Church Growth

By Larry Rosenbaum

“Don’t ever use the `E’ word with pastors,” I was advised by a prominent Christian leader. “Evangelism is a dirty word in the church. Use the `C’ word. Pastors like to hear about Church Growth.” During the past decade, a lot of pastors read books on Church Growth, attended seminars, and even hired consultants to help their church to grow. Some advice was helpful. Some was unscriptural. For example, they were told that churches that are “racially and economically homogeneous” grow best. Many churches, following this advice instead of James chapter 2, became comfortable social clubs for rich white people.

I was very interested when two experts on Church Growth appeared on the 700 Club TV show recently as part of a discussion of the current state of the church in America. Here are excerpts from their discussion:

C. Peter Wagner: “I think it is pretty obvious from the last election that some of the things the church was praying for and desiring did not happen in our society. The decade of the 80’s was a decade of a great flowering of the church growth movement with books and conferences and much interest….[It was] even featured in Time magazine. But yet at the end of the decade, church attendance was the same and Protestant church membership had decreased….Even the churches that had grown were shown to grow through transfer growth not through conversion growth. We haven’t seen large numbers of unsaved people come to Jesus Christ in America since the Jesus Movement. And I think it’s time that we move out and do what’s necessary to see unsaved people come to Christ….The only the way we are going to change the face of the church in America is to free the lay people, to get the lay people ministering.”

Ken Hemphill, Baptist Center for Church Growth: “From 1960 to 1990 church membership rose by 28% but at the same time population increased by 39% and thus we would have had to have 12 million more Christians today to keep even….There are churches that are reaching large numbers of unsaved people but by and large any growth that occurs is largely a transfer, what I term the reshuffling of the evangelical deck and it seems that every time we reshuffle the cards we drop some of them.”

I was amazed to hear two prominent experts on Church Growth say that despite all the books, seminars and interest in Church Growth over the past decade, church growth is not even keeping up with the population growth in our nation. And the growth we are seeing is pretty much people moving from one church to another. Wagner said that the last time we saw large numbers of unsaved people coming to Christ was during the Jesus Movement and that what we needed was to get the lay people ministering.

The Jesus Movement took place from about 1967 to 1975. During this time, large numbers of people involved in the drug counter culture were saved and were actively witnessing to others in this lifestyle. Most were saved through street evangelism, through coffeehouses and concerts, and through new converts witnessing to their friends.

I was saved in 1970 as part of the Jesus Movement. We met in crowded living rooms and storefront churches, not worrying about comfortable chairs or parking lots. We didn’t read books on church growth, but we did read and obey the Bible. Jesus, Peter, Paul and the other apostles went to the streets and public places to preach the gospel, so that’s what we did. We also witnessed to our family and friends, anyone we could. As a result, a lot of people got saved.

During the 1980’s, a lot of Christians who had been saved during the Jesus Movement stopped witnessing. They were busy making money, raising their families, and had a lot of excuses for not witnessing. Perhaps they thought that church growth experts and TV and radio ministries could do the job for them so they wouldn’t have to face possible rejection in witnessing to people. It didn’t work.

We need to become disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ. Following Jesus involves obeying His command to take the Gospel into all the world. We need to sacrifice our money, our time, and our pride. The hardest sacrifice is our pride. We need to be willing to face rejection and opposition when we confront unsaved people with their lost condition and need of a Savior.

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