RyanBolger.com

The ‘back story’ for my Fall quarter was a wrestling match with Donald McGavran.  As founder of my school, and as an inheritor of his church growth classes at Fuller (after C.Peter Wagner, Eddie Gibbs did their respective runs), I had to make up my mind about him. I read most all of his many books and I read what his adversaries said about him. I read him in his context (primarily in the 1950s and 1960s). I presented on him to my church growth class in October, to a conference on church growth in November, and I had many conversations with senior faculty over the last few months. All three of these venues were helpful to get a better handle on things. I also brought his material into conversation with some of my dissertation work on practices, Jesus, the kingdom, modernity, postmodernity, and global information culture. What served to bring all these perspectives together was a 5000 word article I wrote on McGavran for Missiology this coming spring. That paper gave me fits — how to synthesize all these streams together to say what I thought about McGavran — what ought to be brought into the new millenium and what ought to be left behind.

That ‘little’ paper took me over a month to write! I just couldn’t bring it all together. However, in the end, I felt this assignment was more a gift than a burden — it provided me the opportunity to weave together many threads that have been dangling there for at least ten years. I feel I found a way forward with McGavran — a way to look at this man in light of our changed context. Here is the abstract for the upcoming article in Missiology:

LOOKING BACK TO MCGAVRAN AND FINDING A WAY FORWARD

This article explores Donald McGavran’s writings for resources that enable mission engagement today in the culture of late modernity. There is, indeed, much of value in McGavran’s 1955 classic, “The Bridges of God,” among other writings. With these resources in hand, the author situates McGavran within the socio-cultural changes of the twentieth century. Adding deterritorialization to people movement theory enables the formulation of a theory that maintains the dynamics of mission within spaces where people are no longer associated with particular places or cultures. If mission stations represent mission engagement in modernity, and people movements in postmodernity, the author proposes practice movements as a viable way forward for mission in global information culture.

Technorati Tags: Donald McGavran, Global Culture

I taught a class on church growth for the first time this last quarter. It was small — 15-20 of us in a circle, discussing Donald McGavran and everything else church growth has meant since the 1960s. It was highly engaged, I simply had to introduce a topic and the conversations flowed.

One interesting conversation we had was regarding numbers. For McGavran, numbers meant accuracy, truth, the removal of spiritual language about sociological phenomena. McGavran would hear stories where ‘thousands were reached with the gospel.” McGavran would respond, “how many were now engaged in church life?”

In our class, filled with mostly twenty-somethings, numbers were bad news. How many are in your youth group? How big is your church? How many conversions have you had? How many came to that event? These questions, they felt, were not innocent, but were used to judge, to belittle, to control. Numbers were not innocent; they became a tool of oppression, in their experience.

We needed to take another look. Are numbers always evil? Students chimed up. Not always. A church planter from India shared that numbers sometimes help. If he hears of many coming to faith in a certain area, it might be evidence of a move of the Holy Spirit. Others shared that numbers are simply a way to get a better understanding of things that are too complex when looked at individually; in those instances, aggregates give a clearer picture.

What is counted is always imbued with theology. When we count ‘butts in seats’ at a church service, we implicitly raise that up as a sign of faithfulness. We track it, it must be important. But what if what we counted dealt with Jesus-like activities? What if we counted how many in our congregation did activities for the poor, opened their house to their neighbors, participated in acts of justice? In this way, what we track in our churches is in synch with our stated theology; our numbers ‘in church’ are those who follow Jesus into the world. In our church growth class, we came to the conclusion that when we track kingdom-like activity instead of static church membership rolls, we come closer to McGavran’s goal of numbers as a window into the work of the Holy Spirit.

Technorati Tags: church growth, Fuller Theological Seminary, kingdom of God