When Christ gave the command to make disciples is was not a command given to a few present disciples but a mandate binding of all Christians to the task until he returned.
There are 3 ways I could illustrate this;
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| Dr.Bob Orr Lecturing in India on Church Growth |
- In a study done by the Institute of American Church Growth it was found growing churches had and involvement in ministry level of 60% plus and that 25% of that involvement was Class 2 in nature (Class 2 is outreach focused ministry). Plateaued churches involvement level averaged 43% and declining churches 27%. So the total amount of involvement and the way that involvement is deployed are both important.
- The principle of the "Oikos" or the 8-15 people God has supernaturally and strategically placed in every believers sphere would lead us to believe it was God's intent from the beginning that the task of reaching the world would be accomplished by each of us reaching our world for Christ. (see additional articles of this blog on Oikos)
- The ministry of evangelism is better accomplished by lay-persons than Clergy. One illustration of this is something so simple as following up church visitors. When laypersons do the followup the retention rate of visitors who come back and stay doubles.
In this article Dr. McGavran gives emphasis to that principle with concrete illustrations. Take the time in your church to measure the following;
- How many persons have invited someone to come with them to church or a church activity in the past 30 days
- In the formal prayer times of the church is prayer for the harvest a primary item of concern
- Of the persons who have a role or task what % are doing Class 2 work.
- What is the conversion Growth Ratio. This refers to how many Christians it takes to win 1 person to Christ each year. 1:15-1:20 is a healthy number.
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| Dr. McGavran |
The Final Lectures
Number 10
Dr. Donald McGavran
Number 10
Dr. Donald McGavran
Is effective
evangelism of non-Christians the work of ministers or laymen? Does the minister determine whether his
congregation finds and folds the lost in its vicinity? Is his task to do the job himself or to train
his laymen to do it? These are most
important questions for any seminar community.
Let me lay before you some striking illustrations.
Pastor Paul Yonggi Cho in 1958
Easily the
most dramatic illustration of church growth in the world today comes from the
Full Gospel Church on Yoido Island, Seoul, Korea. Under the able leadership of Dr. Paul Yonggi
Cho, its minister, it has grown from 2,000 in 1958 to 400,000 today. Pastor Yonggi Cho was responsible for the
first 2,000. His tireless work, his
Spirit-filled dynamism, and his unceasing prayer gathered together a
congregation in the bombed and ruined city of Seoul from a couple of hundred to
a couple of thousand in three years.
Then Pastor Cho had a nervous breakdown.
His physician assured him he would never preach again. He was confined to his bed. He called in a hundred of his most devout
members, about half women and half men.
They filled the room where he lay on a cot. He said to them, “The care of this
congregation now rests on you. Each one of you must gather the 20 or so members
of this church who live in your neighborhood for a meeting of prayer and Bible
study every week and must see that they come to this tent for Sunday worship.”
The hundred
members instantly protested that they were very ordinary people and would not
begin to have the ability or the biblical knowledge to enable them to do
this. He replied, “God will give you the
ability. You can love the 20 people who
form your congregation, your house church.
Furthermore, these people who are living in intimate contact with many
non-Christians flooded into this bombed city can win them to Christian life;
can demonstrate the new love, justice, and kind way of life which you now
practice.”
God cured
Yonggi Cho, and he was back in his pulpit within a month. The 100 house churches prospered. They soon became 200, then 400, then
600. Yonggi Cho, with some help from the
American Assemblies of God, built the largest church building in Korea. Its main auditorium seated 6,000 worshippers. A television screen placed on the enormous
pulpit showed another thousand gathered in the great hall below the
auditorium. These thousand also saw and
heard the preacher via closed-circuit television. Thus every Sunday Yonggi Cho spoke to 7,000
people. He soon found that he had to
have four services—at 9:00, 10:30, 2:00 and 4:00.
When I spoke
in his church to 9,000 people, I was greatly impressed with five large offices
below the auditorium. Each was filled
with filing cabinets. Every one of the
600 house churches or cells sent its leaders to meet every Thursday night with
Yonggi Cho and his helpers for a couple of hours. I asked Pastor Cho who these lay leaders
were. Were they doctors, lawyers,
teachers, and other such people? “Oh,
no,” replied Pastor Cho, “Those people are far too busy. The 600 who gather here are very ordinary
Christians, but they love and care for their small house churches. They know each one individually, and they
lead them in prayer and Bible study. I
thought immediately of the tremendous growth of the New Testament church led
not by rabbis, scribes, and doctors of the law, but by fishermen and tax
gatherers. The first answer to the
question posed by the title of this lecture is that effective evangelization is
carried on by a joint effort by pastor and people, in which the pastor provides
a small percentage of the total work—a very important percentage—and the people
provide a very large percentage of the total work required. If any denomination or congregation today
wishes to become effective in its proclamation of the gospel, it must inspire
and organize a substantial number of its men and women to become ardent
evangelists.
