Monday, June 10, 2019

Ichabod Lutheran Lexicon - Church Growth and Fuller Seminary and Barth-Kirschbaum



Church Growth Movement – Donald McGavran

The Church Growth Movement began with Donald McGavran. This highly organized and lavishly funded plague has been portrayed as doctrinally neutral or conservative in Christian values. McGavran belonged to the extreme leftist denomination, the Disciples of Christ, which began as a way of united all denominations and promptly split into four warring factions. McGavran received a Disciples education and, like many missionary children, graduated from Yale Divinity School, certainly the epitome of New England liberal trends, though less radical than Harvard and Union. McGavran omitted his PhD in sociology from Columbia University from his autobiographical lectures.[1]
The ALC-LCA-ELCA leaders tumbled for Church Growth, and so did WELS-LCMS-ELS. Mission funds and AAL-LB insurance donations made sessions at Fuller safe, legal, and effective. Objective Justification, which is shared among the mainline denominations and all the Lutheran, made the faux-neutral aspect of Church Growth ideal for the leaders, and the conservative claims made Church Growth appealing to uninformed laity.
Thus began the apostates’ Long March[2] through the Protestant denominations of American and the Roman Catholic Church. Congregations were no longer places of worship but marketing centers to be studied by sociologists. A drive-by D.Min. degree from Fuller Seminary is the ticket for denominational advancement and rewarded with undeserved academic positions.

Fuller Seminary

Although the school has a conservative reputation, that is only in comparison with the Disciples schools, such as their seminary at Butler, operating jointly with the Unitarians.[3] McGavran was invited to move his Institute of Church Growth to Fuller Seminary in 1965, after Fuller’s repudiation of inerrancy. That faux-conservative stance was watered down in the original version, so they subsequently treated inerrancy and sound doctrine as superfluous burdens for world and domestic missions. Several additional influences should be noted. Robert Schuller’s Garden Grove Community Church and Hour of Power TV broadcasts certainly influenced Fuller Seminary. Anything that worked, apart from the efficacious Word, was hailed as a Church Growth Principle.

Karl Barth and His Mistress Charlotte Kirschbaum

Two key figures at Fuller Seminary studied under Karl Barth and his mistress Charlotte Kirschbaum in Switzerland. The students and theological leaders knew of the mistress living in Barth’s family home. Barth-Kirschbaum were eager to adulterate their Calvinistic doctrine, which was bad enough, but it was mixed with Marxist dialectic, adding a hypnotic effect on those who favored the Bible containing God’s Word but not being God’s Word.
Fuller Seminary’s theologian continues to be Barth-Kirschbaum, whose deadly effect continues to wear Protestantism down to Unitarianism or worse.

Paul Y. Cho and C. Peter Wagner

One Church Growth ingredient to consider is the Pentecostal-Occult influence of Paul (now David) Cho and C. Peter Wagner. The far side of entertainment evangelism is the concept of attracting people through claims of miraculous manipulating God’s universe to benefit those with arcane knowledge of how to handle the spiritual powers (The Fourth Dimension, Wagner) who gladly obey orders.
Wagner, for all his charismatic clowning, should be honored for saying, “Church Growth Principles do not work.” Nevertheless, this vast movement of apostasy has achieved what an outsider never could have done. Every denomination is poisoned and shrinking after 65 years of Church Growth, degenerate Calvinism, and occult magick.


[1] Dr. Donald Mc Gavran    A Brief History of the Church Growth Movement,  Lecture 5, The Final Lectures
[2] The Long March in China marked the beginning of Mao’s genocidal political control.
[3] McGavran earned his B.A. at Butler, founded as a Disciples of Christ school.


 Downplaying? Downplaying? John Sparky Brenner would not answer why their precious theological journal printed this lie, except to say, "Write a letter." I then asked, "Does anyone edit that journal?"