I have watched the same scene unfold at more ministry gatherings than I can count. Two pastors meet, shake hands, trade the usual words about family and the drive in, and then, almost involuntarily, one of them asks the question that quietly governs so much of American church life: “So, how big is your church now?”

It is a small question, and it seems harmless. But consider what it assumes. It assumes that size is the measure worth asking about. It assumes that a congregation is a thing that expands or contracts according to the man standing at its front. And it assumes, most revealingly, that the pastor is the cause and the crowd is his effect, that he is the engine of the number. The minister who answers with a large figure walks away validated. The one who answers with a small figure walks away diminished, turning over in his mind what he must be doing wrong.

I want to say something that will strike many sincere and hardworking ministers as very close to heresy. Pastors do not grow churches. We never have. And the belief that we can, a belief that has been packaged and sold to the American church for the better part of a century, accounts for much of the exhaustion, the envy, the creeping pragmatism, and the quiet despair that shadows the men called to shepherd the people of God.

THE MACHINE WE BUILT

To understand how we arrived here, you have to understand a movement most churchgoers have never heard of by name, though nearly all of them now live inside its assumptions.

In the middle of the twentieth century, a missiologist named Donald McGavran began asking a practical question about the mission field: why do some churches grow and others stagnate? It was, in its origin, a reasonable and even pastoral question. But when McGavran’s ideas migrated from the field to the American suburb, and when they were institutionalized at places like the Fuller Seminary Institute of Church Growth (now known as FullerEquip), and carried forward by figures such as C. Peter Wagner, something shifted. A missiological observation hardened into a methodology, and the methodology hardened into an industry.

By the last quarter of the century, that industry had produced a new kind of minister. He was less a shepherd than a chief executive. He cast vision. He studied demographics. He removed barriers to entry, engineered an appealing experience, and measured his success by the metrics any executive would recognize: attendance, buildings, budgets, what one generation of consultants cheerfully called the ABCs.

I do not doubt the sincerity of the people who built this machine. Most of them wanted to reach the lost, and many of them did. But sincerity does not sanctify a premise, and the premise was flawed. The church growth movement borrowed its deepest logic not from scripture but from the marketplace. It created a consumer Christianity suitable for capitalism. It assumed that a congregation grows the way a business grows: identify your audience, refine your product, reduce the friction, and the numbers will come. Rick Warren taught a generation to create a profile of your target customer, also known as potential member. And here is the uncomfortable part. In a sense, it works. You really can gather a crowd with the right techniques. What you cannot do, with any technique ever devised, is manufacture a Christian. Bill Hybels realized that after over a decade of successful church growth, he surveyed his congregation only to discover that he indeed had grown a church, but they had failed to make disciples.

WHAT PAUL REFUSED

The Apostle Paul faced a version of our problem, and his answer is so direct that we have had to work rather hard to avoid hearing it.

The church at Corinth was fracturing into what we would now call personality cults. Some claimed to belong to Paul, others to Apollos, others to Cephas. Each faction rallied around its preferred communicator, its favorite brand of ministry. It was, in other words, a very early and very recognizable form of celebrity Christianity. And Paul, who could easily have exploited his own following, instead dismantled the entire framework.

I planted, Apollos watered, but God was causing the growth. So then neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but God who causes the growth.

1 CORINTHIANS 3:6–7

Notice what Paul does here. He does not merely say that he and Apollos are a team. He says that neither of them is anything. The planter is nothing. The waterer is nothing. The whole drama of ministry, all its labor and skill and devotion, is reduced to two men performing modest agricultural chores in a field that belongs to Someone else. The growth, the one thing everyone actually cares about, is lifted entirely out of human hands and placed in the hands of God.

This is the sentence the church growth movement could never fully absorb, because absorbing it would have collapsed the whole enterprise. If God causes the growth, then growth cannot be the measure of the minister. And if growth cannot be the measure of the minister, then the entire apparatus of comparison, competition, and self-promotion has no ground left to stand on.

WHAT THE BIBLE TEACHES

Once you begin to look for it, the testimony of Scripture is remarkably consistent, and it runs directly against the instinct to credit the man out front.

