Two Misguided Assumptions About Church Growth
As a church leader, perhaps you’re asking yourself, How do I reach the spiritually sleeping and spiritually dead in my community? How do I disciple people to know Jesus deeply and be known by Him fully? And how do I preach in this post-everything world?
To answer these questions, we must first unpack the assumptions behind them. Before making a lane change, we need to shoulder-check the dominant assumptions that have been driving our models of ministry. This will help us avoid repeating past mistakes—and perpetuating ineffective and outdated practices.
After surveying the dominant thought leaders, books, paradigms, and principles of the church growth movement, I uncovered two of its foundational assumptions that continue to affect church practice today.
Assumption #1: “Of Course, Church”
A paradigm that has been highly influential in the Western church is the church growth movement, which began around the 1950s. It was a movement of theologians and practitioners who advocated the idea that it is God’s will for every church to grow. If your church isn’t growing, the thinking went, then you’re doing something wrong.
The founder of the church growth movement, Donald A. McGavran, taught in his book, Ten Steps for Church Growth, that “today there is unprecedented receptivity to the message of Christ. Today people are more winnable; the nations, the tribes, and the castes of the world are more responsive to the gospel than they have ever been before. There is no need to believe that pessimism and indifference outweigh God’s grace.” The church growth movement perpetuated the assumption that if you have the right programs, meet the right felt needs, and are in the right location, then of course, people will come. Of course, church!
I even heard one “expert” advocating the view that a church should function like a car dealership. Your weekend worship service is the showroom floor where you display and sell the product, which is Christianity. The brands and models of cars that you sell are based on your denomination, tradition, expression, and church model. And—since the bread and butter of every dealership is their service department—it’s the church’s programs that keep people coming back.
While I could deconstruct how grossly inappropriate and inaccurate this analogy is, I’ll keep my observations to this: The church is not a business. We don’t sell Christianity. We don’t market Jesus. And we don’t need to be the best show in town. The church is the holy bride of Christ, and we need to treat her with the love and respect she deserves. She is not a product that can be bought or sold. Even though most church growth experts would likely agree with those observations, the assumption “of course, church” has nevertheless been shaping church practice for decades.
“Of Course, Growth”
The second assumption from the church growth movement that continues to affect church practice today is that growth is the goal. In fact, the assumption of growth became such a dominant theme that a shrinking church was seen as a sinning church.
While it’s true that God wants His church to grow, isn’t there a distinct season for everything (Ecclesiastes 3:1-8)? A season to plant, a season to grow, a season to harvest, and a season to rest? And in 1 Corinthians 3, Paul makes it clear that a leader’s role is to plant and water, while God is the one responsible for the growth. So to assume that nongrowth is automatically sin is a gross misinterpretation of the Scriptures and an overgeneralization of how God works!
This is one of the reasons the Bible encourages us to “consider it a great joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you experience various trials, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing” (James 1:2-4). Fire, trials, and seasons of non-growth have a purpose and shouldn’t be avoided or be automatically considered sin.
THE PROBLEM WITH THESE ASSUMPTIONS
Have you seen these assumptions influence you and your church? Specifically, have you seen it affect strategic planning and decisions that have been made—and that you are now helping make—to reach the lost, disciple your people, and preach the word? It’s unfortunate that some “experts” are still trumpeting the principles that arise out of these assumptions as exclusive solutions to your problems. And as new ideas that will help your church grow.
I’m not here to debunk and tear down all the meaningful work and fruit that the church growth movement has produced since the 1950s. And while I didn’t go to seminary during the heyday of the movement, my professors did. In fact, I got my master’s from the School of World Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary, which was the center and hub of the church growth movement. On top of that, I’m the lead pastor of a church that has grown to the size that it has in part because of the principles of the church growth movement.
Countless numbers of people are following Jesus because of the fruit of this movement and its later iterations, like the seeker-sensitive movement. Because of these movements, learning effective leadership principles on strategy, change management, recruiting, equipping, and multiplication is now a normal part of the pastoral training process.
However, we would be foolish to expect the same results by simply copying and pasting all the principles from those movements into our context today. Those principles and tactics were written in a world, and to a world, that doesn’t exist anymore. The blind spots back then are different from the blind spots today.
Since context matters, here is how our context has changed and why these assumptions are problematic today:
• Not everyone is interested in the church these days. Pastoral abuse and sex scandals have happened too frequently to be the exception. One too many power-hungry church leaders have looked more like the world than like Jesus. And love of money seems to be as strong inside the church as it is outside it. Because Christians and church leaders are regularly and publicly falling prey to the temptations to be relevant, spectacular, and powerful, (as expressed in Henri Nouwen’s book, In the name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership) people aren’t as interested in the church as they used to be. The principles that used to work don’t work anymore, because the prevailing assumptions are no longer accurate. We’re starting to look too much like the world. No wonder there’s been a steady decline in confidence in the church and trust in pastors among Americans since Gallup started measuring this in 1973.
• We cannot assume growth anymore. While the global Christian church is growing, the only growth that has recently been happening in the West is the growth of the “nones” and “dones”— those who have no religious affiliation, and those who are done with the church. For the last several decades, evangelism and church growth techniques assumed that people held a shared set of spiritual beliefs—such as belief in an afterlife, moral truth, and consequences to sin, as well as a belief that God (or a higher power) exists. So evangelism and church growth used to be as simple as connecting these “religious dots,” as Timothy Keller, in his book, How to Reach the West Again: Six Essential Elements of a Missionary Encounter, called them, to prove the truth of the gospel. But with the rise of the “nones” and “dones,” a growing number of people believe that the only thing we need salvation from is “the idea that we need salvation.”
DISCERNING YOUR PATH FORWARD Decades ago, the founders of the church growth movement created a compelling case for the relevance of their principles, methods, and tactics, since what was being done at the time wasn’t working for churches anymore.
I believe we have reached an impasse once more. The time has come again for us to reevaluate what we’ve been doing and discern our path forward. It’s a discipleship opportunity that we should embrace! So if you want to disciple your people to know Jesus deeply and be known by Him fully; if you want to equip your people to reach those they live, work, study, and play with; and if you want to preach effectively in this post-everything world, then start by uncovering your assumptions, studying your context, and trusting the Holy Spirit.
Daniel Im is a pastor, Bible teacher, writer, and podcast host with a passion for the local church. He is the lead pastor of Beulah Alliance Church and the author of No Silver Bullets, Planning Missional Churches, and You Are What You Do: And Six Other Lies about Work, Life, and Love. He lives in Edmonton, Alberta with his wife Christina and their three children. For more information, visit danielim.com and connect with him on social media @danielsangi. Daniel’s newest book, The Discipleship Opportunity, will release on June 18, 2024 from NavPress.
Taken from The Discipleship Opportunity: Leading a Great-Commission Church in a Post-Everything World by Daniel Im. Copyright © 2023. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
