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The Transforming Church (3)CONTENTS of Part Three
1. Numerical Growth:The problems with the Church Growth Movement are also those of the cell-church system, for the two are closely intertwined. Cell churches are above all a way of "reaching the unchurched" and adding to the membership rolls. The Church Growth movement sees as its primary task to add quantifiable numerical growth to the Church. Indeed, some would say that it has replaced all other forms of ministry, including the worship of God, with this obsession. The worship service is used as yet another tool for attracting new members to the church, and it has to be tailored to the expectations of the "unchurched". Studies conducted by Church Growth Movement (CGM) researchers show that people want relaxed, informal and entertaining services with high quality modern music and short, positive, affirming talks that do not induce guilt or make anyone embarrassed. People want to see drama, dance and playlets, and this they shall have, say those who are eager to count heads in church. They want clowns? Then they shall have Christian clowns. They want video shows, pot-luck suppers and quiz shows? Let them have anything they want, for it keeps them coming to the church. One of America's five largest churches decided to perk up its evening service by staging a wrestling match. Another sent the pastor up to 'heaven' on invisible wires to the accompaniment of smoke, music and a light show. This must have made a huge impression on "the unchurched" but were they any different spiritually when they went home? Time after time, throughout the bible, we find that God looks for quality rather than quantity. Why else would God decimate the Israelites in the wilderness or send most of Gideon's army home before the battle? Jesus the Good Shepherd forsakes the many to seek for one lost sheep (a practice that the CGM would condemn as time-wasting and ineffective!). He changed the world with a handful of disciples and apostles; He told them that only a FEW would walk the narrow way. When McGravan and others boldly state that "God is interested in numbers" surely they forget the severe penalties He handed out for counting heads in the Old Testament camp! Yet, as the following quote testifies, missionary success is seen in terms of quantifiable growth.
2. Pragmatic ApproachAs we see from the above, it's not only numbers, but the pragmatic approach to evangelism that is of concern here. Pragmatism means choosing your methods and message according to their benefit and effect on human interests. In other words, if it works, and people like it, anything goes! Cell church leaders will be training those under them to "go out into their neighbourhoods" and reach the lost using everything and anything to hand. This sounds extremely worthy and biblical until you realise that the goal is numerical growth and the method is "the end justifies the means". Peter Wagner praises this approach thus:
McGavran's influence on the CGM was to teach evangelists to use anything that produced new church members and rule out nothing unless it was specifically condemned in the word of God. Whatsoever in ministry that did not contribute to growth was discarded - for nothing was more important than "making disciples of all nations". Therefore the bible is approached by CGM churches as mostly a tool for attracting people to meetings; its message is diluted because the doctrines and passages that challenge, rebuke or condemn are not attractive, and teaching on behaviour is secondary to evangelism. Therefore the principles of Church Growth are "based on" the bible but also based on market research and other non-bible sources that appear to work when approaching non Christians. Once this thinking establishes itself in the consciousness of missionaries and evangelists, it is but a short step to watering down the gospel and hammering it into a shape that is pleasing to the world, in order to make converts without offending them too much. In his book "Marketing the Church", the sociologist George Barna says: "the audience, not the message is sovereign". When the audience is the world and its values are in complete contradiction to the bible, the result is that sinners dictate the message according to their liking, and converts - who already expect nothing more from the Church than helpful platitudes and practical assistance - resist any hint of disapproval or talk of repentance. To play along is to deny them the truth that will save them from a lost eternity! Pragmatism means "if it works, use it" but is this a biblical method of evangelism? Are we really to be unconcerned about the purity of our methods? Does the end justify whatever means we use? Is God so pleased with quantity that he overlooks the quality? 3. Marketing Strategies:Church Growth delights to use whatever in the world will support their cause. Thus they turn to sociologists and demographers like George Barna (who is founder and president of Barna Group, a full-service marketing research company in Glendale, California which has conducted extensive research for many corporations and organizations including Visa, The Disney Channel, Focus on the Family, and the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association). They justify this with 1Cor. 9:22b where Paul says, "I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some." For the CGM, this validates the use of sociology, demography and the fruits of marketing research for their work. They happily use business planning and management techniques, and borrow whatever suits them from the secular marketplace. But using the techniques of the marketplace turns sinners in need of salvation into mere consumers of a product. Marketing the Church leads to a mentality where quantifiable "results" are of paramount importance to measure the "success" of the project. However, in evangelism there are not always immediate or discernible "results" and forcing a visible response goes beyond what God intended. Commercial