Intensity of Belief: A Pragmatic Concern for Church Growth

When Donald McGavran became disgusted at the unbiblical way in which certain theological liberals were redefining such terms as “missions” and “evangelism,” he began using a substitute: “church growth.” But church growth does not mean simply adding names to rolls. It has become in recent years a technical term for an approach to biblical missions and evangelism pioneered by McGavran and identified primarily with the School of World Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California. This approach has attracted many articulate supporters, but it has also aroused a great deal of skepticism. Critics contend, for example, that church-growth principles stress quantity over quality and encourage reliance upon human effort rather than the work of the Holy Spirit. Some argue that these principles implicitly neglect missionary work among peoples who are harder to reach with the Gospel and that the movement encourages theological dilution by urging adaptations of the Gospel to appeal to “natural” cultural differences. In an effort to examine some of these concerns and dispel whatever misunderstandings contribute to their rise, Senior Editor David Kucharsky talked with Dr. C. Peter Wagner and Dr. Arthur Johnston. Wagner is professor of church growth at Fuller Seminary’s School of World Mission and vice-president of Fuller Evangelistic Association; he has written numerous articles and books on church growth, the latest book being “Your Church Can Grow: Seven Vital Signs of a Healthy Church” (Regal). This and other church-growth books are reviewed in this issue, page 32. Johnston is professor of world mission at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He pioneered the work of the Evangelical Alliance Mission in France and is the author of “World Evangelization and the Word of God.” He is a noted evangelical expert on church trends.

Kucharsky. Dr. Wagner, you have stated that the church-growth movement is unabashedly pragmatic, and that it has sought to appropriate modern insights not only from the social sciences but also from business management and marketing. What one characteristic describes church growth more than any other?

Wagner. It would be an oversimplification to isolate any one principle as absolutely characteristic of the whole, but we often think of the key function as being the establishment and monitoring of goals. It’s very similar to Weight Watchers, actually. What Weight Watchers basically sells is accountability. Their scales aren’t any better than anyone else’s scales. Their diets are not exotic or unique. It’s that weekly visit to a group of peers that helps a person accomplish whatever goals have been set. We are kind of the Weight Watchers of churches, but we try to help them put on weight, not to take it off.

Kucharsky. The monitoring process obviously demands adjustments in procedures and even in goals as you go along, which is why you may be accused of relativism.

Wagner. Possibly.

Kucharsky. Dr. Johnston, you have in effect been monitoring the church-growth movement for a number of years. Why do you think it has attracted so much attention?

Johnston. The church-growth movement has made some very, very positive contributions to world evangelization. It has also aroused some hostility. Some weaknesses have been pointed out.

Kucharsky. What do you see as the positive and the negative?

Johnston. It has spoken very forcefully to non-evangelicals and their world orientation. It has reminded evangelicals of their great responsibility. It has given great encouragement both to missionaries and to nations. The danger as I see it is looking upon church growth as a fad.

Kucharsky. What do you mean in saying that it speaks to non-evangelicals?

Johnston. Church growth becomes blurred and almost irrelevant if we think not about the lostness of man but about man’s immediate need in the world. This is what happens with liberal theology, for example. In some extreme cases the focus comes on the restructuring of society and the social order to establish justice on the earth. The World Council of Churches has spoken about the mission of God, and instead of the emphasis being upon the Church and a gathering in of people from every tongue, tribe, and nation, it is more generally upon what God intends to do in this world as a sign of the Kingdom.

Kucharsky. So if nothing else, the church-growth movement builds upon man’s need of spiritual salvation in Christ. It affirms the Scriptures and it understands the Great Commission.

Johnston. Right.

Kucharsky. Let’s move on, then, to the controversy that has come up over the matter of people movements, or what is now spoken of as multi-individual conversions. Dr. Wagner, how can there be such a thing as mutually interdependent decisions for Christ?

Wagner. Studies show that many people movements have taken place. They have been documented. There have been times when a very large percentage of those who made an initial decision in a people movement have become permanent and faithful disciples of the Lord. The day of Pentecost was the first example. In modern times there have been groups of animists won seemingly all at once to the Lord. That’s not to say that there is not a danger. But we must recognize that some people in the world will not come to Christ as individuals. Their social pattern does not allow them to do so.

Kucharsky. Obviously you feel that the danger can be overcome.