Consider first the plain grammar of the promise Jesus made about the church. When Peter confessed Him as the Christ, Jesus did not say, “and you will build My church,” or “and your leaders will build My church.” He claimed the work as His own. (Matthew 16:18)

The subject of the verb is Christ. The church is His possession and His construction project, and He has never subcontracted the growth of it to us. We are laborers on the site, but we are not the architect, and we are certainly not the source of life in the stones.

Consider next how Luke describes the explosive expansion of the early church. After Pentecost, after three thousand were added in a single day, after the apostles preached and the community shared everything in common, Luke could easily have written that the apostles grew the church. He wrote something else.

praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord was adding to their number day by day those who were being saved. ACTS 2:47

The Lord was adding. The verb belongs to God. The apostles preached and prayed and broke bread, and all of it mattered, but the adding was the Lord’s own act. The New Testament simply refuses to hand us the sentence we want, the one in which the gifted leader produces the increase.

Paul says the same thing about himself in a moment of startling honesty. Looking back on a life of labor that outran every other apostle, he declines the credit even for his own effort.

But by the grace of God I am what I am, and His grace toward me did not prove vain; but I labored even more than all of them, yet not I, but the grace of God with me. (1 Corinthians 15:10)

This is crucial, because it guards us against the lazy misreading. Paul is not saying that effort does not matter. He worked harder than all of them. He is saying that even the effort was grace, and the fruit of the effort was grace, so that no one, least of all Paul, could stand in the field and take a bow.

And what, then, is the pastor actually for? Scripture answers that too, and the answer is dignified without being grandiose. The pastor is a shepherd who tends a flock he does not own. (1 Peter 5:2–4)

The flock belongs to God. The Chief Shepherd is Christ. The undershepherd feeds, guards, leads, and models Christ before the people, and then he waits for the appearing of the One to whom the sheep belong. He is a steward of another man’s house, and the first thing required of a steward, Paul says elsewhere, is not that he be impressive but that he be found faithful.

The early church understood this. Cyprian of Carthage, the North African bishop who gave his life in the persecution of the third century, compressed the whole truth into a single line the modern ministry entrepreneur would do well to memorize: no one can have God as his Father who will not have the Church as his mother. The church is a family that God begets, not a franchise that a man builds.

Put the whole witness together and a picture emerges that is at once humbling and freeing. Christ builds the church. The Lord adds to it. God causes the growth. The pastor plants and waters and feeds and guards, and all of this is real work, costly work, work that Scripture never once disparages. But the growth was never his to produce, and therefore the size of his church was never his to boast in, nor to grieve over as though it were a verdict on his soul.

THE FARMER AND THE MANUFACTURER

There is a difference between a farmer and a manufacturer, and our confusion of the two explains a great deal.

A manufacturer controls his outcome. He assembles inputs according to a process, and if the process is sound, the product is guaranteed. If the product fails, he examines the process, because the failure is his. This is the mental world of the church growth expert. Ministry becomes an assembly line, and a church that fails to grow is a church with a defective process, which means, inevitably, a defective pastor.

A farmer lives in a different universe entirely. He plows and plants and waters, and then he goes to bed. He cannot pry the seed open and install the life. He cannot command the rain. He works genuinely hard, and his work genuinely matters, and yet the decisive factors are all outside his control. He is, of necessity, a man who labors and then waits on God. Jesus described the kingdom in exactly these terms, as a man who scatters seed and sleeps and rises night and day while the seed sprouts and grows in a manner he does not himself understand.

The pastor is a farmer, not a manufacturer. The church growth movement, for all its good intentions, tried to turn farmers into manufacturers, promising them a control that God has never granted to any minister in the whole history of the church.

A WORD TO THE BLACK CHURCH

I write within a tradition that ought to have been immune to this confusion, and I grieve that we have not been.

