A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE
CHURCH GROWTH MOVEMENT
Lecture 5
The Final Lectures
Dr. Donald Mc Gavran
A Personal View On The Rise Of The Church Growth Movement
The first four lectures have insisted that the discipling of all the peoples of the earth is commanded by God and will not be brought about by conventional doctrinal correctness and spiritual renewal. It has faced frankly the fact that much mission today does not result in winning many of of the lost or bringing the many sheaves of ripe grain into the Lord's barn. In this lecture is the personal pilgrimage of Donald McGavran as he faced facts and devised strategies. As he notes "the church growth movement is addressed to the the fact that the most powerful force ever to exist (the church) is in too many instances, either slow growing or actually declining. It is hoped that this personal view of the rise of the Church Growth Movement will help focus attention on the amazingly receptive world and the reaping of ripe fields.
1933-1936 Many Good Works, Static
Memberships
The church
growth movement began in the fourth decade of the twentieth century. During those years as executive secretary of
the India Mission I had the privilege to see not only my own mission but many
other missionary efforts in various parts of the subcontinent of India. I find that all missions were engaged in many
good works. Only a few mission efforts
were resulting in actual discipling of an ethnos. Too many national denominations and
congregations were busy looking after themselves, caring for existing
Christians, maintaining leprosy homes, funding famine orphans, running mission
schools, carrying on Christian medical work in dispensaries and hospitals,
developing better methods of agriculture, and other similar works. They were doing these many good works,
believing that as these were done, the Christian faith would spread. However, the areas in which the Christian
faith was actually spreading were few and far between. Often nine-tenths of a mission’s resources
were spent in doing good works, and less than one-tenth went to the actual
spread of the Christian faith. Many
congregations among the Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans,
Anglicans, and others continued on for years without adding a single
non-Christian to the church. It became
increasingly clear that something very much more effective ought to be
instituted.
Just what
this other program was, however, was not clear.
World evangelization is a very complex process. It faces very different opportunities and
difficulties as it evangelizes very different segments of mankind. All those who would obey eternal God’s
command to proclaim the gospel to all peoples, leading them to faith and
obedience, must realize that many programs which achieve that end in one
segment of society will not achieve that end in most other segments. There is no question that Christian schools
in many of the tribes of Africa would result in substantial
Christianization. There is also no
question that in vast India Christian schools very seldom lead to any
Christianization at all.
During the
fourth decade as I faced these and similar facts, I was constantly asking the
question, what then must we do? We pray
the Lord of the harvest to send laborers into whitened fields; but how must
they reap these very different harvests?
You do not reap potato fields with a sickle, and every crop presents
certain significant differences.
1937-1954, Seventeen Instructive
Years
In 1940 my
mission sent me to be the evangelistic missionary in the Takhatput area, some
300 villages spread across the plain around the small town of Takhatpur. In many of these villages lived ten to fifty
families of Satnamis, who had shown some appreciation for the gospel. My mission said to me, “We like your concern
for effective evangelism. We will back
your efforts to multiply churches in different areas. We will ask our supporting board to raise
$25,000 to undergird a new and vigorous program of evangelism. What that program is will depend very largely
upon you. We hope that God will make it
successful.” Those fourteen years,
therefore, were spent in an evangelism which attempted to win enough families
in a given village to enable the establishment of new congregations.
Had this
attempt been made in 1920 instead of 1940, it would without question have
brought 10,000 to 50,000 people to Christian faith. However, in 1940 Mahatma Gandhi was
proclaiming that the end of British rule was at hand and that the Untouchables
were to be regarded as Harijans, or God’s people. Consequently the receptivity of the Satnamis
sharply declined.
Alas, Mr.
Gandhi’s kind words and some attractive political concessions did not change
the oppression which the Satnamis suffered.
They did,
however, lead many of them to refuse to become Christian, “Hinduism,” they
would say, “is going to treat us fairly.
Why should we become Christians?”
Nevertheless, the evangelistic effort did bring in fifteen new
congregations.
At the same
time, faced with several hundred Christian children in the villages growing up
illiterate, I was burdened with the need for Christian education. Furthermore, the preventable deaths of many
Christians underscored the need for building and maintaining a Christian
hospital at Takhatpur. The very great
need for agricultural improvements of various sorts made it seem necessary to
stress agricultural development. Thus,
despite convictions to the contrary, I found myself engaging in many good
works; true, I gave more attention to evangelism than most missionaries, but I
found that the Christian program which the situation needed had to include many
undertakings which seemed to bear little relation to the spread of the church.
