see that in Scripture. He said, “It’s human nature for Americans to have tomorrow, next week, and the future all planned securely. Throughout Scripture, though, I just don’t see that God works that way. He promises us our daily bread, not our monthly bread. God has never failed to meet what we needed on a given day, and we’ve never had a lot of money sitting around for what’s coming up. My salary was set at $24,000 when we didn’t have nearly half that amount coming in; but we believed that if God had called us to do this, he was going to meet the need, and sure enough, he did.”
With attendance growing steadily, a second full-time minister came aboard. Bob Elliott, a former Marine and a construction worker who is toiling for a degree at Washington Bible College, began serving as youth director. He and his wife Cathy are trying to make an impact among Chantilly’s large teen-age population, which is rife with the emotional and drug problems found in most middle-class suburbs. The Elliotts get housing and a small living allowance, but no salary yet.
The fast growth and the quick plunge into deep debt are events that naturally bring about dissension in churches, but that hasn’t seemed to be a serious problem at Grace Community Church, at least so far.
The emphasis of the leadership at Grace is on trying to identify God’s will and then following it, not in stepping out first and then praying that God will honor their decisions. “We are not responsible for determining the direction of our church,” Austin said. “God is responsible. Our responsibility is to ensure that the direction we’re going in conforms to Scripture. That relieves us (the elders) of doing anything but investigating the Scripture, making sure we’re doing what it says, and making sure we’re spending enough time with the people-knowing where they are with the Lord, and what they feel their gifts are.” One “unlikely result” of this, he says, is that elders’ meetings are a joy, centered around Bible study not an interminable agenda. Austin likens the elders to waterboys on a spiritual football team: “The higher you are spiritually, the greater the servant you should be. The elders should train the people to do the work of the ministry. The work of the ministry is not centered in the elders or the deacons. The work of the ministry is the people of the church being a light to the world.”
Two illustrations will serve to show how elders at Grace Community Church have faced problems. First, missionaries on deputation frequently asked to present their work to the congregation, but being so new, it hadn’t yet given much thought to formalized missionary giving. The elders dug into the Scriptures and concluded that the church should be giving to missions. On faith, then, they set aside 10 percent of the income for missions. Almost immediately, Austin reports, the weekly income increased accordingly.
On another occasion, a question arose over how active non-members should be in the church. Again to the Scriptures, and this time the elders concluded that membership didn’t seem to be a salient issue. What was far more important was that new people be placed so they could be discipled by more mature Christians. “If you’re a member of the universal body of Christ and abide by our doctrine, you’re a member,” Austin said. “We don’t want to make membership in our church any more unique than membership in the church at large.” Membership, consequently, isn’t much more than a formality, although a prospect is asked to abide by the doctrine, not whether he agrees with it. “We’re told to make disciples, not find them,” Austin said.
The church leaders try to follow the principle of following where God leads, even to the question of programs and ministries. “It’s easy,” Austin said, “to have a desire to reach kids for Christ, get a bus ministry, and then get people to fill the positions. l believe that the way God intends for a church to work is to allow those persons to first grow closer to him, and then if God directs them to start a bus ministry, for the leadership to be able to recognize it. My experience is that pastors spend too much time filling positions.”
No one was picked to start a children’s program at Grace, but one of the men felt burdened and stepped forward to do it on his own. The men have a Saturday morning prayer breakfast because a couple of them felt the desire to do it. It wasn’t a question of a committee deciding it was a good idea and then casting about for someone to be responsible. The same was true of the ladies’ Tuesday morning prayer meeting. The elders themselves weren’t selected until about nine months after the church opened. The idea was to first see who would become obvious choices for spiritual leadership, and those choices were obvious by the time they were made.
Although there are a few congregational votes on matters at Grace Community Church, there aren’t very many. Austin explained, “The local church is a theocracy. God directs his church. Therefore, to have a vote implies a democracy. When churches vote, sometimes they seem to be forcing God into their way of doing things. They’ll ask, ‘Should we buy this land or that land?’ instead of praying for the will of God concerning the land. The prayer shouldn’t be, ‘God, please bring in the money for this land.’ The prayer should be, ‘God, do you want us to have this land?’ A majority on an issue is no guarantee of God’s will,” and he cites the famous incident of the Israelite spies who voted not to enter the Promised Land.
Grace Community Church does seem to be trying to follow God’s will boldly, and it’s even more remarkable when you understand that Austin, thirty-five years old, has been a Christian for only eight years. It happened one night in 1973 when two people from Faith Bible Church knocked on his door. Eight weeks later he was also going door-to-door, and the change in him was so pronounced that it led his wife Shirley to accept Christ also. He began to teach the teens at Faith, only a little fazed by the fact that some of them knew a lot more Bible than he did. A year and a half after that first knock on the door, Austin entered Capital Bible Seminary, quitting his job as a structural engineer.
