Dangers of the Church Growth Movement, by Ralph H. Elliott. Dr. Elliott is senior pastor of the North Shore Baptist Church in Chicago.
Pseudo-gospel
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.
A second danger is that the movement encourages sinful prejudices. A third is that it misses the major gospel note of reconciliation, forgetting that the key theme of the Christian gospel is the breaking down of the walls of partition between male and female, Jew and Greek and so on. The body of Christ should not be merely a reflection of the divisions that exist on earth predetermined by the exterior similarity of social class and cultural background.
The church growth theology is also dangerous in dooming the city to hopelessness. The strong emphasis on choosing target populations according to the criterion of success leads the church growth people to neglect the city with its economic mobility, its changing neighborhoods and racial mixture. The preference is for the suburbs and for each succeeding suburban ring which mobility and economics establish. One suburb gets old, so emphasis shifts to the next one because that’s where the best possibilities are. The biblical concern for the powerless is totally overlooked. The movement also sanctifies the unholy status quo. In regarding the church as "our kind," church growth sees no problem, for example, with apartheid churches in South Africa, regarding them as routine.
In warning against any ecumenical concerns, the movement also violates the unity of the church. Followers suggest that ecumenical concerns drain away energies and smooth the sharp edge of competitiveness that beats out the other person and leads to success.
In truth, the movement prostitutes the church. Wagner calls on Dean Kelley’s book Why Conservative Churches are Growing for theological support, yet the church growth thesis and Kelley’s are opposites. Kelley portrays the successful church as being against culture, whereas Wagner wants the church to identify the given culture as "my culture." This is surely a sell-out for the gospel which often calls us to leave father and mother and brother and sister.
Finally, church growth theories neglect the biblical dimensions of truly meaningful growth, such as those discussed by Jitsuo Morikawa in his little book of sermons, Biblical Dimensions of Church Growth. In it the author examines the call to grow as individuals and as a faith community -- adhering to qualitative, not merely quantitative, standards.