The African American church grew, and grew astonishingly, under conditions that make the marketing strategies of the modern growth expert look absurd. It grew in the hush harbors of slavery, where to gather and worship could cost a person their life. It grew through Reconstruction and its betrayal, through the trademark domestic terrorism of the lynching, through the daily indignities of segregation. It grew without demographic studies, without branding consultants, without seeker services or padded seating. It grew because God was causing the growth in a people who had almost nothing else, and who therefore knew, in their bones, that the increase came from the Lord and not from a strategy.

We of all people should know that the power of the church has never resided in its production values. When we trade that inheritance for the metrics of the megachurch, we are not gaining sophistication. We are forgetting who we are, and, worse, we are forgetting whose the growth has always been.

WHAT THIS FREES US TO DO

I understand that this can sound like an excuse for passivity, and it is essential to say plainly that it is not.

Paul planted and watered with everything in him. The pastor who takes this truth seriously does not stop laboring; he labors differently. He preaches the Word whether the crowd swells or thins, because the seed is the Word and his charge is to sow it. He prays, because the rain does not come from him. He disciples the few in front of him rather than pining for the many who are not, because faithfulness is measured in obedience and not in attendance. He stops comparing himself to the man with the bigger building, because he has finally understood that the man with the bigger building did not grow that church either.

And he learns to ask a different question when he meets a brother in ministry. Not how big, but how faithful. Not how many, but how deep. Not what have you built, but what has God, in His mercy, been pleased to grow.

The harvest was always God’s. Our part is the sowing, and the sowing is enough, because the God who assigns the labor is the same God who, in His own time and by His own power, gives the increase.

____________

Research Sources

1. Donald A. McGavran, Understanding Church Growth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970).

2. C. Peter Wagner, Your Church Can Grow: Seven Vital Signs of a Healthy Church (Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 1976).

3. Eugene H. Peterson, Working the Angles: The Shape of Pastoral Integrity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987).

4. Os Guinness, Dining with the Devil: The Megachurch Movement Flirts with Modernity (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1993).

5. David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994).

6. Cyprian of Carthage, On the Unity of the Church 6, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (repr. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994).

7. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

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What if the greatest crisis facing the American church is not persecution from without, but preference from within?

Something has shifted in the way a generation comes to church. They arrive with the posture of a customer, evaluating, comparing, and calculating. The music is auditioned. The sermon is rated. The parking situation is factored in. If the coffee is good, they’ll stay another week. If the children’s program feels underfunded, they are already searching for alternatives before the benediction has landed. They have not come to encounter God. They have come to be served.

This is what scholars and practitioners have begun calling consumer Christianity, and it may be the most quietly devastating force in the contemporary American church.

The Architecture of Appetite

Consumer Christianity is not a theological position. It is a posture, a set of largely unconscious assumptions about what the church exists to do and whom it exists to serve. At its core, it treats the local congregation as a vendor of religious goods and services: worship experiences, community programming, inspiring content, and spiritual self-help. The congregant, in this framework, is not a member of a body but a subscriber to a platform. And like any subscriber, they reserve the right to cancel.

The sociologist Christian Smith identified decades ago what he called “moralistic therapeutic deism,”1 the belief that God exists primarily to help individuals feel good and live well, and that religion is a resource for personal flourishing rather than a call to cruciform discipleship. Consumer Christianity is its ecclesiological expression. It takes Smith’s therapeutic God and builds Him a campus.

The marketplace metaphors are no accident. American evangelicalism in particular has been deeply shaped by market logic since the post-war era. Churches learned to speak the language of growth, branding, and audience. Some of this was strategically wise. The instinct to make the gospel accessible is a noble one. But somewhere along the way, accessibility curdled into accommodation, and accommodation hardened into a theology of preference. Bill Hybels, Rick Warren, Andy Stanley, Craig Groeschel, and Joel Osteen are considered to be the most the most influential figures in contributing to the creation of this cultural shift.

When Church Was a Covenant, Not a Contract

My grandparents did not go to church to find a church that “worked for them.” They went to church because the church was where God’s people assembled before God’s presence, and you did not miss that. There was no consumer calculus. The question was never whether the worship team met their aesthetic expectations. The question was whether they had been faithful.