companies know how to market a product. They use targeted advertising, slick glossy brochures, multimedia presentations, eye-catching professionally-produced websites. They employ celebrities to endorse their product. They make sure that their stores are large, bright, clean, freshly painted, with adequate facilities like toilets, restaurants and easy car-parking. When all of this is applied to churches, however, the result is a "product" that cannot not "do what it says on the tin". As a result of all the hype, those who come to church expecting to have their desires fulfilled and their senses ticked are either indulged in entertainment services, or sent away disillusioned and feeling betrayed and lied-to. Or both. As well as that, poorer churches are disadvantaged, and struggling little local congregations are trampled on in the rush to get the "product" out into the marketplace in the most lavish and expensive way possible. Those who have a genuine message of salvation to offer may be doing so in a run-down back-street hall, but they may well be overlooked by the public when it is taught to expect a totally different Christianity. Church Planting is also big business these days. It is seen as one of the most effective ways of increasing the number of people attending meetings. Through analysis, people's needs and expectations are estimated. One tool used is the Holmes Stress Scale which lists life changes and estimates the amount of stress caused by each change. This scale is used to identify which communities would be receptive to the church message. After the research discovers a group of people who are, in McGravan's terminology "winnable" - they are likely to respond to the message - an organisation or company is employed to set up a church in that area, ready-made. If only the apostle Paul had been able to call on the services of these companies, think how much time and worry he could have been spared! I have seen many "church-planting" services offered on the Internet, in which a company of consultants will undertake to set up a local church and train its leadership for a fee. One example, Crosspoint International, charges "$3650.00 to take a church planter through our two-year coaching process. This is not the total cost to plant a church, of course..."
Yes, if you have money, equipment, talented young entrepreneurs, large modern buildings, access to commercial advertising, and an experienced Church Planting Team to train your staff then success is guaranteed. But woe betide Paul and Barnabas who have nothing more than an offensive gospel message that gets them run out of town or stoned in the marketplace. 4. Group Salvation, not Individual:McGravan taught, and CGM proponents have followed in his footsteps, that "it is not easy for individuals to become Christians on their own". People like to stay with their cultural group, and to respond to a message and make changes in their lives as a group - whether a family, tribe, religion, culture, linguistic or ethnic group. Therefore the CGM plays down those elements that tend to emphasise the separateness of the Christian life, and individual decisions for Christ, and tries to develop a "tribal consciousness" that maintains people's comfort-factor, so that a whole group converts en bloc. To this end, the leaders and spokesmen of a group are targeted first in the hopes that they will influence everyone else. This is considered to be a more effective way of reaching large numbers of people at the same time. Modern "mission" involves targeting "people groups" around the world, and aims at changing the religious persuasion of that group to a Christian one where most people are attending Christian churches, having their children baptised and following the commands of the bible rather than those of other sacred texts. McGravan's teaching has received a boost in recent years from those who see the "revival outpouring" and techniques such as "spiritual warfare" as a way of reaching whole nations at a time. The "prophets" say - for instance - that "millions of islams [sic]" will come to Christ, and whole nations will be impacted by an outpouring so intense that none can resist. 5. Ethnicity:McGravan believed numerical growth is much more likely to take place if the person doing the evangelizing belongs to the same culture, class, tribe, or family as the person he is trying to evangelize, and that churches consisted of people from the same cultural background. This is the often-cricitised 'Homogeneous Unit Principle'. In reality, it is not a "principle", but a descriptive observation that people do not like to cross ethnic, linguistic, or other social barriers in coming to Christ. This - as we have seen from McGravan's own explanation - means putting an end to the "separation" from the world and often from families and former friends that converts accept when they become Christians. Jesus was himself One who separated himself from his mother and family as a deliberate act, and called believers his new family. He said that those who consider their natural ties as more important to following God do not deserve the name of disciples, for in Christ we are all as one family and there is "no Jew or Greek". Yet McGravan set in place a principle that converts must identify as closely as possible with their old way of life and keep the same company. (How does this work for Hindus and Muslims who are saved, to say nothing of tribal shamans and witches.) The reasons for all this is simple - NUMBERS! McGravan does not deny that one-by-one conversation works, but complains that it is so slow that the world will never be saved. Thus, biblical principles are overthrown for the sake of rapid church growth. Frank Kaleb Jansen (Adopt-A-People Clearinghouse) writes:
A misinterpretation of the word "ethnos" (nation) has led to these organisations targeting clans, tribes, classes, professions and anything else that they understand as "people groupings". It has resulted in the decision to allot people targeted for evangelization to groups according to their "ethnicity". One "Joshua Project 2000" people's list has people groups in Canada, for example, as "German Jew; Hindi; Urdu". Download the Joshua Project Peoples database and listings Yet the word according to Vine's simply means a nation or people - ethnos: originally "a multitude," denotes "a nation" or "people," e.g., Matt 24:7; Acts 10:35; the Jewish people, e.g., Luke 7:5; 23:2; John 11:48,50-52; Acts 10:22; 24:2,10,17; (from Vine's Expository Dictionary of Biblical Words). 6. Social Sciences and Psychology:The aim and urgency to increase the size of the Church has led the CGM to use sociological principles as tools rather than classic biblical evangelism, in an effort to reach the largest number of people in the shortest possible time. Thus, the emphasis of the Church Growth Movement (CGM) is to put people and their needs before sanctification and holiness. "Discipling" in cells is more often "sharing" than biblical teaching; more often meeting people's needs for comfort, friendship, healing or emotional support than a challenge to conform to the bible in genuine spiritual transformation. Sarah Leslie writes in her unpublished report on cell churches:
The assumption here is that the bible is insufficient to disciple converts and needs to be supplemented with “contemporary social and behavioral sciences.” But when psychology takes over from doctrine, we end up with a gospel of self-esteem. 7. Social ReformMcGravan writes that the Church Growth mission is the growth of the Church, which he understands as synonymous with the "renewal of society". This view is the prevailing one amongst conservative a-millennial Christians who see the kingdom of God as the continuously-spreading government of God on earth through his people in the Church. They believe that through mission, evangelism, good works and being salt and light in society eventually the Church will spread out to cover most of the world and influence most of its population to act in a Christian way. So McGravan hopes that his book "Understanding Church Growth" might be "used of God to aid in the urgent revitalization of His Church and the incorporation of sufficient men and women in it, so that major social advance may be achieved in all nations." Another study, on house churches, has this to say:
Believing the Church to be God's agent of deliverance for all mankind, Church Growth and cell-church teaching looks for an advancing "kingdom" ever-increasing in power and size so that its message of goodwill and hope can eventually rescue the world from the effects of the Fall. With this fantasy in view, the target is the largest possible Christian Community, at any cost, by whatever means and as soon as possible. Wolfgang Simson who wrote the "15 Theses for a New Reformation" says in the draft of his book:
In the past few years, this thinking has received a boost through the "revival" that introduced the idea of: Impartation EvangelismSpeaking at the former Toronto Airport Church, home of the so-called "Toronto Blessing" Ralph Neighbour Jr. commented that conventional evangelism using a reasoned approach based on the truths of the word of God is not effective enough to do the job. He said:
8. Reconstruction - new wineskins One of the most sinister aspects of the 'Apostolic Reformation' with its church growth techniques and its cell-church structure is the push to dismantle the present-day Church and replace it with another more suited to their dominion mandate. Although not all groups subscribe to this principle, the underlying doctrine of the "new apostolic order" dictates that the "old order" with its traditions, churches, clergy, buildings and all the old ways of thinking (including much that is biblical and sound) must be removed entirely to make way for the church of the 21st century with a foundation of new apostles and prophets to lead and direct all people. In his "Houses That Change The World" Wolfgang Simson - a major leader of the house church movement - says that:
In order to establish the "kingdom" on earth they must do away with denominations, and unite all church members and leaders in a new apostolic network, presumably with the "Presiding Apostle" C. Peter Wagner at its head. The Singapore FCBC cell church led by Laurence Khong says:
This is not just a minor modification of the old Church. It is COMPLETE REPLACEMENT with no hint of incorporating the "old paradigm" which Ralph Neighbour, for example, thinks is incapable of doing the job. Ron Wood, one of a large number of present-day "prophets", comments:
This same author expands on the doctrine is his article "Leaving Organized Religon":
Leaving aside the question of how many of the current cell-church and apostolic networks consciously or openly subscribe to the above doctrine, it has to be said that, in practice, the work of removing people from supposed "ignorance and powerlessness" in the traditional denominations, and making a transition to a "new wineskin" is being accomplished more by the introduction of cell systems than anything else. Therefore it would be good to go on and examine this phenomenon. Starting with the history and background, and the people responsible for launching this new move, the remaining parts of this series will examine house groups, house churches and cell churches.
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"Compelling people to come to Christ, strictly by means of doctrinal truths has not been that effective. We need to develop friendships and relationships with people. We need to express the love of Christ through our lived experience of him. This draws people. The apostle Paul in 1 Cor. 14:23ff relates how the gifts of the Holy Spirit (in this case prophecy), can be used to convict an unbeliever of the reality of God among us. It is not so much a belief system that compels one to Christ, but the supernatural workings of the Holy Spirit through us. The Holy Spirit assembles us in small group, "and we invite others to "join us" and observe the manifest power of God in our midst." [
CONTINUE TO PART FOUR: