Church Growth

The Church Growth Movement is a movement within evangelical Christianity which aims to grow churches based on research, sociology, analysis, etc . The Church Growth Movement started with a passion for the Great Commission, and seeing people come to Christ. Donald McGavran, a seminal figure in this movement asserted that 'It is God's will that women and men become disciples of Jesus Christ and responsible members of Christ's church'. The Church Growth Movement is a movement within evangelical Christianity which aims to grow churches based on research, sociology, analysis, etc . The Church Growth Movement started with a passion for the Great Commission, and seeing people come to Christ. Donald McGavran, a seminal figure in this movement asserted that 'It is God's will that women and men become disciples of Jesus Christ and responsible members of Christ's church'. The church growth movement began with the publication of Donald McGavran's book The Bridges of God. McGavran was a third-generation Christian missionary to India, where his observations of How Churches Grow (the title of another of his books) went beyond typical theological discussion to discern sociological factors that affected receptivity to the Christian Gospel among non-Christian peoples. In 1965, he organized the School of World Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, which was the institutional homebase for Church Growth studies until after his death. It has been the training ground for tens of thousands of pastors and missionaries of one hundred mainly evangelical denominations. McGavran used statistical research to show that the typical missiological strategy of the time, mission stations, was largely ineffective in reaching people for Christ, as well as ineffective in discipleship. The original goal of the Church Growth Movement was to answer the question, 'How do we reach peoples (as opposed to a few random individuals) with the gospel in the U.S.?'. The goal was to understand how to share Christianity in a culturally appropriate way, given the changing climate in the United States. Just as Donald McGavaran stated that we must understand the culture of the people we are trying to reach; we cannot simply enter a completely different culture on the other side of the world, we must seek to understand that culture, and present the gospel in a culturally relevant way. Paul's missionary journeys, it was argued, used the same cultural relevance, which eventually led to the council at Jerusalem (Acts 15) which determined whether Gentile converts must adopt Jewish culture in order to become Christian. Stetzer states that the Church Growth Movement went astray when it became overly simplified into a series of formulas for church growth, and ultimately led to the very thing McGavran sought to avoid, namely a new kind of mission station. Stetzer states too many of the churches following the emerging formulas became a socially engineered mission station, which drew people out of their own cultures, into Christian warehouses and away from their neighborhoods and communities where they lived . Two key attributes of Church Growth are a passion for the 'Great Commission' and a willingness to apply research to attracting members, including quantitative methods. Scholars and leaders from many denominations continue to meet annually to discuss the implications of these insights as the American Society for Church Growth. The 'seeker sensitive' label is associated with some megachurches in the United States where Christian messages are often imparted by means of elaborate creative elements emphasizing secular popular culture, such as popular music styles. Such churches often also develop a wide range of activities to draw in families at different stages in their lives.