I have been reading Todd Wilson’s latest book, How Did We Get Here? It is worth your time if you have been working in church planting in any way over the past half century or so. You can download it for free at the website in the link.
Wilson details the rise and evolution of the Church Growth Movement over the past 70 years. It is a strange walk through history if you have been in any of the churches mentioned in the book. It captures the rise of the megachurch in ways no other source I have seen does.
I’m going to camp out a little bit on one of the points he makes in the book that I think is very relevant to global missions. Wilson does not describe it as such in the text, but missionaries have long wrestled with how non‑indigenous ideas harm indigenous churches.
The Church Growth Movement: a predominantly cross‑cultural strategy developed for missions... co‑opted by consumer culture.
In the case of the Church Growth Movement, his thesis is that its birth as a predominantly cross‑cultural strategy developed for missions was co‑opted by consumer culture. He rightly asks, “What happens when a paradigm developed in one cultural context gets transplanted into another?”
This is the big story that unfolds in the book. Instead of geography being the distance the gospel travels, he argues that culture shifted and swept up the Church Growth Movement and, as it did so, it birthed things it was never intended to birth.
The Church Growth Movement is much bullied these days as a set of shallow, market‑driven principles for how CEO‑style pastors can grow churches. Wilson makes the case that it did not start out that way, and I believe he is correct.
Donald McGavran is considered the founder of this movement.
Donald McGavran is considered the founder of this movement. He was a missionary working in India when he began to conclude that the church needed to be at the center of mission. His missions experience and thinking (not mono-cultural church planting) was the essence of the early ideas behind the movement. As culture shifted, these ideas were essentially appropriated by well‑intentioned church planters. Wilson writes:
McGavran’s original principles were evangelistically driven, biblically grounded, and missionary‑focused. The gradual co‑opting of these principles—though unintentional and well‑meaning—slowly produced a consumer‑driven operating system that prioritizes attendance over discipleship, programs over relationships, and addition over multiplication.
This co‑opting happened through a series of events that sucked the spirituality out of the church‑planting process. For any of us who have worked overseas and seen a radically different type of church than many we have here in the United States, this book will resonate.
It will be interesting over the next few months to see various church leaders distance themselves from this consumer‑oriented church model now that there is a resource like this pointing out the problems in a thorough and helpful way.
It’s not a book that seeks to deconstruct the church.
Wilson himself had a front‑row seat to many of these developments throughout his career, and he does not hesitate to name names. At the same time, I found him to be very generous, and it’s not a book that seeks to deconstruct the church. The last section asks a lot of great questions for anybody in the U.S. church‑planting scene to ponder.
As I read it, I also thought about the Emerging Church Movement. This is touched on very briefly in the book, and it’s not the central theme. Leslie Newbigin was very influential (perhaps a founder or thought leader?) of that movement and, like McGavran, was a missionary working cross‑culturally.
He came home to introduce deeply thought-through ideas from his missionary experience into his home culture. That movement also produced problems in local churches; problems that Newbigin himself probably did not foresee or intend. A very different set of issues, to be sure, but the same general issue of a method or paradigm being transplanted from missionary experience.
When missionaries carry strategies with them cross‑culturally, they often do not realize the lack of fit and the potential ramifications that may be on the horizon.
When missionaries carry strategies with them cross‑culturally, they often do not realize the lack of fit and the potential ramifications that may be on the horizon. This cuts both ways—to the missionary culture and from the missionary culture. The overriding principle here is that each context is unique and requires us to understand it as such.
This can be true for those importing very different ideas cross‑culturally. For example, those who are eager to "start movements" (a vogue term in recent years) have a very specific strategy that they seek to employ everywhere. I love movement strategy, by the way, but we should be cautious about how we bring it into various contexts. But the true believers see no other way to do ministry.
Similarly, the arch‑rivals to those who practice movement strategies are those employing the traditional/proclamational model, now calling themselves the “Healthy Church” model. I love this model too! Yet it can be a similar imposition of strategy and theology where it might not fit well. Its particular weakness is that its proponents see it as the so-called “biblical model” in judgment of all others.
When your methodology becomes your theology, your ecclesiology... becomes a pathology.
I like to say: when your methodology becomes your theology, your ecclesiology (understanding and practice of church) becomes a pathology. This is an undercurrent in the book, "How Did We Get Here?". It is strategy over spirituality.
Relying on systems and strategy and not the Holy Spirit.
I was once in a leadership development program. A prominent Texas mega church pastor came to speak to this group of leaders. He had planted numerous mega churches. At one point in his talk, he said, “I could come to this city and within six months start a church of 5,000 people. I’ve done it multiple times. We know how to work the system to make this happen. And if I did it,” at this point he paused and got very serious, “I would be in sin. Because I would be relying on systems and strategy and not the Holy Spirit who has not called me to plant churches in this city.”
At least that guy understood the danger of strategy over spirituality.
Originally published on Ted's Substack, TedQuarters. Republished with permission.
Ted Esler is the President of Missio Nexus, an association of agencies and churches representing hundreds of mission agencies and churches. Ted worked in the computer industry and then served in the Balkans during the 1990s. He then held various leadership roles with Pioneers. He was appointed the President of Missio Nexus in 2015. He is the author of The Innovation Crisis. Ted has a PhD in Intercultural Studies (Fuller Theological Seminary, 2012).