Pinned to a bulletin board behind the desk in Steve Austin’s study is a note that says this: “Some things have to be believed to be seen.” That seems to summarize pretty well the experience of the young congregation at Grace Community Church, some two years into the mission God has for them in Chantilly, Virginia.
* * *
During the eighteen years Thomas Younger pastored the Immanuel Baptist Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the church nearly doubled in size and built a half-million dollar sanctuary as well. The church had all the marks of conventional success, but few probably would have predicted it. For during those eighteen years, the people of Immanuel started thirteen new churches in and around Fort Wayne, and seeded every one of those new churches with the best of its own families.
Younger is now president of Western Baptist College in Salem, Oregon, and he can’t imagine why more pastors don’t have the vision for church planting he and his congregation had. He finds many pastors recoil at the prospect of losing some of their best people to start a church elsewhere. He’s convinced God honored their commitment by replacing, sometimes two-fold, all those who left the home church to struggle with a new one.
Younger is a leader in the sense of a man with an idea, who can convince the unwilling that the idea is sound, and that it is theirs. In 1956, Younger, then twenty-seven, had been pastor at Immanuel for all of three months, and he was discouraged one Sunday because he didn’t have a new church started yet. That night he couldn’t sleep well. He doesn’t regard himself as a mystic or as especially pious, but sometime during the night he’s convinced the Lord spoke to him somehow, telling him that the only way to start a new church was to go out and do it. He, Younger, would have to lead; the people wouldn’t.
The next morning, Monday, he jumped out of bed, excited, phoned the chairman of his deacon board, Sidney Peak, and arranged to meet him at the cemetery. “What’s going on?” asked Peak. “We’re going to start a church today,” came the reply. “Praise the Lord!-where?” asked Peak. “I’m not sure,” said Younger. They drove off together, and before long they came upon a small building in a cornfield that looked like it might once have been a church, except it had no steeple. Actually it was used as a dancehall on Saturday nights, and the owner was there sweeping up. He agreed to rent it out as a church. Younger paid him five dollars on the rent, all he had in his pocket, and the Shoaff Park Baptist Church was born. That same night he called all the deacons together, took them out to the site, and announced to them that the following Sunday services would be held there, as the first of Immanuel’s mission churches. A bit of spirited discussion ensued, centered around the word “premature,” but the pastor sold them on the idea. The next night, Tuesday, he and the deacons began calling on seven or eight Immanuel families living in the vicinity to see if they would switch.
On Wednesday night he announced the new church to the full congregation during the regular prayer meeting; on Thursday he finished negotiations to rent the building; on Friday night he met with the suddenly-assembled new congregation and passed out assignments: one to teach Sunday-school, one to take charge of the children, and so forth. Sidney Peak, a graduate of Moody Bible Institute, agreed to be interim preacher.
Some weeks later, Younger convinced a pastor friend in Ohio to consider becoming the permanent pastor. He brought him to Immanuel and sat him downstairs while the branch church congregation was meeting upstairs. During the meeting, Younger apologized for his abruptness and the lack of protocol which normally accompanies the calling of a Baptist preacher. He said he already had a good prospect, that he was downstairs, and would the congregation care to go down and meet him? They would, and they did. The flock and new shepherd hit it off well.
That, roughly, is the Thomas Younger model for church planting. Over the years it’s been polished up somewhat, but the principle-action-remains the same. The only way to do it is to do it.
The main problem with starting the second church was that there were no Immanuel families coming from the area he had selected for the church. So he preached a sermon on the need for some missionaries, not to go to Africa or the Amazon, but to go five miles out of their way and become the congregation for the next branch church. It wasn’t long before he had a small, willing band to do just that. Recalling the starting of that second church, Younger said:
“I learned a vital lesson about the timing of God, and I came to the settled conclusion that there was never a ‘right’ time to start a church, especially when it meant that you were going to have to give up some of your own flesh and blood to get it started. I think we tend to take counsel for our fears too much.”
One evening, while talking excitedly with some of his people about plans for yet another new church, he was aware of an invisible wall of resistance building. Later, at a deacons’ meeting, he thought to himself, “Well, now, maybe I’ve been a little highhanded. I’ve started a couple of churches, and the people haven’t had much to say about it. Why not find out what they think?” So he said to the deacons, “I’d like to suggest we start a church at Wallin. What is your opinion?” They gave him their opinion, and he was sorry he asked. He concluded that leading people takes more than asking them what they think.
As the church planting continued, the pattern became clear. A core of families was necessary, as was a place to meet, and a pastor. Good leadership was vital, Younger believed. So was money. Immanuel spent almost half of its income on missions, both overseas and in Fort Wayne, during these church planting years from 1956 through 1973.
But the most important aspect for Younger, the place where it all had to start, was a desire to win souls for Christ. Immanuel had a strong visitation program, and the area in which a church was planted was thoroughly canvassed. But, Younger believes, the congregation will never be convicted about evangelizing if the pastor isn’t.
“I know that God saves people and I don’t save them, but I still know that God uses means. If he’s going to do it through men, I have to push myself away from the desk and the dinner table, and occasionally from things I’d rather do, and get out there and confront people with their need for Jesus Christ. That’s one of the biggest problems today with men who are going into the ministry. When I left seminary, I didn’t know how to lead a soul to Christ. Now maybe that was my fault, but I have to say this, I didn’t see many teachers who were models, who were leading people to Jesus Christ.”
He continues, “We have a whole bunch of people sitting around in their churches right now trying to figure out what their gift is, and the interesting thing is that you can’t find one in a thousand who will say he thinks he has the gift of evangelism.”
One of the thirteen branch churches was the Blackhawk Church. The idea for it was rattling around in Younger’s mind for years before it was started. It was to be in northeast Fort Wayne, the section that was growing the fastest, and Younger arranged with a developer to sell Immanuel a choice piece of property for it. Later, an even better parcel came on the market, and the church snapped it up as well, later selling the first one.
Younger recalls, “I prayed earnestly that God would help us do something that was way beyond what we had ever dreamed of in finding a leader and putting together a nucleus.” The congregation prayed for a year that God would lead ten families into the new work. Eight families left, some of whom weren’t members at Immanuel. They also located David Jeremiah, a young assistant pastor from a church in the East, and he was called by the small group. Jeremiah took hold and Blackhawk prospered. In its twelve years it has grown to about 1,250 on Sunday mornings, with a Christian school from pre-kindergarten through grade twelve. The church recently began work on a new sanctuary to seat 3,500. It’s the brightest jewel in the ring of branch churches, and its success means it has overshadowed Immanuel and the other branch churches, at least by the conventional standard. (Of the thirteen branch churches, twelve are still operating and have grown in varying degrees.)
Younger left in 1973 to become president of Western Baptist College, even though he believed the church planting work in Fort Wayne was unfinished. Yet he doesn’t grieve that his successors aren’t carrying on this ministry, for he believes that different men are given different visions.
The Marvin Degitzes and the Jack Saylors are two couples who were close to Younger and his wife during the growth years at Immanuel. They offer an analysis that somewhat moderates Younger’s image of reckless abandon. “He was a terrific administrator and a good leader,” said Marvin Degitz. “He was able to do the things he did because he could get the people’s confidence. He didn’t really rush into things like a bull in a China shop. He’d go see people, get them thinking and praying, and he’d back off if people weren’t in agreement. But if the Lord had laid something on his heart, he’d come back to it.”
“He wouldn’t take just anybody (for the branch churches),” said Elsie Saylor. “He’d try and get tithing families.” “But,” interjected Marvin, “it wouldn’t be long before we’d double the number to replace those we lost. I tell you it was amazing.”
“He was the kind of guy,” said Jack Saylor, “who’d be painting his house, and after awhile you’d be painting his house, he’d be nowhere around, and you’d be enthused about doing it.”
To this writer, after researching all three ministries, the main thing that became apparent was that God works in great diversity. I found no “secret of the successful church,” but instead, strains of similarity interrupted by chunks of contradiction.
One common dynamic in each of these churches is a pastor who believes he knows what the Lord wants of him, and who tries to follow that leading. Certainly God must want Christians to grow and bear fruit for him, as the people of the Church of the Saviour so strongly believe. But how do you do that? By building your life around your church work as they do? Or by stoking the fire for souls, which led Tom Younger to guide the planting of all those new churches in Fort Wayne? Are the goals of Christian churches like the goals of a football field- when you run toward one, you necessarily run from the other?
For its part, Grace Community Church hasn’t slipped into either mold, at least not yet. Its people and its pastor are still working out the vision they believe God has given them, and as yet, they don’t see the path clearly. What Steve Austin has seen is what he views as God’s direction to purchase a large, expensive parcel of property; but he does not say God necessarily intends for the church to keep it. In fact, the people have been to the brink more than once, as this article shows. There will be readers who will look askance at that kind of financial planning, but Austin is convinced that people will not see the Lord work miracles if they never give him the chance to do so.
I doubt any one of these churches has the answer. At least, not for anyone else. It seems to me the successful church is not the one that levels its gaze at what others are doing. It’s the one that constantly gazes upward, trying to discern what God wants to accomplish in and through its people as a unique congregation.
Copyright © 1981 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
