The Cruelty of Church Growth
The Rev. Rob King
The United Methodist Church, to which we have vowed our loyalty and given our love, is now bowing before an idol. That idol is innocuously called “church growth.”
What is so bad about the Church Growth Movement? For starters, if church growth is our primary goal – rather than evangelization, Baptism, and the formation of Christian disciples – then the end result is idolatry. Again, if we are preoccupied with numbers and denominational welfare, we are messing around with idolatry. After all, the primary goal of Methodist Christians is not perpetuating and sustaining the particular institution called The United Methodist Church. Instead, our primary goal should be reaching out to all of God’s children in holistic service, loving them in the name of Christ, and offering them salvation in Christ – regardless of which particular church they join.
Here is the particular cruelty of church growth. In order to attract non-believers and marginal Christians, we United Methodists are (literally) buying into models of ministry and worship that are theologically misguided. These models will lead to the further decline of Christianity in the years to come.
This is why. Church-growth models – such as Vision 2000 and “seeker services” based on the Willow Creek megachurch – are theologically mistaken because their primary focus is attracting new members, rather than worshiping God, the sole reason for the Church’s existence. Any church program or worship service that is more human-centered than God-centered is idolatrous, because in such endeavors the creature is trying to take over the role of the Creator. Marva Dawn rigorously and astutely critiques this self-centeredness in church-growth, seeker services in her book, Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down.
In addition to Dawn’s theological and aesthetic criticism, a pastoral critique can be offered. As United Methodist churches in North Carolina jump onto the church-growth bandwagon, I weep. Why? Because although seeker services may, at first, draw large numbers of people (largely because they make people feel “comfortable” with a minimum of overtly Christian symbols and liturgy), the luster of newness soon begins to fade. In time, Christians at these churches are left without the practices and liturgy that sustain them over a lifetime of Christian discipleship. When prayers of confession and the Apostles’ Creek drop out of services, the result, over time, is churches in which the very identity of being Christian has been forgotten; and church begins to seem much more like shopping at the mall than living as the Body of Christ. One need only look to the decline of a megachurch, like Calvary in Charlotte, North Carolina and its half-empty sanctuary each Sunday to see the long-term pastoral problems with comfort-driven, seeker services.
The current dissatisfaction with what is now termed “traditional worship” is not a problem with the liturgy itself. This dissatisfaction is an indictment of how we pastors and laity organize and celebrate traditional worship. If our churches are to grow in Spirit and Truth, the answer lies not in the Church Growth Movement. Rather, the answer lies in pastors carefully planning worship services (often months in advance), working with their choir directors to select appropriate music, and making sure that worship is creative and varied. The answer also involves churches creatively utilizing traditional liturgies. But most importantly, the answer calls for everyone viewing the worship of God, Father Son, and Holy Spirit, as the primary task of both congregation and pastor.
