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The Transforming Church (4)CONTENTS of Part Four
Some say the move towards the more pragmatic, numbers-oriented seeker-sensitive approach to church growth began at the turn of the century with the Student Volunteer movement which spawned the idealistic vision of reaching the world for Christ by the year 2000. Their motto was "The Evangelization of the World in this Generation". Begun in Massachusetts in 1886, with a home bible study group, it blossomed under the leadership of A. T. Pierson who told the students that "all should go, and go to all". Pierson believed the world could be won within one generation with enough manpower and enthusiasm, but it was not to be. There are other candidates. Sarah Leslie writes:
Norman Vincent Peale, in 1984 on the Phil Donahue program, announced, "It’s not necessary to be born-again. You have your way to God; I have mine. I found eternal peace in a Shinto shrine . . . I’ve been to Shinto shrines, and God is everywhere."
Both Peale and his close friend and disciple Robert Schuller, author of "Your Church Has Real Possibilities" espouse heretical "New Thought" Christian-Science doctrines that they have christianised into "positive thinking" and a self-esteem gospel that targets "the unchurched". MASONIC: You can judge for yourself the "christianity" of Peale by going to this site, where he is proudly portrayed as a 33-degree Mason and Honored as "Supreme Temple Architect 1991" with his "Portrait Donated by The Scottish Rite Masons of The Southern Jurisdiction." OFFSITE LINK: "Norman Vincent Peale: An Man who Made up his Mind"ROBERT SCHULLER
In a long letter published in the October 5, 1984 issue of 'Christianity Today', he wrote:
In 1992, Robert Schuller launched a new organization called Churches United in Global Mission (CUGM), "to share positively the message of Jesus Christ ...[in] a spirit of unity that is truly Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, evangelical and charismatic." He backed up his ecumenical statement by sharing his church growth principles at the headquarters of Unity Church, Lees Summit, Missouri and dedicating a new Unity Temple in Warren, Michigan. Unity is a cult that denies the deity of Jesus and teaches reincarnation! [from Lion and Lamb Ministries] Despite all this, Schuller stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Wagner and other leaders in the Church Growth camp. He joined David Yonggi Cho in Sicily for the country's first Church Growth Conference in March 1998, visiting Pope John Paul II en route to the conference. He also led the First American Convocation on Church Growth in Garden Grove. In 1997 when more than eighty gay and lesbian pastors and lay leaders from the Metropolitan Community Churches participated in Robert Schuller's 'Institute for Successful Church Leadership' at his Crystal Cathedral, the speakers included cell-church big names Bill Hybels, John Maxwell and Rick Warren. 'Christianity Today' for September 8, 1989 had a picture of Schuller at the Crystal Cathedra with C. Peter Wagner and Bill Hybels. It seems that the philosophy of self-esteem is such a major crowd-puller that heresy can be overlooked in the name of "expanding the church and converting the world." Wagner has in fact paid tribute to Robert Schuller, who in turn is indebted to Norman Vincent Peale. Wagner states:
OFFSITE LINK: See "The Gospel According to Schuller"ROD TRUDINGERIn looking at one early book on the cell concept, "Cells For Life" by Rod Trudinger published in 1979, I was struck by how many of today's ideas were already present decades earlier. For example:
Trudinger speaks of his introduction to the cell concept as early as 1964 with a lecture by Bishop A. Jack Dain of the Anglican Church in Sydney, Australia, who in his turn attributed his interest to South American church growth in the 50's and 60's. [In Mexico City 1975, Bishop Dain chaired the Lausanne Continuation Committee. In an interview prior to the first International Congress on World Evangelization, Bishop Dain, who served as Executive Chairman of ICOWE, stated: "Lausanne is a Congress on evangelization, not a Congress on evangelism.] Trudinger also mentions the concept of groups of 12 as being a teaching of Howard Snyder - one of the key speakers in the 1974 International Congress on Evangelism in Luasanne. Cell churches had already influenced the UK restoration movement as early as the 1970's when Barney Coombs wrote about them in the magazine "Renewal". Like Snyder he called the new structures "new wineskins" - but this oft-repeated phrase comes straight out of dominion teaching and has been avidly adopted by the revival in promoting a totally new order of Church for the 21st century. (This is in keeping with the "Second Reformation" concept of Wagner and others. William Beckham's book on 'reshaping the church for the 21st century' is called "The Second Reformation".) See "The Net" for a further explanation of this concept. Trudinger states that beyond the renewal of the system lies an even greater concept - RESTORATION. "Renewal is the basis for something far greater: Restoration!" Cells For Life, page 11. Today his views have been adopted by almost every major ministry on the planet! HOWARD SNYDER Snyder's original landmark book and the update of that book from 1996, "Radical Renewal: The Problem of Wineskins Today" have become textbooks for instructing missionaries and cell-church leaders. Snyder, a major speaker at the 1974 International Congress on World Evangelization in Lausanne, is part of the "Christian Spirituality" circle which proposes largely Catholic mystical forms of spiritual renewal, and is on the Board of the Center for the Renewal of the Churches. He is a liberal, a ecumenist, an environmentalist and I would class him as "Christian-New-Age" His book "Earth Currents" (Abingdon Press) examines from a global perspective eight cultural trends that he believes will occur between 1990-2030. Chapters Five and Twelve are on the Environment. Snyder's 1977s book "Community of the King" is no longer available, (although some of the same thoughts are given in his web essay "An Evangelistic Lifestyle in the Church") where he says:
Snyder's teaching on the Church, and his insistence that "salvation by faith must always be connected to true Christian community and real discipleship." show signs of having been drawn from Catholic theologians looking to reestablish the preeminence of the visible church on earth as the one great mother of all spiritual communities, but it is also an a-millennial quest to "work for the progressive manifestation of the kingdom of God" worldwide as represented by the "community of God" - one united "holy, catholic and apostolic Church". To Snyder, growing the Church is a vital step towards "healing the earth" and reconciling all things in God. Therefore, there is a lot at stake. If churches remain numerically small and without a global impact, the "cosmic plan of God" which "even includes the redemption of the physical universe from the effects of sin" cannot take place, for this, Snyder asserts, is the mission of the Church as the agent of God on earth.