Nevertheless,
these fourteen years, 19401954, during which I frequently studied other
missions also and wrote a monthly article for the United Church Review (a Presbyterian magazine) did enable a church
growth point of view to be developed.
Convictions formed in my mind as to what had to be done. Some of these convictions grew out of my
successes; others were based on my failures.
In 1953 I wrote the manuscript of The
Bridges of God. This was later
published by World Dominion Press in London and Friendship Press in New
York. It became, so Dr. Price of the
Missionary Research Library asserted in his bulletin, “the most read missionary
book in 1956.”
1955-1960 Additional Insights
In 1954 Mrs.
McGavran and I completed our fourth seven-year term in India and came home on
furlough, intending to return to India in 1955.
However, my board, the United Christian Missionary Society, impressed by
the need to know its various mission fields more accurately, kept me busy. It sent me to Puerto Rico, Thailand, Belgian
Congo, the Philippines, and Orissa, India, to do church growth surveys in each
place. These were very significant
years. I saw how the missionary
enterprise was being carried out in most of the continents of this world not
only by one board but by many. The
information I received helped very greatly in developing a church growth point
of view which spoke to the real situation in most mission fields.
In 1958,
finding that most mission leaders were inclined to think that I spoke chiefly
about people movements to Christ and had started calling me “People Movement
McGavran,” I wrote a second book, How
Churches Grow. In it I never
mentioned people movements at all. This
was in order to emphasize that the essential task of all Christian missions was
to carry out the commands concerning finding and folding the lost. The essential work was the spread of the
Christian faith. The absolute center of
our mission work was panta ta ethne, incorporating all the
segments of society into Christ’s body.
It was discipling panta ta ethne.
How Churches Grow, published
by World Dominion Press and Friendship Press, enabled this view of missions to
spread in the English-speaking world.
The year
1954-55 was spent as a research fellow of Yale Divinity School. The year 1956-57 I continued to live in New
Haven, Connecticut on the edge of the Divinity School campus. From 1957 through 1960 the United Christian
Missionary Society appointed me to a new position—professor of missions of the
College of Missions. My duties were to
teach at the summer sessions of the College of Missions (Indianapolis) and
during the other three quarters of the year become professor of missions in
some one of the seminaries of the Christian Church. This I taught in the graduate seminary of
Phillips University; the Divinity School in Des Moines, Iowa; Christian
Theological Seminary in Indianapolis; the College of the Bible, Lexington,
Kentucky; the School of Religion, Berkeley, California; and Northwest Christian
College, Eugene, Oregon. Interspersed
with these teaching assignments were the church growth lectures in the
countries already mentioned. These researches
were to be of the major Protestant missions in those lands. For example, in Puerto Rico my researches
included careful studies of the Baptist, Congregational, Methodist, and
Presbyterian missions and churches as well as those of the Christian churches. During these years the theological and
conceptual bases of effective evangelism (church growth) were enlarged. My statements concerning church growth were
framed to fit the general Protestant mission picture. The fact that church growth thinking which
began to be expanded in classes after January 1, 1961, was so generally
acceptable across the spectrum of Protestant denominations can be credited in
large part to these years which combined finding the facts in many lands and
teaching these in five seminaries and five summer courses of the College of
Missions. Unrecognized by me, God was
preparing me to speak convincingly to the church about discipling panta ta
ethne
The Years January 1961 to September
1965
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As I
pondered these things, it became clear to me that I ought to resign from the
missionary society and start an Institute of Church Growth. This would enroll career missionaries from
many mission boards and touch the beginning Churches in scores and eventually
hundreds of different areas on the globe.
When I told
this to the Executive Secretary of the United Christian Missionary Society, he
replied, “You really must rethink your position. It would be extremely foolish of you, now
that you are 63 years of age, to do any such thing. You have a secure position now with your own
missionary society. You wear a 35-year
pin. You are one of our honored
missionaries. Stay with us.”
However,
feeling strongly that God was calling me to labors which would help advance
effective evangelization in many Branches of the Church in many lands, I
resolved to resign as a missionary of the UCMS and to found the Institute of
Church Growth.
I approached
three of the Christian Church seminaries asking that they start institutes of
church growth. All of them declined,
saying that it was a good idea, but they simply did not have the money. In the spring of 1959 while serving as
professor of missions in Northwest Christian College for a quarter, I mentioned
my dream to President Ross Griffeth. He
replied, “We would be happy to have you as a member of our faculty. You could begin the Institute of Church
Growth here. All the college would
require would be for you to teach our course on missions every quarter. The rest of your time you could spend
teaching the career missionaries from many denominations attending the
Institute of Church Growth. Furthermore,
we will be glad to give three $1,000 scholarships to career missionaries who
would come here to study church growth.”
A small
Christian college in far-off Eugene, Oregon, was not the best place to start an
Institute of Church Growth. However,
since it was the only possible place, I decided to accept President Griffeth’s
offer.
In the
school year 1959-60 the UCMS sent me to teach missions in Bethany College, West
Virginia, and in the fall of 1960 to be the professor of missions in the School
of Religion on Holy Hill in Berkeley, California, right next to the University
of California. The School of Religion
there had written over the doorway to its chapel, “Go into all the world and
preach the gospel.” The Congregational
Seminary, when it built that chapel, had been ardently missionary, but by the
fall of 1960 it had become cold toward missions, and my classes there were
small. The main thrust of the seminary
was on other matters. In mid-December
1960, Mrs. McGavran and I packed our belongings into our small trailer, covered
them with a tarpaulin, hitched the trailer to our car, and drove 600 miles
north to Eugene, Oregon to establish the Institute of Church Growth.
The first
classes of the Institute of Church Growth opened on January 2, 1961, with one
student, the Rev. Keith Hamilton of the Methodist Mission in Eclivia. For the
next five months he was my sole student.
I had the unrivaled opportunity of forming the courses of Instruction of
the Institute of Church Growth before a very small audience. However, his researches into the
Christianization of the Aymera and Quechua Indian tribes of the high Andes gave
me an opportunity to become well acquainted with what was happening in all the
nations of western South America—Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and
Chile. It was a most rewarding five
months.
In the fall
the number of students increased to six.
Among them were two holders of research fellowships—Alan R. Tippett,
Methodist missionary from Fiji, and Orlando Waliner, a Mennonite missionary
from India. The courses of study that I
had roughly outlined in the spring of that year were taught edited and
improved. It was cheering to note that
the sic career missionaries all felt that their courses of study were
distinctly helpful to them. Their
researches also into what had actually happened in six different mission fields
were most illuminating. These researches
abundantly articulated the church growth point of view.
Because of
the small enrollment, President Griffeth
said to me, “Rather than tying up one of our classrooms, I think that
you had better hold your classes in that part of the library where we stack the
books yet to be catalogues. There in the
stacks you will find a large and beautiful oak table, around which ten students
can easily sit. If you stand at one end
and lecture, your classes will be held in a very quiet part of the college.” Consequently, for the next four and a half
years all the classes were held around that oak table in the stacks.
Alan Tippett
decided to work for his Ph.D. in the University of Oregon, just across the
street from the library stacks of Northwest Christian College. I had granted him a research fellowship of
$1,000, because I liked what he wrote in the International Review of Missions and his replies to my
letters. He liked the emphasis of the
classes in the Institute of Church Growth.
At the end of his first year I said to him, “Alan, how about you teaching
two two-hour courses, one on animism (which you know very well from your twenty
years’ work among the animists of Fiji) and one on anthropology. Your courses in anthropology across the
street and your twenty years of experience amply qualify you to do this.” Since he needed the additional income, he
gladly accepted. The Institute of Church
Growth now had two teachers—Alan
Tippett, who taught four hours a week, and Donald McGavran, who taught
sixteen.
In the fall
of 1961, the annual meeting of the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association,
headed by Dr. Clyde Taylor, was to be held in Winona Lake, Indiana, in the
first week of September. Dr. Taylor
invited me to deliver a series of lectures on church growth to that meeting. The executive secretaries there assembled liked
what they heard. They said, “This kind
of Instruction should be given to all our missionaries on furlough. Would you be willing to come here next year
at this same time and speak to a gathering of possibly a hundred career
missionaries on furlough? We will pay
your way to and from Eugene. Edwin
Jacques, executive secretary for the Conservative Baptists, will manage the
seminar. All you have to do is
lecture. Give them, somewhat expanded,
the same lectures you have given to us.”
Thus the annual Seminar on Church Growth at Winona Lake was born. Every year for the next nine years EFMA
missionaries and many others on furlough assembled at Winona Lake for four days
of instruction in church growth. What
later was published as Understanding
Church Growth formed the subject matter of these lectures. For the first four years the only lecturer
was Donald McGavran. After that time the
program was enriched by lectures from Ralph W
This Church
Growth Seminar, attended by more than 1,000 career missionaries over the years,
had a considerable impact on mission thinking.
The Congress
on the Church’s Worldwide Mission assembled at Wheaton, Illinois, in 1966 had a
section on church growth, the first time church growth as a distinct topic had
been assigned an important place in mission theory.
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During the
four and a half years five sets of researches were thus completed. Dependable information in regard to actual
church growth was assembled. The
processes of growth in many countries were accurately described. The victories and defeats were set forth in
meaningful detail. What causes church
growth and what causes static, non-growing congregations became increasingly
clear. None of these researches,
however, was published in America before 1966.
The Institute of Church Growth simply did not have the money or the
prestige. Church Growth in the High Andes by Keith Hamilton, Multiplying Churches in the Philippines
by Donald McGavran, and Church Growth in
Jamaica by McGavran were published in India by the Lucknow Press before
1965. The others were not.
The annual
church growth lectures at Eugene also nurtured and furthered the church growth
movement. Noted mission executives and
missionaries were invited to address the Institute on the subject of church
growth. Their lectures were then
published. Bishop J. Waskom Pickett gave
the first lectures. In the second, Dr.
Eugene Nida, American Bible Society, Dr. Cal Guy of Southwest Baptist
Theological Seminary, the Rev. Melvin Hodges, executive secretary for Latin
America, Foreign Mission Department, Assemblies of God, Springfield, Missouri,
and I delivered the twelve lectures. The
audience included more than twenty mission boards in North America as well as
the career missionaries attending the Institute.
In 1964, as
a result of the researches done by career missionaries from Latin America, I
came to feel that a scientific, on-the-spot research into church growth in all
the Latin American lands would be a major contribution to mission thinking and
planning. In consequence, I wrote to
more than twenty foundations asking for grants to fund the church growth survey
which would cover all of South America.
Nineteen of my proposals proved fruitless, but the twentieth, addressed
to the Eli Lilly Foundation of Indianapolis, bore fruit. One day in December of 1964, I received a
check for $50,000, and the Latin American church growth project was born.
That spring
after much correspondence, three researchers were secured. The Rev. William Read of the Presbyterian
Mission in Brazil, Harmon Johnson of the Assemblies of God, and Victor Monterroso,
a Baptist minister and seminary lecturer in Costa Rica were selected as the
three researchers. Scheduled to begin
work in September, 1965, the researchers were to assemble at the Institute of
Church Growth in Oregon for several months of book research before fanning out
to the various lands in the great continent to the south. Since in June, 1965, Northwest Christian
College decided to terminate the Institute of Church Growth and permit me to
accept Fuller Theological Seminary’s invitation to become the founding dean of
its new School of World Mission, the three men assembled in Pasadena,
California, rather than Eugene, Oregon.
Their researches during the next two years resulted in a notable
contribution to the cause of missions, Latin
American Church Growth. For the
first time those carrying on mission in those countries saw what had actually
occurred by way of church growth. Graphs
of growth and statistics showed what had actually occurred. Pages of description told why some missionary
efforts had succeeded greatly and why others had been practically
fruitless. The whole enterprise was a
notable contribution to missiology. Such
researches need to be carried out from decade to decade so that world
evangelization remains well informed as to what God is blessing to the growth
of the church and what He is not blessing.
World evangelization calls for dedication. It must proceed in the light of accurate
information as to the degree to which the unreached ethne in that
particular field are in fact being disciple.
Graphs of growth showing how many converts are being won, how many new
congregations are being established are the most essential element in the
information concerning Christian mission.
Thus at the
Institute of Church Growth between January, 1961, and September, 1965, notable
contributions to church growth thinking were made. Thus year by year leaders of Christian
mission had impressed upon them that the actual winning of men and women to
Christ and the actual multiplication of congregations was the heart of
Christian mission. Missionaries, mission
executives, and indeed all leaders of all denominations needed to know what was
actually happening in regard to the discipling of all the peoples of earth. It was not enough to proclaim the gospel
widely. The goal was much more than
that. The goal was to multiply sound,
believing, Spirit-filled congregations in every segment of society. The degree to which this goal was being
achieved needed constantly to be accurately stated and carefully considered. This is the central business of all
missiology, of all courses on evangelism , of all Christian mission.
The four and
a half years when Northwest Christian College made possible a small beginning
venture in effective evangelism had been greatly blessed by God.
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