Top Church-Growth Myths

When I attended seminary, our dean was a big fan of the late Donald McGavran and his sociology-based theories of church growth. During the 1980s and 1990s there was also an avalanche of books, seminars, and live-streamed conferences purporting to grow the church of anyone who used the principles. Because I pastor a small congregation (less than 100), I had to wrestle with these ideas, that worked their way into my mind and caused me all kinds of frustration.

Myth #1 is that people want a relationship with God at all. There are Pentecostal church-growth theories, many of which promoted by C. Peter Wagner, that talk as if the only force keeping people from the Lord is the devil. But the Bible says that people by nature dislike God, strongly. His authority offends our desire for freedom, His righteousness makes us feel guilty, and His rules clash against the very things we like (or at least feel normal to us).  We like the gods of our own imaginations, but we sure don't like the real God.

Myth #2 is that a needs-meeting ministry will result in true conversions to Christ. Bob Schuller's old motto was, "Find a need and meet it; find a hurt and heal it." That's a good motto in itself, because it reflects a servant's attitude. We should help people just out of love for neighbor.

People flock to needs-meeting ministries, but then at the same time they'll turn away from the Gospel. Jesus' feeding of the 5,000 in John 6 describes this situation. Crowds of people surrounded Jesus as He healed their sick and made bread and fish for everyone. But at the same time, Christ knew they were only there for the miracles. When He started preaching about Himself being the bread of life, the people turned away. 

Myth #3 is that the preacher is the primary cause of church-growth. Pretty much all of the contemporary church-growth gurus are celebrity pastors, or the writers use celebrity pastors as their examples of how to do it. (To be fair, that wasn't McGavran's focus. He put a lot of emphasis on impersonal ethnic and social forces).

The idea is, if your preacher does certain things, growth was always occur. If growth occurs, it automatically proves God is pleased with your preacher. As one staff-pastor at Willow Creek told a visitor who was caught griping about celebrity preachers, "Bill Hybels has more people in the church bathrooms on a Sunday than you have in your whole church".  In other words, Willow Creek's attendance proved that God approved of Bill Hybels and how he did things.

But the Bible contradicts this myth. Some preachers in the Bible were very popular, but the audiences were hypocritical. Ezekiel was very popular among the Jews in exile, but they also never did what the Lord said. Jesus was very popular, then they killed Him.

God must have been very pleased with Jonah's attitudes, since Jonah had a national revival break out in response to his preaching. Right? Elijah on the other hand must be judged a huge failure, based on numbers; and Jeremiah was an even bigger failure.  Rick Warren said that growth results from the quality of a ministry, so Elijah's quality must have been pretty bad.

You can't use numbers alone to judge a preacher's effectiveness, pro or con. A community's interest in spiritual things shifts like the sands of the seashore shift from one generation to another. The Holy Spirit blows wherever He chooses. One town can be in revival, while the next town over is as cold as a stone.

A community's biases differ. There are some white communities who would never give a black preacher the time of day, no matter how anointed he was.  A community's embedded traditions change from place to place. There are towns where nearly everyone is a Lutheran, and other towns where the people would not even consider visiting a Lutheran church. There are churches where the pastor is fine, but the congregation has a bad community reputation for some reason.

In other words, there are complicated, multiple forces (spiritual, cultural, psychological, styles) at work in every community. To credit all success or all failure to just one man isn't wise. That makes way too much of the man.

I know there definitely are some preachers who are poor at their jobs, or who are ill-fitted to the particular community where they serve. There are preachers who aren't gifted, and they have no business preaching. There are preachers whose foolish attitudes or methods turn people off. But Paul attributed success in preaching to the Lord's working, not to any power in himself or his co-workers (1 Corinthians 3:5-7).

What I'm saying is that a lot of the church-growth material to which I was exposed in past years was unbiblical and simplistic. Much of it was built on an underlying semi-Pelagianism, as if people of this world weren't biased against God. Much of it quoted the Bible selectively, cherry-picking a verse here or there, but Christians leader should develop a rounded, Bible-based approach to church expansion.