The Cambridge Diet for Fat Churches

I live with a church that has a weight problem. The weekly spread of tasty music, erudite education, scrumptious social life, and gourmet preaching seems to produce ever more poundage on our padded pews.

In fact, the fare can get so rich that sometimes I think only the dessert of the eschaton would be enough to make the saints salivate.

The bulges under the garment of success began to show after only ten years of corporate life. By 1974 we had to admit that our increasing size was bittersweet. The frequent accomplishments—new buildings, staff additions—were often interrupted by a belch of discomfort as we sensed something amiss.

I was a member of the church at that time, serving as campus pastor at the denomination’s nearby liberal-arts college. The pastoral leadership began to suggest one way to spell relief: m-i-s-s-i-o-n. But what would that solve? The mission budget was as obese as the rest of the church. Articulate guests came to the pulpit of Evangel Temple on a regular basis to remind us of the physically and spiritually starving world on the other side of those glass doors. So the bucks rolled in, but no parishioners moved out. “Mission” meant missionaries, and we had plenty of them. The congregation had yet to risk anything more than its checkbook.

Meanwhile, my wife and I were in the throes of making some long-term decisions about our ministry. The campus work was challenging—but a different challenge was growing within us: the idea of planting a new church back in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We knew the community well from the three years we had lived in the Boston area while attending Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary. The clogged streets of this Ivy League city of 120,000 were lined with empty hulks of religiosity that once teemed with parishioners. We knew from experience that there was much spiritual work to be done in this urban home of Harvard University and M.I.T.

What would Evangel Temple think about mothering a new church, not in the next suburb or county, but 1,350 miles away? What concord hath the Ozarks with New England? With a vision in hand and a lump in our throats, we approached the church leadership. They spent several weeks in prayer and discussion.

Eventually, they embraced the idea of a Cambridge diet.

When we rolled east from Springfield with our U-Haul truck and Dodge Dart, we carried part of our obese yet loving parent congregation. Not only did we take the financial support to let us give full time to the new work but also prayer support, song books purchased by the children’s classes, the promise of semiannual visits by the Evangel pastoral staff, and a communication link that has not been broken to this day. After two years, Cambridge Christian Center became financially independent, and today it thrives in the heart of this East Coast city.

But what began as a project has become a philosophy of ministry. After we had spent five years in Cambridge, Evangel Temple asked me to return to the mother church as senior pastor. Kathy and I turned them down; the invitation seemed all too self-serving. Climbing from one steeple to the next, chasing the bigger salary and the leased car were not what I wanted. After several weeks, however, we began to see the potential for leading this church into more creative “dieting.” In October 1979, we returned to Springfield.

As of today, churches have been planted in the Bronx of New York City; Bangkok, Thailand; Santa Barbara, Mexico; Ciudad Juarez, Mexico; and Danvers, Massachusetts. As part of our plan for total growth, Evangel Temple has laid the strategy to plant four more new U.S. churches by 1990.

The dynamics of dieting

That’s our story, and there’s no need to institutionalize it. While no one should copy our methodology, the following principles may be worth considering:

First, the most effective method of evangelism is church planting. Church growth statisticians confirm this with their data, and we see the same in studying conversion growth figures in our daughter churches. We are encouraged to see that people are not just making decisions for Christ but are also deciding to grow in a local body. In a spiritual sense, every time someone comes to Christ in one of the churches we have planted, we vicariously welcome them to the altar of Evangel Temple.

Second, large, affluent churches have to find some way to fight what Donald McGavran calls “redemption and lift.” This malady has plagued the church for centuries as people from the wrong side of the tracks experience the New Birth and soon find that all things have become new. Their new discipline and industriousness results in moving up the socioeconomic ladder (“lift”)—to the point that eventually they find it difficult to get their hands dirty with evangelism.

We see “lift” at our church all the time. The alligators on our sweaters, the 450 SLs in the parking lot, the Ballys on our feet are all mute reminders that the 1980s have dealt this congregation a good hand. The days of tent meetings and storefronts are now faded photos in air-conditioned archives.

Planting new churches keeps us honest. As we hear almost weekly about the growth pains of a new church, we are forced to grapple with whether our message is equal to the challenge. It is difficult to be glib about mission when one of our children is out there in a harvest field beyond our sight. The agonies and ecstasies keep us stained with the honest perspiration of building a church from the ground up.

Third, congregations (like Christians) will be held accountable for the stewardship of their spiritual gifts. Like you, I’ve heard the parable of the talents thumped from pulpits for decades. If your experience has been like mine, those words always produced more guilt than guilders on Stewardship Sunday. But the totality of Scripture confirms the point regardless.

At Evangel Temple, we had to become serious about our giftedness. We started with money. After realizing that our church income had almost doubled over a three-year period, we were sobered to see that more than three-fourths of it was still going to make us “more mature” Christians. Nurture was a justifiable goal—but we were out of balance. Beginning in July 1981, we started to allocate 10 percent of our general receipts (undesignated) to missions and church planting. If we could harangue one another about tithing, surely we could ask the church to tithe as well.

Next, we looked at the gift of our pastoral staff. Shouldn’t this dazzling collection of degrees and divinity be made available to the new churches? Evangel’s business administrator, minister of Christian education, and senior pastor have all made extensive trips to share with the embryonic congregations.

What about our congregation’s vocational skills? Instead of having another six-week seminar on discovering your spiritual gifts, we sent twenty-two masons, carpenters, cooks, sign painters, and electricians (men and women) to the Santa Barbara, Mexico, site in February 1982 to build a building. Working hand in hand with Mexican Christians, we saw natural talents turn into supernatural gifts.

The next year, we decided such a trip would be a yearly habit.

Meanwhile, the new start in Danvers, Massachusetts, has been launched with more than just a salaried pastor. We asked lay people to consider moving to that area, finding jobs, and guaranteeing the presence of mature Christians in the congregation the first Sunday. (I remembered how I would gladly have given my entire set of Kittel to have such people among the first seventeen back in Cambridge.) A young couple took us seriously and relocated; he is now developing the Danvers youth program, while she works in music. At the five-month mark, the new congregation numbers fifty, meeting in a Howard Johnson’s.

The final gift we possess is our vision. To continue to stretch it as well as share it, we have brought the North American pastors of the churches we have planted back to Springfield every October for the past four years.

We spend two days exchanging ministry philosophy, sharing methodology, and reaching out to each other in prayer. They also participate in our Sunday worship while they’re here. The intensity of relationship that takes root among us during these days is hard to describe.

The heart of this diet plan is being willing to give up what we have tried so hard to get. We have been weaned on the sweet milk of accumulation. For years we have worked to pull in cash, crowds, and credit. But our flagstone foyers and swank sanctuaries are hollow if they echo our selfishness. Fat is no fun.

We know that at our core we are koinoniaholics, ever craving the good things of the Lord. But he will not allow bingeing. The Cambridge diet forces us to curb our appetites, to lose weight so we can gain strength, to give up fat in order to be healthy.

—Cal LeMon

Springfield, Missouri