Wagner. Most crucial in a people movement is not so much the initial decision process but the post-baptismal care. When demons are swept out and the house is not filled, the demons will return. Some people movements have fizzled because of the lack of nurture of those who made decisions.

Johnston. It seems to me there is a problem when one is depending on the dynamic of social change as the barometer of the responsiveness of a people to Christ. It has been looked at as sociological and psychological. The vacuum can be filled by Christ. This is true if there has been real conversion to Christ. Sometimes the people movement will deal superficially with the culture. This is sometimes even possible with individuals. In group movements, it can lead to group reversions and to syncretism. There has been quite a bit of this in Africa, where the old tribal customs and rites have come back into what we thought were believing communities. We must have true discipleship.

Kucharsky. What do you mean?

Johnston. McGavran has helped by redefining the word “discipleship,” but sometimes he has clouded the issue by using the word “discipling” to mean evangelism. “Perfection” means bringing groups to a place of Christian maturity. History suggests, I believe, that when Christian proclamation does not adapt to culture but demands total change and makes the decision very hard, sometimes entailing even martyrdom, the result is that belief becomes deep-rooted, and deviation is less when winds of social change come along later.

Wagner. That is a good point. As far as I know, most people associated with church growth would agree. On the other hand, in northeast India, where some of the most dramatic people movements have taken place in the last fifty to seventy-five years, many have come in the midst of persecutions and even martyrdoms which made conversion difficult but spurred the movement of entire tribes to Christ.

Kucharsky. Have church-growth methods enabled churches to grow or have they simply stimulated the use of other methods?

Wagner. Church-growth people do not recommend special methods of winning people to Christ. What church growth does is to provide a framework from which to discern accurately the body of Christ. We often use a medical model: some churches are healthy and some are ailing. We seek to develop instruments for diagnosing the health of the church. We determine where the strengths and weaknesses are, to help the people of the church get a grasp on who they are, and what potential God has given them, and who their community is, and what kind of preparation the Spirit of God has done for their message. So the kind of methodology chosen is usually the very last thing on our agenda. The decision about specific methodology is usually made by the people doing it, simply picking what is most likely to work, and if it doesn’t work scrapping it and trying something else.

Kucharsky. How do you answer critics, Dr. Wagner, who contend that church growth encourages neglect of peoples resistant to the Gospel and a greater respect for what man thinks he himself has learned than for what God says is so?

Wagner. It is true that church growth emphasizes reaching people who are receptive. This is a strong point with us, but it is sometimes misinterpreted, the reasons for the misinterpretation probably largely being our own fault. I regret that in urging evangelization of receptive peoples we frequently give the impression that we want to ignore the others. What we try to say is that people who seem to be more receptive represent what the Bible calls the ripened harvest field. We never recommend that others should be neglected. The question comes in deployment of personnel. If a mission board has thirty workers, for example, we think it poor stewardship for the board to divide these workers equally between receptive and resistant fields. Most, but not all, should be assigned to where the harvest is, because time quickly runs out on harvest opportunities and they are lost.

Kucharsky. What about Muslims? They are very resistant to the Gospel and there are a lot of them.

Wagner. If a board feels it is called to minister to Muslims, it should send all its workers to do so. We are not talking about individual mission boards. We are talking about the total evangelistic force of the world. But now that you bring up the Muslims, many of us have a hunch that Muslims are not as resistant as has previously been thought. There are different kinds of Muslims. Some have in fact come to Christ recently in Indonesia, in central Africa, and in other places.

Kucharsky. On the other hand, there has never been anything like a great moving among Muslims. Why?

Wagner. Some of us are beginning to think that the resistance has been partly because of poor missiology. That evangelistic methodology can be wrong has been borne out in the recent switch here in North America in Jewish evangelism from the old Hebrew Christian model to the new Messianic Judaism model. In the last three or four years we have been seeing a tremendous increase in results from Jews who all the time were undoubtedly responsive but previously were not able to “hear” the Gospel because it was not preached in the right way to them.

Johnston. Can I add just a word to that? Often this kind of a strategy seems to be built—and rightly so—upon the sovereignty and the providence of God, that he is the Lord of the harvest, and that he prepares peoples and situations for a responsiveness to the Gospel. However, on the other hand, the injunction is given that we should sow everywhere and sow abundantly. I like this, and I think it is very biblical. There is still to be a calling out, a gathering, of a few in those nations, tribes, and ethnic groups that seem to be more resistant as a whole.

