Is All Church Growth Good Fruit?

Donald A. McGavran, Understanding Church Growth. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1990. 332 pp.

On my morning runs in the Middle East, I’d see locals line the coast, set up shop with rod and reel, and wait for the fish to bite. Some fishermen seemed more adept at filling their coolers than others. I imagined these skilled early risers being happily greeted by their families when they returned home, fish in hand.

My perspective on these fishermen changed one morning when I ran with a local. Marine researchers, he told me, had warned residents not to eat the fish in the inlet. The high density of metal substances in the water made the fish toxic to human health. Locals could feed their families, but should they?

A similar question could be asked regarding Donald McGavran’s work Understanding Church Growth, which outlines the process by which church growth occurs. It will likely cause growth, but should pastors and missionaries apply it today? Is McGavran’s methodology safe?

McGavran’s Aim

Churches in the mid-to-late 1900s, McGavran lamented, had become focused on secondary pursuits and were in a “universal fog” regarding their central task (55). He wrote, “The chief and irreplaceable purpose of mission is church growth. Social service pleases God, but it must never be substituted for finding the lost” (22). He zealously appealed for readers to recenter the church on growth:

The great campaigns of evangelism are urgent. They are one way in which the gospel advances. But as the pages of this book show abundantly, campaigns need to be carried on in such fashion that multitudes of new churches are established, and multitudes of new converts do become reliable members of Christ’s body. (xvii–xviii)

It would be easy to echo McGavran’s distress over mission drift today. Social concerns continue to crowd evangelism in the church. Amen. I agree with McGavran that we need to get busy finding the lost and sharing the gospel with them. And yet I would disagree with the way McGavran suggests we go about that work.

Before I explain why I disagree, it’s important to understand the ongoing impact of this book today.

McGavran’s Ongoing Influence

McGavran’s ideas, particularly his emphasis on the social sciences and their usefulness for church growth, gained traction in the 1970s. Around that time, Ralph Winter’s work also emerged, which recalibrated the church’s missionary aims on unreached people groups.

While Winter’s ethnographic lens refocused the target of missions, McGavran’s sociological methods provided the tool to reach these ethnic groups. Ethnic nations seemed within reach on a scale previously unimagined. One tactic McGavran commended was not “lifting” new believers from their societal moorings upon them coming to faith but using them as “bridges” to reach their entire community. Foreign missionaries, McGavran corrected, too often erected unnecessary social barriers to conversion because “people like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic, or class barriers.”

This became known as the “homogeneous unit principle” and sought to course-correct from some of the more colonialized missions approaches of the 19th and early 20th centuries (163). McGavran gave detailed reports of “people movements” where cultural insiders witnessed conversions en masse. New possibilities of growth entered the imaginations of missiologists. Winter proved instrumental in narrowing the focus of missions, while McGavran heightened the expectation of harvest. Understanding Church Growth attracted a broad readership and, as a result, has been republished three times in the twenty years following 1970.

Even in our day, McGavran’s methods are the operative assumptions of many mission strategists, even though his name may not be familiar to most. On the extreme end of contextualization methodologies, insider movements keep new believers embedded in their previous religious community to maximize their potential impact. Upstream from this practice is McGavran’s “bridges of God” concept and “oikos” models of church growth, where finding the “person of peace” is critical. Justification for this approach is found in texts like Matthew 10, but it’s also an extension of McGavran’s principle of homogeneity.

One can sense McGavran’s impact even in non-missions contexts. In the West, attractional models of ministry grow small groups around natural affinities like age, stage, and common interests. The logic remains the same: if we lessen the sociological barrier, the church, movement, or small group will grow. Birds of a feather, after all, do flock together. This should be leveraged for maximal growth.

To return to the fishing analogy, the modern ministry waters are saturated with McGavran’s influence. We’ve unconsciously absorbed McGavran’s sociology as a key to church growth.

But is it safe to fish in these waters? As long as the church grows, what could possibly go wrong?

Misunderstanding Church Growth

Two foreign elements in these waters render this kind of growth more harmful than helpful:

1. Pragmatism: Visible fruitfulness displaces the Bible as McGavran’s final authority.
2. Sociology: A sociological means of church growth replaces the supernatural means of the gospel.

The Bible’s authority, for McGavran, is usurped by visible results, yet this displacement appears to elude his recognition. He writes, “Church growth arises in theology and biblical faithfulness. It draws heavily on the social sciences because it always occurs in societies. It continually seeks for instances in which God has granted growth and then asks, what are the real factors he has blessed to such increase?” (xiv).

Notice how tightly McGavran intertwines “faithfulness” with fruitfulness. Faithfulness is known by its fruit to produce growth. After all, God does not desire a “token search” where efforts yield no growth (6). The real factors must be the right factors because they have God’s “seal of approval” when growth happens (132). This concept finds modern expression as church growth advocates appeal to the definition of insanity: to keep doing the same thing and expect different results. This is why case studies of visible fruit fill the book; a case is made for the ends to justify the means. It’s not faithfulness to keep doing unfruitful practices. After all, “church growth is faithfulness” (6). Here is classic pragmatism.

Don’t get me wrong: we all desire fruit. The tension comes when methods, i.e., “real factors,” either secure the harvest or hinder it. This is one foreign element that makes the harvest harmful in the end.

To be fair, McGavran occasionally cautions the reader against an over-dependence on method, but the big arc of his book trends toward dependence on method. He laments, “There is nothing biblical or spiritual about very slow progress in itself. Sometimes it must be endured, but there is no reason to canonize it” (121). Ironically, however, the whole book trends in the other direction, canonizing methods that produce speed and visible results. He warns against deifying his methods, yet divine endorsement is his way of justifying them himself.

The attempt to “canonize” immediately fruitful methods is apparent in McGavran’s observations on the book of Acts. Acts narrates the early expansion of the church among Jews, but tragically, their resistance increases as the Gentile church flourishes. Where does McGavran place the blame? What was the real factor that hindered growth?

As soon as numerous Gentiles had become Christians, however, to be a Christian often involved for a Jew leaving the Jewish people and joining a conglomerate society. Admitting Gentiles created a racial barrier for Jews. Indeed, it is a reasonable conjecture that as soon as becoming a Christian meant joining a house church full of Gentiles and sitting down to agape feasts where on occasion pork was served, would-be Jewish converts found the racial and cultural barriers too high and turned sorrowfully away. Jews have been largely resistant to the gospel ever since. (169-170)

In other words, the Jerusalem council dropped the sociological ball. Their lack of awareness caused them to miss out on the “would-be” harvest of Jewish converts and is to blame for almost two millennia of resistance. McGavran laments a tragedy of a missed harvest instead of praising a triumph of God’s grace in a now diverse church.

If sociological barriers were the primary cause of Jewish resistance, what was the real factor that produced growth among Jews earlier in Acts? Peter apparently rightly applied McGavran’s sociological secret:

The church won the winnable—while they could be won. If Peter on the day of Pentecost, in an effort to win the Gentiles, had required all would-be converts to practice inclusiveness in eating, marrying, worshiping, and proclaiming, and the apostles had immediately given as much attention to Gentiles living in Jerusalem and Judea as they did to Jews, very few Jews would have become Christian. (29)

Do you see the logic? Pentecost just became the rise and triumph of ancient sociology. For McGavran, homogeneity unleashed the harvest among Jews, and heterogeneity prevented the harvest after the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. An unexplainable miracle produced by the Spirit just became explainable by sociological means.

This is what makes these waters contaminated. McGavran filters his exegesis through his prior commitments to fruitfulness and homogeneity. This illustrates my concern over his use of the Bible to reinforce a pragmatic, sociologically informed approach to church growth, rather than submission to the Bible on its own terms.

According to Scripture, a faithful preacher yields fruitless hearers when gospel seed falls on rocky hearts. That’s how Paul interpreted Jewish resistance. He told his hearers:

The Holy Spirit was right in saying to your fathers through Isaiah the prophet:

 

“Go to this people, and say,
‘You will indeed hear but never understand,
and you will indeed see but never perceive.’
For this people’s heart has grown dull,
and with their ears they can barely hear,
and their eyes they have closed;
lest they should see with their eyes
and hear with their ears
and understand with their heart
and turn, and I would heal them.” (Acts 28:25–27)

Our hearts toward God are the problem, and sameness is no Savior from sin.

Neither Paul nor Jesus in the parable of the sower attribute fruitlessness to faithlessness (Mark 4:1–20). Nor do they ever credit fruitfulness to homogeneity (Matt. 16:17, 2 Cor. 4:6).

Growth may occur within homogeneous units, but if that growth requires homogeneity, a natural means has just replaced the supernatural. A “gospel” welcomed because of homogeneity will not cause us to welcome diversity. While McGavran expects churches to eventually mature into diverse unity, he fails to see that the very gospel that removes sociological barriers has just been hijacked. In the end, these toxins undermine the very growth we long to see.

This isn’t to bemoan gospel impact among homogeneous units of college students, young married couples, or unreached tribal groups on distant islands. My concern rests in McGavran’s assumptions that all growth must be faithfulness, and homogeneity is the key to unlocking it. For him, “right methods which do not hinder the Holy Spirit and do not put a ceiling on church growth” operate authoritatively (142). A method has replaced the miracle. That is why, in the end, he misunderstands real church growth. He conflates visible fruitfulness with biblical faithfulness.

This is also not to say McGavran’s observations will leave readers without any help along the way. But reader beware, like fishermen in the Middle East. Foreign elements have saturated the inlet. These waters prove unsafe in the end.