For that generation, and for most of the church’s twenty centuries before them, the Lord’s Day gathering was understood as a covenantal act. You came not primarily to receive but to participate, in worship, in confession, in the breaking of bread, in the hearing of the Word proclaimed. You came expecting that the congregation would meet God, and that God would meet the congregation. The encounter was the point. You were not the audience. You were the offering.

Augustine went to church in Hippo not because Bishop Valerius had a dynamic personality, but because the eucharistic assembly was the site of the church’s participation in the risen Christ. Medieval Christians walked miles in winter to hear the Mass, not because the experience was emotionally satisfying, but because they understood themselves to be enacting something cosmic. The Black Baptist tradition, forged in the fires of slavery, sustained through the long suffering of Jim Crow, built churches that were not venues but sanctuaries. The congregation gathered, and the Spirit moved, and lives were changed, and the community was strengthened for another week of a world that did not love them. The church was not a service they used. It was a people to whom they belonged.

What Consumer Culture Does to Discipleship

The damage consumer Christianity inflicts on discipleship is both subtle and severe.
Discipleship, at its root, is the process by which a person is formed into the image of Jesus Christ. It requires discomfort. It requires accountability. It requires the willingness to remain in a community through conflict, through seasons of spiritual dryness, through sermons that challenge rather than comfort. Discipleship is not optimized; it is endured and embraced. It is, in the language of Dallas Willard, a training in godliness that demands the reordering of the whole self, will, mind, body, and affection.

Consumer Christianity is structurally incompatible with this. When a congregant understands their relationship with a church as transactional, they leave the moment the cost exceeds the perceived benefit. But the moments that cost the most, the sermon that exposes a hidden sin, the accountability conversation that feels intrusive, the community that calls you back from a comfortable compromise, are precisely the moments in which the most formation occurs. The consumer exits at the threshold of transformation.

Pastors bear some responsibility here. Many have been trained, explicitly or implicitly, to read attendance numbers as the primary metric of faithfulness. When people leave, the instinct is to ask what the church failed to provide, rather than what the culture of discipleship failed to demand. This creates a feedback loop: the church adjusts its offering to retain consumers, which attracts more consumers, which further dilutes the conditions necessary for genuine discipleship.

The congregation grows numerically while shrinking spiritually. The budget expands while the depth contracts. The consumer exits at the threshold of transformation. Discipleship requires exactly the discomfort that consumer culture is designed to eliminate. There is also a profound ecclesiological distortion at work.

The New Testament does not know of a Christian who is not embedded in a local body. The epistles are addressed to churches. The metaphors, body, family, temple, flock, are all irreducibly communal. One does not merely attend a church. One belongs to it, is accountable within it, suffers with it, and serves through it. Consumer Christianity severs the nerve of belonging and replaces it with visitation. The person who is shopping for a church has, by definition, not yet submitted to one. And submission, to leadership, to community, to the disciplines of a particular congregation’s life together, is not incidental to discipleship. It is its very medium.

The Way Forward: Recovering a Theology of Presence

The church will not overcome consumer Christianity by becoming more appealing. It will overcome it by becoming more itself. This begins with theological recovery. Pastors must preach an ecclesiology that is robust enough to resist market logic. Congregations must understand that they have not been gathered by their preferences but by the Holy Spirit.

The church does not exist to meet felt needs. It exists to conform a people to the image of the Son, for the glory of the Father, through the power of the Spirit, and the path runs through the cross before it arrives at the crown. When people understand this, the question of whether the parking lot is convenient becomes almost comically beside the point.

It also requires structural courage. Churches must be willing to build the scaffolding of genuine discipleship, small groups that are not optional, accountability relationships that have teeth, membership covenants that actually mean something, preaching that afflicts the comfortable and not merely comforts the afflicted. This will not grow a crowd. It will grow a church. And that is a distinction worth recovering.

The African American Baptist tradition has a particular gift to offer this moment. Born in communities where the church was the only institution that belonged entirely to Black people, where the congregation was simultaneously a house of worship and a school of freedom, the Black church has historically understood itself as a covenant community rather than a voluntary association. Its members did not shop. They belonged. They sacrificed. They stayed. The tradition’s instinct toward communal faithfulness, toward the church as a redemptive institution embedded in a particular place and people, is precisely what the broader American church needs to recover.