Kucharsky. It brings up the question whether there is such a thing as an inherent resistance to the Gospel or whether all resistance is conditioned. We would probably do better not to get into that!

Johnston. At the International Congress on World Evangelization at Lausanne, there was a strong feeling among some of the Third World churchmen that we in North America were a little too involved in programming and methodology. Perhaps we gave them the impression that we did not have a sufficient sensitivity to the ministry of the Holy Spirit to lead in this area. I think this is the great crux of the matter. We need to be sensitive to the needs of the ripened harvest fields where people are ready to respond, but we dare not tread upon the ministry of the Holy Spirit, and I’m sure the church-growth people would strongly reinforce that point.

Kucharsky. Dr. Wagner, does the church-growth movement tend to play down the need for pre-evangelism? Would you concede that there is an impatience about letting God do his work in his own time?

Wagner. That’s a valid criticism, and this is one of the areas in which our critics have helped us. We have not given enough attention to the people who before they can come to Christ need to be prepared. We have had the most help on this point from Dr. James Engel of the Wheaton Graduate School, who has shown us from the point of view of marketing research that there are something like ten levels through which a person needs to pass before he or she becomes a Christian. These are spelled out in the “spiritual decision process model” in the book What’s Gone Wrong With the Harvest, written by Engel and H. Wilbert Norton. Some pass through the levels more quickly than others, but the Engel scale does show that there is a process. Actually, I do not like to use the word “pre-evangelism” any more.

Kucharsky. The whole process is evangelism, right?

Wagner. Yes. And not only until the time of decision but right through the time the person is incorporated into the body of Christ. We distinguish between decisions and disciples. Decisions do not complete the evangelistic process. A person must be registered as a disciple by being incorporated into the body of Christ. That is the way I would like to express it now, despite the fact that we have created some misconceptions in that area.

Johnston. I think when we say pre-evangelism we may have in mind such things as medical work and education. Often we are accused of being negligent, but a good case in point is that there was a certain type of pre-evangelism among the Muslims in the recent relief work carried on in drought-stricken parts of Africa. There was a warm response to the Gospel following the generosity shown by churches that rose up to meet the need. Just on the other side of the coin again, Hudson Taylor in 1900 in the New York Missionary Conference spoke of the necessity of continually expecting people to receive the Gospel when they had heard it for the first time. There was an idea even back then that there needed to be a considerable, lengthy evangelism process before a decision was made. But he strongly defended the viewpoint that he had preached to a number of people in China who the first time they heard received Christ.

Wagner. It’s important to remember in that context that some people go through the Engel scale fast and others may take a year or more.

Johnston. Yes. We should not ignore the process, but we should not become enslaved to a time scale.

Kucharsky. What view of the Church underlies the concept of church growth?

Johnston. This is a matter that J. Robertson McQuilkin raises in his book Measuring the Church Growth Movement. What is the Church? What has caused evangelicals concern at times is the tendency of the church-growth movement to call every group that bears the name Christian a church, so that when someone describes the responses to the Gospel in Africa and predicts that Africa will become a Christian continent by the year 2000, many ask what is meant by Christian. It seems to me that this point needs a little clarification.

Kucharsky. This ties in with another question sometimes raised: does the church-growth movement put enough content in the Gospel to make church membership more than merely institutional affiliation?

Wagner. We must clarify the way the church-growth movement tends to use statistics. I like to distinguish between what I call World Christian Handbook statistics and “Lamb’s Book of Life” statistics. Anyone who would claim to be Christian, or who would respond to a religious census question to indicate a Christian preference, would be counted as a Christian in the handbook. There are more than a billion such Christians in the world now. But those of us who interpret this from a biblical viewpoint know that these are not all born-again Christians, and that many of them still need to be evangelized. I spent much of my adult life evangelizing Roman Catholics in Latin America, all of whom would be counted as evangelized people in the handbook. The church-growth movement counts as Christians only those who are born again, have been incorporated into the body of Christ, and are continuing in the apostles’ doctrine, fellowship, breaking of bread, and prayer. These constitute the bottom line as far as the people of the church-growth movement are concerned.

Johnston. Maybe some of the confusion arises in the definition that is sometimes given to discipling as it comes out of Matthew 28. There the concept is that one is to go and make disciples of all the nations. This term “all the nations” has been used sometimes in the church-growth movement to indicate ethnic groups because the word “ethnic” derives from the Greek word for “nation” used here, ethnos. So there is a kind of national Christianity that is represented in a particular country. Karl Barth’s definition of disciple may be helpful here, though I do not agree with him on much of his thinking. He says discipling is bringing other people into the same relationship with Jesus Christ that the apostles themselves knew. This means that a disciple is one who has been truly brought into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ by faith in the Word through the power of the Holy Spirit. When this definition of Christian comes through loud and clear, we can see what we mean by discipleship and what the Church is.

What really determines growth is the intensity of belief that any group has in the particular doctrine it holds. What we have seen is a general watering down of belief in our views of salvation and of the Church.

Kucharsky. Okay, let me ask Dr. Wagner then what he feels is the chief impediment to church growth. Are the unregenerate generally shunning the Gospel because the cost seems too high, or are there other reasons—ignorance, for example—that are more significant?

Wagner. Here in the United States a recent survey made by the largest Presbyterian denomination shows that one of the basic reasons why it has declined (11 per cent in the last ten years) is that the churches—the people, the pastors, the leaders of the local churches—simply do not want their churches to grow. I think that is the chief impediment to church growth in the United States. The leadership and the people are not highly motivated for growth. As far as the people who hear the Gospel are concerned, the world is full of many different kinds; there is no way to generalize across the board. But we do know from what is actually happening in the world that many people are receptive to the Gospel. The problem is not so much theirs as it is that of the Christian people who are not motivated to preach. Or when they do preach they preach irrelevantly. They don’t know how to contextualize the message so that it becomes relevant to the thought patterns and the behavior patterns of those who are listening. Many Christians blunder along in what may be an honest attempt at evangelism but nevertheless results in very few disciples.

Johnston. McGavran has used a fine little phrase to emphasize the point that what really determines growth is the intensity of belief that any group has in the particular doctrine it holds. What we have seen occurring from the time of Constantine in the fourth century has been a general watering down of belief in our views of salvation and of the Church. The way individuals grow in Christ is to enable others to come to Christ. I have found that there is no true growth in Christ without continual discipling, using discipling not only to mean decisions but as McGavran says incorporation into the church. People who are coming into the church grow in grace best by being involved in winning others.

Wagner. What I hear Art saying is that when there is a constant process of making disciples going on in a church, you have a high-quality church.

Kucharsky. Which refutes the critics who contend that church growth puts quantity over quality.

Wagner. That criticism is false. When Christians are actively making disciples they are high-quality Christians. This contrasts with what often happens not only in World Council circles but also in some evangelical circles, namely, a strong emphasis on koinonia and the idea that if Christians just get together and love each other enough everything will be all right. Koinonia is good, but it should always be accompanied by the passion and the imperative to reach out and win unsaved people in the community to Jesus Christ.

Kucharsky. Dr. Wagner, you have been widely quoted as saying that we ought to quit trying to make everyone in the Church an evangelist. This has had the effect of easing a lot of guilt feelings among evangelicals, but is it scriptural? And how do you reconcile it with what you just said about the Church’s need for outreach? The Bible says the Jerusalem church, excluding the apostles, was scattered abroad and “went everywhere preaching the word” (Acts 8:1 ff.). Doesn’t this destroy the notion that only some Christians are to do the work of an evangelist?

Wagner. I have said that we should be satisfied if 10 per cent of any given congregation is engaged in evangelism. I base this on the biblical doctrine of spiritual gifts. Not everyone is cut out by God to be an evangelist. Studies show that in churches that are growing well, rarely are more than 10 per cent of the members doing evangelism. I do say, however, that every member should be a Christian witness. There is a distinction.

Kucharsky. What is the distinction?

Wagner. It’s a matter of structured versus casual witness. Every one of us should take opportunities to witness for Christ when God provides the occasion, but only those with the gift of evangelism ought to be expected to be working at it in special, structured ways. Too many Christians are gloomy and frustrated because they do not have the gift of evangelism yet are being told that it is expected of them. The result is a debilitating guilt complex.

Johnston. One thing we have hardly mentioned that is extremely important in evangelism and missions is prayer. We also need to remember that some sow, and some water, and some reap the harvest.

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