What’s Wrong With Church Growth?

Pastors and laypeople all want their congregation to grow.  We certainly don’t want it to shrink!  There are many examples of congregations in our fellowship that have lost membership over the years and are in danger of closing their doors.  No one is happy with that.  What Christian isn’t delighted to see new prospects baptized and brought into membership?  In the simple understanding of the term, church growth is a good and necessary thing.

But Church Growth can also be a bad thing.  Forty years ago a new movement developed in American Christianity called the Church Growth Movement (CGM for short).  The father of the movement was a Christian missionary pastor named Donald McGavran, who until his death in 1990 was the Dean of Missions and Church Growth at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. 

McGavran taught that churches grow numerically when business-world administrative, organizational, and marketing strategies are applied to the church’s mission.  An early friend and disciple of McGavran was Robert Schuller, the phenomenally successful founder of the famous Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California.  Contemporary examples of CGM proponents include Rick Warren, pastor of the giant Saddleback Church in Lake Forest California, and Joel Osteen, pastor of the largest Protestant church in America- the Lakewood Church in Houston Texas.   These mega-church examples demonstrate that breathtaking  institutional numerical growth can result from the application of business principles to the church.  Because of the phenomenal success of churches like Lakewood and Saddleback, CGM ideology has spread like wildfire throughout American Evangelicalism, including Lutheran churches.   But at what cost?  CGM is built upon a number of dangerous fallacies.

CGM credits human intelligence and business acumen as the means by which churches grow.  Focusing on business-world principles of marketing and administration distracts people from the Word of God and the Sacraments.  In fact churches grow by God’s grace, by God’s decision, through God’s ordained means of preaching the Gospel and administering the sacraments.  Our focus and practice must remain on the preaching of the Word and administration of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.  These are God’s chosen means through which he creates and sustains faith.   Teaching people to focus on Wall Street marketing strategies for church growth is a perversion of Christian theology.

Numerical growth is NOT a proof that God is blessing that institution.  Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world.  Is that explosive growth evidence that God is pleased with and blessing Islam?  Mormonism continues to be among the fastest growing religions in America.  Is that by God’s blessing, or are other forces at work?  Christians must not equate numerical growth with success or as evidence of God’s pleasure and blessing.  

Even in legitimate Christian congregations, application of CGM principles does not assure numerical growth.  There are plenty of examples of churches that have zealously applied CGM principles and strategies to their mission, but have not realized numerical growth.  Likewise, there are plenty of examples of  growing churches that seriously lack in planning, administration, organization, or the application of any CGM business theory.  Churches grow when and where God makes them grow.  When, where, and why can be as mysterious as God himself is mysterious. 

CGM is obsessed with numerical, statistical growth, to the neglect of other aspects of Christian growth.  So many aspects of Christian growth are invisible and impossible to quantify.  How do you measure faith, hope, love, knowledge of Scripture, or sanctification?  Yet those aspects of spiritual growth are no less important than numerical growth in membership and attendance.   The obsession with numerical growth causes pastors and congregations to fall into the “the end justifies the means” mentality.  So we continue to witness outrageous promotional activities intended to grab attention and pack the pews.  The rule becomes “whatever it takes to bring ‘em in!”  Churches cease advertising worship or promoting serious Bible study, and instead promote carnivals, circuses, rodeos, concerts, and other blatant forms of entertainment having nothing to do with legitimate worship or Bible study. 

CGM is man centered rather than God centered.  CGM proponents speak incessantly of “felt needs”-  marketing jargon meaning “find out what the customer wants and give it to them.”  That makes sense for McDonalds, but not for the church.   When it comes to fast food, people know what they want and they will flock to that provider that offers it.   The lost, unbelieving people of the community may know what they want, but they don’t know what they need.  The Christian mission is to give people what they need, not what they think they want.

In his first letter to the Corinthians, the Apostle Paul wrote, “The natural (unconverted) person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14).  Until a lost person is converted to Christ, he does not understand his spiritual needs.  Christ did not call his church to be a marketplace supplying the wants and desires of consumers under a sanctified banner of “Christian.”  Christ called his church to preach law and Gospel, through which the spiritually dead come to understand their sin and its eternal consequences, and through which they come to understand and believe in Jesus as Savior.  Marketing to “felt needs” may fill the church with soaring numbers of happy consumers remarking on how wonderful the church is for so wonderfully providing them with what they want, but we will not have even touched on our true mission if we do not confront those lost souls with the eternal consequences of sin and grace in Jesus Christ. 

CGM elevates the Great Commission of Christ to the place of  the chief doctrine of Christianity.  The Great Commission (“Go and make disciples of all nations…”) is important, but it is not Christianity’s chief doctrine.  Our chief doctrine is Justification by Grace through Faith in Christ.   The church’s chief purpose is teaching, preaching, confessing, and living that doctrine.  When Christ ordered Peter “Feed my lambs… tend my sheep… feed my sheep” (John 21),  he indicated that feeding and tending the flock (the church) was Peter’s job as an apostle.  Indeed, Jesus also gave Peter and the other apostles the Great Commission, but that mission of making disciples of all nations is done only through baptism and teaching the Word.  And both baptism and the Word center on the doctrine of  Justification.

Of course we want our church to grow.  We want our members to grow spiritually.  We want growth in faith, love, hope, sacrifice, stewardship, sanctification, and wisdom in God’s Word.   We also would be thrilled with numerical growth when the Holy Spirit calls sinners to repentance and faith through the preaching and teaching of the Word.  So what can you do to  help your church grow?  Support sacrificially and liberally the ministry of preaching and teaching the Word of God and the administration of the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.   Focus and rely ever increasingly on the Word and Sacraments for your own spiritual growth.  Grow in faithful attendance at worship and the sacrament.  Grow in knowledge of the scriptures through personal and group Bible study.  Through the Word and Sacrament grow in faith and in your ability to know and do the will of God.  Pray that the Lord will present you with opportunities to share the Good News of Christ with the lost souls he causes to cross  your path in life.

-Pastor K.J. Anderson

2 David Krueger

3 Nicholas Henricks

5 Charlie Talbot

6 Evan Blom

7 John LaSalle

8 Johanna Krueger

8 Fischer Chapman

12 Sophia Robb

18 Desmond Yaeger

24 Carrie Holz

26 Evan Anderson

27 Zack Sickmann

27 Taysom Calhoun

30 Anthony Peterson