“They are from the world;
therefore they speak as from the world, and the world
listens to them. We are from God; he who knows God
listens to us; he who is not from God does not listen to
us. By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit
of error.” (1John 4:5, 6)
“It is my deep conviction that anybody can be won to
Christ if you discover the key to his or her heart. . .
. It may take some time to identify it. But the most
likely place to start is with the person’s felt needs.”1
(Rick Warren)
...the Apostle John... says that
the world will not listen to a true, unsullied Christian
message. Rick Warren says that anybody can be won to Christ
if we discover a message that will interest them through
promising to meet their felt needs. These concepts are
contradictory. The Biblical idea is that we must speak God’s
unchanging message of the gospel whether the world hates us
or not:
“If you were of the world,
the world would love its own; but because you are not of
the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore
the world hates you” (John 15:19).
The Church Growth idea is that
we must study man (using the latest sociological,
psychological, and anthropological insights) to determine
how to create a church that will grow and a message that
will be popular through appealing to a target audience.
Someone is wrong here....
...the modern church growth
movement... was founded primarily by two people,
independently. Those people are Donald McGavran and Robert
Schuller. Donald McGavran wrote The Bridges of God in
1955. C. Peter Wagner claims that this book, “launched the
Church Growth Movement.”3
Rick Warren cites McGavran’s book as being influential early
in his ministry.4
About that same time Robert
Schuller started his ministry in California which became the
Crystal Cathedral. Later, in 1970, Schuller founded the
Robert Schuller Institute for Successful Church Leadership,
where he has trained many key leaders in the Church Growth
Movement including Bill Hybels and Rick Warren.5
....
...the Church Growth Movement... has convinced the majority
of church leaders that if their local organization is not
growing, this is a sure sign they are “unhealthy” and
failing. Rick Warren says, “Forget church growth, Church
health is the key to church growth. All living things grow
if they’re healthy. You don’t have to make them grow -- it’s
just natural for living organisms.”7
So, according to this thinking, failure to grow is a sign of
disease or sickness. Having convinced pastors and other
church leaders that they are failing, Warren and others
leave them desperate for a solution. The following email I
received from a CIC reader reflects this:
"We are going through a
restructure where questions have been raised about what
the "vision" is, whose "vision" is it, and must we all
rally behind that "vision" or do we each get a piece of
that "vision" by being allowed to input into that
"vision." The answers provided at my church are
ambiguous...." [The rest of the illustration
available
HERE]
Many churches feel the type of
pressure that is reflected in this email. ... The problem is
that church leaders end up feeling like SOMETHING has to
change. To meet this challenge leaders usually create a plan
of their own or buy someone else’s plan that promises to
give the congregation appeal in the community....
Leaders present a mission
statement that reflects this vision; then all the remaining
resources of the congregation, financial and human, are
poured into the vision.... Whatever happens, the new
vision will not focus on the preaching of the gospel. Gospel
preaching often has already been determined to have failed
and it’s offensive to the unregenerate mind anyway
(1Corinthians 1:22-24). ...
Consistently on the cutting edge of Church Growth theory,
research, and development is The Fuller School of World
Mission and Institute of Church Growth founded by Donald
McGavran and further developed by C. Peter Wagner.8
Ideas that have come from this movement include the concept
of “people movements” that suggests a more group oriented
version of becoming Christian than individual
repentance and faith.... Peter Wagner writes, “The
ethical issue is one of pragmatism.”11
Long before “outcome based” became a buzz word, McGavran,
Wagner, and others determined to base their movement on
what is proven to work....
To clarify the problems of the Church Growth Movement, I am
going to examine some of its key premises and compare them
to the Bible. We will see that several of the most basic
assumptions that underlie this movement are false.
False Premise # 1: That
God’s Will for Every Local Congregation is Numerical Growth
...Paul preached in Pisidian
Antioch (Acts 13:14-51)... “And when the Gentiles heard
this, they began rejoicing and glorifying the word of the
Lord; and as many as had been appointed to eternal life
believed” (Acts 13:48). ...
The advocates of church growth
set up standards that require pastors to get people into
their churches even if they have rejected the gospel.
This causes them to search for some new message and
new method that appeals to people’s unregenerate minds.
Is an organization with this new message and new method the
“church” as described in the Bible? ..
"The dangers inherent in the
church growth movement are many, and the crucial
issue in assessing those dangers is whether we
are talking about becoming Christians or about building
institutional membership. The greatest danger in the
movement may be that it obviously succeeds. If one
tailors the church to identify with its culture and
engages in the pseudo-gospel of “possibility thinking,”
promising to assuage guilt with the minimum of pain and
connecting that promise with marketing techniques, there
will be success. The question is whether the result will
bear any similarity to the church.19
[Ralph Elliot]
The church consists of the
“called out ones,” not those who enjoy having a religious
experience with people who are just like themselves.... True
fellowship is not the gathering of religious consumers with
similar “felt needs,” but it is fellowship around the person
and work of Christ. Consider what John wrote:
"What we have seen and heard
we proclaim to you also, that you also may have
fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with
the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ. If we say
that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the
darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth; but if
we walk in the light as He Himself is in the light, we
have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus
His Son cleanses us from all sin. (1John 1:3, 6, 7)"
...By Church Growth standards
the greatest failures of all time were Noah and Jeremiah.
Noah preached (see 2
Peter 2:5) for a hundred
years and no one believed him. Jeremiah’s message was
totally rejected. Events of history proved him right during
his lifetime, but even then those left in Jerusalem still
would not listen to him and carried him away to Egypt
(Jeremiah 43:1-6)...
Further proof of the falsity of
Church Growth premise that numerical growth of any given
local congregation is always God’s will is found in a study
of the churches in Revelation.
[See
Church Health Award” from Rick Warren or Jesus Christ?]
False Premise # 2:
That the Needs and Sensibilities of the Unconverted Should
Determine the Strategy of the Church.
Let us return to Rick Warren’s
statement cited at the beginning of this article: “It is my
deep conviction that anybody can be won to Christ if you
discover the key to his or her heart. . . . It may take some
time to identify it. But the most likely place to start is
with the person’s felt needs.”21
This principle of “felt needs” is bedrock to Church Growth
principles. It is related to the idea of “relevance” and
“satisfy the customer” is one of marketing’s oldest
principles. If a person feels a need and is convinced that
your product meets that need, they will be satisfied if they
buy the product and it performs as expected. ...
What Church Growth thinking does is take the easier
approach. Rather than convince people they have a need, they
start with needs that people already feel. Having determined
what those are, they design a church that meets those needs.
If the church succeeds in adequately meeting the needs, it
has satisfied customers. Satisfied customers are the best
advertising for future potential customers....
Let us analyze this Biblically. The greatest need
that all people have, because they are children of Adam (the
homogeneous unit that matters most) and are under God’s
wrath against sin, is for the blood atonement that only
Christ provides. The unconverted do not feel this as a need
unless they have already come under the conviction of the
Holy Spirit (John 16:8) which happens through the preaching
of the Law and the Gospel. The unregenerate in any
neighborhood are not going to say they feel a need for the
blood of Jesus to wash away their sins. This is a need they
must be convinced they have, and will not be convinced
unless the Holy Spirit does a work of grace in their
hearts....
Warren’s claim that anybody can
be won to Christ if we figure out some key is false. There
is no Biblical warrant whatsoever to this claim; and there
are many passages that refute it. The passage in Matthew 7
about the narrow gate refutes it. The concept of the saved
remnant found in Romans 9 and elsewhere refutes it. The fact
that even Jesus, who as God knows the heart, lost Judas the
“son of perdition” disproves it. The Biblical doctrine of
election taught in dozens of passages (such as Romans
8:28-33) disproves it. ...
The nuts and bolts of missiology have to do with the study
of man. This is from a website that promotes missiology: “As
missiologists reflect on the global march of the Church,
they use tools from the social sciences to understand
various dynamics. Insights are drawn from cultural
anthropology, ethnology, sociology, geography, and political
science.”23
...
The bad theology that underlies
Church Growth thinking is man-centered. It does not take
serious the depravity of the fallen human race. It
apparently assumes that people have the power and
inclination to become Christian without a prior supernatural
work of grace.24
... But Paul rejects this type of reasoning all together:
"Now we have received, not
the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God,
that we might know the things freely given to us by
God.... But a natural man does not accept the things of
the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness to him, and
he cannot understand them...."
1 Corinthians 2:12-16
...Paul ... was dependant on the
work of the Holy Spirit, not the wisdom of man. The work of
the Holy Spirit was to change hostile sinners into loving
worshippers through the gospel:
"For indeed Jews ask for
signs, and Greeks search for wisdom; but we preach
Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block, and to
Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are the called,
both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the
wisdom of God."
(1Corinthians 1:22-24)
Ironically, in the Church Growth
Movement C. Peter Wagner offers signs and Rick Warren offers
wisdom, but who is going to publicly proclaim the gospel?
...
Faulty Premise # 3:
That the Lack of Adequate Church Growth World Wide Proves
the Need for a New Reformation
In 1982 Robert Schuller
issued a call for a new reformation in his book
Self-Esteem, the New Reformation.25
Since 1982, at least three other calls for new reformations
have been proposed. The next one, chronologically, came in
1993 at a “Re-imagining”
conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This conference
called for
re-imagining God according
to feminist ideals. Then in 1999, in his book Churchquake,
C. Peter Wagner announced a New Apostolic Reformation.
Now Rick Warren is calling
for yet another new reformation, this one based on his
PEACE plan to wipe out the biggest world problems. ...
[See
Warren's P.E.A.C.E. Plan & UN Goals]
Schuller wrote, “Where the
sixteenth-century Reformation returned our focus to sacred
Scriptures as the only infallible rule for faith and
practice, the new reformation will return our focus
to the sacred right of every person to self-esteem! The
fact is, the church will never succeed until it satisfies
the human being’s hunger for self-value.”28
... His reasoning is that since all humans hunger for
self-value (remember the felt needs concept), the
church must feed their appetite for this if it is going to
succeed. ...
The lack of popularity of Christianity does not prove the
need for some new reformation. It proves that Jesus was
absolutely right when He said that His way was narrow and
that few walked on it. The Church Growth Movement has shown
a willingness to lay aside the clear teachings of Scripture
in order to find success in this world. The “reformations”
of this movement are all “deformations” and should be fully
rejected.
Please
read the rest the of this much-needed message -- along
with the endnotes -- at
http://cicministry.org/commentary/issue89.htm
Other articles by Bob DeWaay:
The Gospel: A Method or a
Message?
True and False
Unity
|
Redefining the Church
Faulty Premises
of the Church Growth Movement
“Church Health
Award” from Rick Warren or Jesus Christ?
Bob DeWaay is
the Pastor of
Twin City Fellowship, a
non-denominational evangelical Church in Minneapolis, MN:
"We are a
body of believers who attempt to live our Christian
faith according to Acts 2:42 by devoting ourselves to
prayer, fellowship, searching the Scriptures, and the
Lord’s Supper. Our mission is to equip the saints for the work of
ministry and to reach the lost with the Gospel of Jesus
Christ. We do this through expository preaching, study
of the Scriptures, publications, our website and
neighborhood outreaches."