John Wesley and Class Meetings
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| What Lever Are You Using To Change The World? Clergy or Laity |
Dr. George
Hunter of Asbury Theological Seminary is publishing a book titled “To Spread the Power” in the spring of
1986. In it he tells in considerable
detail of Wessley’s Methodists. He
emphasizes that Wesley operated according to the principles which the church
growth movement is emphasizing today.
Wesley did not call these church growth principles, but that is what
they were. If he had not emphasized
these methods, his movement would not have grown and grown until today there
are more than 40 million Methodists scattered around the world.
The training
of committed Christians to find and nurture the unsaved brothers and sisters,
neighbors and friends, is something which every ordained pastor can do. The fact that so few pastors do this is very
largely responsible for the static condition of many denominations. How to do this, of course, varies from
congregation to congregation and from pastor to pastor. This key to obey eternal God’s command can be
seized by the ordained leaders of all congregations in all parts of the
globe. What a tremendous and effective
army will be found, organized, trained, and set to work as leaders of the
church grasp this truth and act upon it.
Illiterate Preachers and Baptist
Mltiplication
Of considerable
significance is the fact that, while at the time of the Revolutionary War, the
large denominations in the United States were the Episcopalian, Presbyterian
and Congregationalists. By 1976 (200
years later), the large denominations were the Methodists and the
Baptists. The Episcopalians,
Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Lutherans had, of course, grown some but
not as much as the Methodists and Baptists.
Why was this
so? There are, of course, many
reasons. But one, concerning which there
can be little doubt, is that the slow-growing denominations rely for their
growth very largely upon well trained ministers, whereas the Methodists, with
their class meetings which soon became congregations, and the Baptists
frequently used Spirit-filled men and women who had relatively little formal
training. As one reads the history of
the rapid expansion of Baptist churches, he runs across instances of men of
very little formal education. These,
filled with the Holy Spirit and reading the Bible through from cover to cover,
many times became effective proclaimers of the Word to those frontier people,
among which were many actually illiterate men and women. Indeed, I read of more than one Baptist
preacher who was illiterate when he married.
His wife taught him to read.
Be assured
that I am not advocating no training for ministers. Fuller Theological Seminary and the School of
World Mission emphasize the need for abundant instruction and education of
prospective ministers and missionaries.
It does need to be said, however, that there is a danger that highly
educated men will not be heard by large segments of the population. If effective evangelism is left solely to the
highly educated, millions of the men and women living around us will not listen
to what we have to say. This is one
reason why ordained ministers must enlist and train at least 10% of their
members to become effective evangelists.
These members of their churches will speak to their neighbors and
friends in ways that vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. They will be heard exactly as were the
unlearned apostles in the early church.
Evangelistic Home Bible Studies in
Boston
A very good
illustration of what we are talking about comes from the City of Boston. There a Church of Christ minister, Kip
McKean, in 1978, came to a small congregation of about 50 members. By 1983, five years later, this had grown to
a congregation of 1400 baptized believers.
As I corresponded with Pastor McKean about this amazing growth, he gave
several reasons for the growth. Among
them was the fact that every week that congregation of 1400 members assembled
in 150—repeat, 150- evangelistic home Bible studies. These met in all parts of the great City of
Boston.
Pastor
McKean insists that to be counted as an evangelistic home Bible study, each
must have as many non-Christians attend as Christians. If just the saints of God gather to study the
Bible, the meeting has very little evangelistic potency. If, however, believers and non-believers,
members and non-members meet, faith is generated and flows from believers to
non-believers in a remarkable fashion.
To be sure, the Bible study course which all these groups employ has
been carefully designed to meet the conditions of modern life in a great city
and to present the Christian alternatives.
The pastor never visits these evangelistic home Bible studies. There the faith is communicated by the Holy
Spirit through ordinary Christian men and women.
Creating Core of Effective
Evangelists in Your Congregation
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| This army of Lay Leaders is being trained and equipped to reach their world for Christ in Kenya |
The answer
to this question must be carefully framed.
If we were to select the right men and women in each congregation, train
them, work with them, encourage them, pray with them, and help them, we would
beyond doubt be able to turn many non-growing churches around. We would without doubt be able to field a
good many new congregations. We would
beyond question be able to start many vigorous Spirit-filled house churches. On the other hand, in some congregations we
in this room, no matter how much we tried, could not find the right men and
women. Possibly this would be due to the
way we went about it. Possibly this
would be due to decades of belief that all such work is the work of the
pastor. He is paid to do it. Why should we do it?
Nevertheless,
my friends, I trust that many gathered in this room will seek to create one or
more bands of laymen or laywomen who will be effective evangelists, who will
start evangelistic home Bible studies, who will learn how to speak winningly,
pleasingly, and effectively to their neighbors and friends. All across America, congregation after
congregation, Presbytery after Presbytery, union after uni9on are becoming
wakened to the multitudes of the unreached and to eternal God’s command to
disciple them. The ways in which they
obey this command will be multitudinous.
The effectiveness of each unit will beyond question vary
enormously. But that the total will be
impressive is hard to doubt.