Finally, the church must recover a thick vision of the Sunday gathering itself. Worship is not entertainment. The sermon is not a TED Talk. The table of the Lord is not a spiritual snack bar. These are the means of grace, the appointed places where the risen Christ meets His people. When congregations understand this, they do not come asking what they will get out of it. They come asking whether they are prepared to stand in the presence of the living God. That is a very different question. And it produces a very different kind of Christian.

The church does not exist to meet felt needs. It exists to conform a people to the image of the Son, and the path runs through the cross before it arrives at the crown.

Why This Matters for the Future

We are entering an era in which the cultural supports for nominal Christianity are collapsing. The social incentives that once kept lukewarm believers in the pews, respectability, community belonging, professional networks, are dissolving. In their place, following Jesus will increasingly require something that consumer Christianity cannot produce: conviction.

A church full of consumers will not survive the pressures of a post-Christian culture. Consumers leave when the cost rises. Disciples stay. The early church did not transform the Roman Empire through superior programming. It transformed it through communities of formation so compelling, so countercultural, so marked by love and suffering and resurrection hope, that they could not be ignored or explained away. Tertullian reported that the pagans said of the Christians: “See how they love one another.”2 They did not say: “See how they have optimized their weekend experience.”

The church that will bear faithful witness in the twenty-first century is the church that has done the hard work of forming disciples rather than attracting consumers. It is the church that has resisted the temptation to become whatever the market demands, and instead asked what the gospel demands. It is the church that still believes, against every cultural pressure, that Sunday morning is not a transaction but a visitation, that God Himself shows up when His people gather in His name, and that such a meeting is worth any inconvenience, any discomfort, any sacrifice.

My grandparents knew this. The question is whether we have forgotten it, or whether we still have time to remember.

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There is a moment in the prophet Elijah's ministry when he sits beneath a broom tree and asks God to take his life. He has just called fire from heaven. He has just outrun a chariot in the power of the Spirit. And now, alone and exhausted in the wilderness, he is done. What strikes me about that scene, one of the most human moments in all of Scripture, is not the despair. It is the diagnosis. 'I alone am left,' Elijah says, 'and they seek my life' (1 Kings 19:10). He is wrong on both counts. God will tell him so. But his error is instructive: a man who has watched God move in extraordinary power can still become convinced, in the silence that follows, that the cause is lost. I think the American church is sitting under that broom tree right now.

We are exhausted by our own divisions. Hollowed out by the scandals of leaders we trusted. Compromised by a political captivity that has traded our prophetic voice for access to the powerful. And we have begun to whisper what Elijah said aloud: it is over. We are the last ones. There is nothing left to do but manage the decline. That whisper is a lie, the same lie God corrected in the wilderness, and the antidote to it is the same one God prescribed then: not a strategy, not a summit, not a new coalition. Fire.

A FRACTURED HOUSE

The American church has sorted itself into warring camps with the efficiency it has absorbed from the broader culture. On one side, congregations have collapsed the gospel into a social program, emptying it of its supernatural claim. On the other, congregations have fused the faith with a nationalism so thoroughgoing that the cross and the flag have become nearly interchangeable symbols. Neither camp is listening to Scripture. What we have built are not so much churches as political tribes with steeples, and in the process, the actual gospel gets lost somewhere between the opinion columns and the culture war skirmishes.

The church's critics are right to be suspicious when Christian leaders invoke the language of spiritual awakening while pursuing what is essentially a partisan program. Revival is not a strategy for winning culture wars. But political captivity has a cost that runs deeper than bad optics. When the church begins to see political power as the primary mechanism of its mission, it trades the birthright of prophetic independence for the pottage of access. 'Do not put your trust in princes,' the psalmist warned, not because politics is irrelevant, but because when your ultimate hope is in princes, you will inevitably compromise your witness to accommodate them (Psalm 146:3).

THE SHEPHERD'S WOUND

And then there are the scandals. We built celebrity cultures around individual leaders, insulated them from accountability, surrounded them with yes-men, and trained congregations to confuse charisma with character. The word 'pastor' means shepherd. The shepherd's calling is to be present, accountable, and cruciform. 'Not many of you should become teachers,' James warns, 'for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness' (James 3:1). When shepherds wound the sheep, the sheep scatter, and scattered sheep are not simply a church problem. They are a civilization problem.

WHAT REVIVAL ACTUALLY IS

Revival, properly understood, is the sovereign work of God in which He restores spiritual life to a dormant church and, through that church, to the wider society. It is not a technique. It is not a conference. It is the movement of the Holy Spirit through a humbled, praying, repentant people, producing consequences no human program could engineer. The biblical vocabulary is instructive: the psalmist cries, 'Will you not revive us again, that your people may rejoice in you?' (Psalm 85:6). The presupposition is that spiritual life can diminish, and that restoration comes only from above.

The biblical record is full of these moments. Josiah's reformation began when the Book of the Law was found in a temple so neglected it had simply been lost (2 Kings 22). Nehemiah's rebuilding of Jerusalem began not with a construction plan but with corporate confession: 'I and my father's house have sinned' (Nehemiah 1:6). At Ephesus, revival was confirmed when new believers burned their magic books, fifty thousand pieces of silver's worth, in public. 'So the word of the Lord continued to increase and prevail mightily' (Acts 19:20). Repentance is always the door through which revival enters.

"If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land." (2 Chronicles 7:14)

HOW FIRE FALLS, AND WHAT IT DOES

Every great revival in the historical record begins the same way: not in the largest churches or with the most celebrated ministers, but in obscurity, in prayer, through broken and desperate people. The Welsh Revival of 1904 began with a twenty-six-year-old who had prayed for eleven years. The Hebrides Revival of 1949 was preceded by two elderly sisters who prayed through the night, week after week, in their cottage. The First Great Awakening began in Northampton, Massachusetts, where Jonathan Edwards preached through Romans and watched his congregation undone. The antecedents are always the same: prayer, humility, and a willingness to wait on God rather than manufacture results.

And the fruit is always social as well as spiritual. Wilberforce's campaign against the slave trade was a revival-born movement. The Second Great Awakening fueled abolition, prison reform, and the education of women. Genuine revival reaches where policy cannot, because it operates at the level of the human heart. Policy can constrain behavior. It cannot change desire. Only the Spirit of God can do that, and when He does it at scale, the effects on a society are incalculable.

A CALL TO THE KNEES

So here is what I want to say to pastors: you have been given a stewardship unlike any other, the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the care of souls made in God's image. Some of you have discharged it faithfully, week after week, in obscurity, without the platform the celebrity culture has taught us to treat as significance. But some of you have drifted. You have let prayer become a ritual box to check before the real work begins. You have neglected the interior life and tried to compensate with activity and strategy. The prophet Joel was direct: 'Between the vestibule and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep and say, "Spare your people, O Lord"' (Joel 2:17). Repentance does not begin in the pews. It begins in the pulpit or before the pulpit, in the quiet place where the pastor meets God before he meets anyone else.

And to the people: you are not consumers of religious goods. You are, if you belong to Christ, members of the body through which God has chosen to make His appeal to the world. Pray for revival, not as one item in a balanced spiritual portfolio, but as the primary labor. The great revivals were born in prayer meetings that most of us would find inconveniently long and uncomfortably earnest. They were attended by people so desperate for God that they were willing to stay until He came.

"And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily." -Luke 18:7–8

God told Elijah that seven thousand in Israel had not bowed to Baal. The cause was not lost. It never was. The fire we need is not a fire we can start, but it is a fire we can prepare for, by clearing the altar, stacking the wood, and calling out to the God who has never, in all the centuries since Carmel, grown reluctant to answer. Pray for revival. Pray as if the church depends on it. Pray as if the country depends on it. It does.

Scripture citations from the English Standard Version (ESV) unless otherwise noted.