Who Actually Grows The Church?

The church growth movement made a promise scripture never made, and a generation of faithful ministers has been crushed beneath its weight.

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.

You can gather a crowd with the right techniques. What you cannot do, with any technique ever devised, is manufacture a Christian.

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.

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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).