In the light of this, it can be seen that the conventional understanding of the Church: "a matter of individual soul culture rather than the building of the community of the Spirit" fails to do the job.
Therefore the institution of the Church must be altered into a global community. "To do justice to the biblical understanding of the Church we must say that the goal of evangelism is the formation of the Christian community" (p.104 Ibid). But "what kind of structures can and should be created to further the oneness of the true Church and the effective proclamation of the gospel?" he asks. It will be no surprise to readers to learn that Snyder proposed, in this book written in 1977, just the very organisations we are seeing all around the world today. He proposed the City Church, regular large-scale city-wide celebrations (to include all denominations including Catholic and orthodox) and some monitoring and communications networks that have since come to fruition. He also proposed "Seven Steps Towards Renewal" in his final chapter, steps 4-7 having to do with cell-church structures and church-planting. The emphasis on the global community being created by such means is underlined when we read:
JUAN CARLOS ORTIZ He is often credited with sparking the "shepherding/covering" movement by introducing the five Fort Lauderdale leaders to his discipleship and authority teachings. Like Snyder and many other cell-church proponents, Ortiz believed that the Church must reform its structures and rebuild into flexible "new wineskin", in order to do the job of forming a united world community of believers:
Sarah Leslie writes:
NOTE: Juan Carlos Ortiz is now Pastor of the Hispanic Ministry at the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, CA., and Professor, Fuqua School of Communications, Campus of the Crystal Cathedral - The Crystal Cathedral is pastored by Robert Schuller as we saw above. DAVID YONGGI CHOChairman, World Assemblies of God Fellowship
As a teenager, Dr. Cho converted from Buddhism to Christianity, and in 1958, he began conducting church services on the outskirts of Seoul. In 1967, when the cell system was introduced, it consisted of 7,750 individuals of 2,267 families organized into 125 cells. When the church membership reached 10,000, the church relocated to Yoido. The first worship service at the now YFGC was held on August 19th, 1973. In 1976, Dr. Cho founded Church Growth International (CGI) as a forum for sharing his principles of church growth. In September of 1992, Pastor Cho Yonggi was elected as the chairman of the Executive Committee of the World Pentecostal Assemblies of God Fellowship now known as the World Assemblies of God Fellowship which has a membership of 30,000,000 members among 60 nations of the world. Like the other participants in the CGM, Cho's emphasis was multiplication (numbers):
A researcher writes:
The important thing to know about the Korean church, for the purposes of this article, is that it is and remains one single church, with a pastor, a hierarchical leadership and a weekly church service, at which attendance is required, with traditional hymns, choir and orchestra. It is NOT a network of "house churches" but a single church divided into cells. The church hosts many organisations and ministries, and Cho has by no means eliminated "programs" in order to create a "pure cell" structure. His church fits more into the meta-church pattern of Carl George than Ralph Neighbour's model, but the distinctions are hard to make and the church welcomes and participates in all kinds of Church Growth programs. For example, Cho holds annual church growth conferences as opposed to a cell-based ministry conference. At the 1997 annual church growth conference, Rick Warren and Bill Hybels were the featured speakers (Meta model) along with Larry Stockstill and Billy Joe Daughtery (Pure Cell model). OFFSITE LINK: "David Yonggi Cho: General Teaching & Activities"DALE GALLOWAY The book 20/20 VISION was written by Pastor Dale E. Galloway in 1986 and describes the method Galloway uses for successful church growth. There he tells us who are his mentors and friends:
Galloway, a graduate of Nazarene Theological Seminary is a very influential man with audiences ready to hear his views on how to change the church and "transition it" into the new paradigm. With more than one million copies in print of his 18 books, Galloway is in a position to alter the thinking of a large section of the Church, but with mentors like the self-esteem guru Schuller and fourth-dimension mystic Paul/David Cho we have to be concerned about what these eager disciples of Galloway will be taught.
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Schuller says, "We’re trying to impress non-Christians and non-churched people. We are trying to make a big, beautiful impression upon the affluent nonreligious American who is riding by on this busy freeway." But Schuller doesn't intend to offend them by suggesting they are acting contrary to the laws and commandments of God. For Schuller "Sin is any act or thought that robs myself or another human being of his or her self-esteem." (Schuller, "Self-Esteem: The New Reformation", p 14)
Howard Snyder
Ortiz was for many years the pastor of a large Pentecostal congregation in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He became internationally known through the 1974 Congress on World Evangelism in Lausanne, and the publication of his first book, "Disciple" in 1975.
The most influential leader of the cell church movement is 
Dr. Galloway is a "pioneer in developing need-meeting ministries led by laypeople". Pastors from all over the world have come to his Church Growth Institute to learn how to create and sustain effective cell-group ministries. He founded New Hope Community Church located just outside of Portland, Oregon in 1972 which has more than six thousand members in small groups. He is now Dean of Asbury Theological Seminary's Beeson International Center for Biblical Preaching and Church Leadership.
CONTINUE TO PART FIVE: