📈 Church Growth — Unit 3: Terms and History

Part One: The Terms

Assignment: Complete the exercise “Pictures of a Church.”

1. Evangelism. Sharing the gospel with lost people.

2. Church Growth. “All that is involved in bringing men and women who do not have a personal relationship to Jesus Christ into fellowship with Him and into responsible church membership” (C. Peter Wagner, Your Church Can Grow, p. 12). Several types of growth have been identified:

• Transfer growth — believers who come from other churches.
  • Swap. They come from nearby churches in the same community over worship differences, relatives, friends, or problems. Some mega-churches actually sap the life out of smaller community churches, the way a shopping mall saps the life out of smaller businesses. The trouble is that the net increase for the Kingdom of God is zero.
  • Distance. People coming from more distant communities.
  • The evangelical community. When they come, there is always the question of what to do with them once they arrive.
• Rededicational growth — people who return to the church after leaving it for some reason.
• Generational growth — when our own children come to know Christ. We dare not take them for granted; some fall through the cracks.
• Conversional growth — this obviously must be the target of church growth.

3. The denominational definition (Southern Baptist, 1990). “Church growth is God at work through His redeemed people in adding to a church those who are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, and helping inactive believers come to renewed commitment. It is new believers added to existing churches or gathered into new churches and equipped to become responsible church members who minister and witness as personal soul-winners to others. It is strengthening the churches in fellowship, organization, and in world missions commitment” (statement endorsed in 1990). Whatever our tradition, that opening clause is the one to write on the wall: church growth is God at work through His redeemed people. We settled that in the last unit, and every term that follows must serve it.

4. Church planting. The intentional process of beginning a new permanent church or witnessing point in order to reach a distinct geographical, social, racial, or ethnic group. It is one form of church growth (1 Corinthians 3:6–9).

5. The superchurch. These are the very large churches. In the era this course was first taught, nine of the ten largest churches in America were Baptist. They are superaggressive in evangelism and have strong, visible, long-tenured pastors. They often function as a kind of mini-denomination. Some have criticized the superchurches as being like a superstore that dries up the smaller stores around it.

6. The metachurch. Called in its day the most important innovation of the movement, the metachurch revolves around two events: the meeting in small groups, or cells, and the gathering for corporate worship, or celebration. In the metachurch the clergy are no longer the primary caregivers — that ministry is given to lay coaches and the small groups themselves. Virtually all ministry is decentralized to the cells. The key number is now ten — the size of a typical cell group — rather than the hundreds in the auditorium, and on that basis a church’s growth is virtually unlimited.

Church growth might be pictured like a shopping mall. In a mall there are usually two large anchor entrances on either end — at one end a department store, at the other a discount giant — and between them a hundred specialty shops. People are drawn in through the big anchors and then find the shop that fits them. Among the churches of this study, the two great anchor entrances have long been Worship and Sunday School.

Where We Are Now (2026): A Second Glossary

The vocabulary of church growth has gone on growing, and a student today will meet a second glossary the first edition never knew. Several are simply the terms above, grown older.

Megachurch. What this course called the superchurch the whole world now calls the megachurch — by common reckoning a congregation of two thousand or more in weekly attendance. One thing has changed and it changes the whole picture: the largest congregations on earth are no longer American or Baptist. They are Pentecostal and charismatic and they are in the Global South.

Multisite church. One church meeting in many locations, often with the sermon carried by video. It can be fruitful — but note the hard-won caution: multisite is an expansion tool for a church already growing, not a growth strategy in itself.

Attractional and missional. The two words that now frame nearly every conversation. The attractional church draws people in — come and see. The missional church is sent out into the world — go and be — treating the neighborhood, not the auditorium, as the field.

The “nones.” The religiously unaffiliated. A generation ago a rounding error; today one of the largest groups in the country, many with no church memory at all.

Dechurched and rechurching. The dechurched are the great company — some forty million in America — who once attended and no longer do. Rechurching is the work of bringing them home, and because most did not leave over doctrine, it is more open to us than we feared.

Deconstruction. The now-common term for a believer’s hard reexamination of the faith of his upbringing — sometimes ending in deeper faith, sometimes in departure.

Microchurch, house church, dinner church. The metachurch grown all the way up: the small, simple, decentralized forms where the cell is no longer a department of the church but is itself the church.

Digital, online, and hybrid church. Congregations that gather partly, or wholly, through a screen — made permanent by the pandemic, and quietly the new front door.

Discipleship and spiritual formation. The word the movement has circled back to: the slow work of shaping a person into the likeness of Christ — the goal named at the very beginning.

Renewalist. The umbrella term for Pentecostals and charismatics together — the Spirit-emphasizing movement that is the engine of the church’s growth in the world today, running clean across the old denominational lines.

Part Two: The History

The movement’s father was born in India in 1897 to missionaries, and went back to the field himself as a mission administrator. There he realized that some churches were not growing, so he resigned his post and started churches. In 1955 he published The Bridges of God, coining the term “church growth,” and in 1970 Understanding Church Growth, the movement’s defining work. His focus was the foreign mission field, and he stressed four things: that evangelism is making disciples (the results, not merely the proclamation); that men come to Christ within their own culture; the homogeneous principle; and “perfecting,” or internal growth. He named three ways a church grows — by conversion, by biological growth, and by transfer — and noted that already more than 80% of growth in North America came from transfer, not conversion.

He came to America in the 1960s, and in 1965 to Fuller Seminary, where missionaries from all over the world studied under him. Through the 1970s his disciples reinterpreted his principles for the North American scene; chief among them was a former missionary to Bolivia who, more than anyone, popularized church growth in this country and wrote Your Church Can Grow: Seven Vital Signs of a Healthy Church. Others carried the movement forward through conferences, statistics, and a steady stream of books, until by the early 1980s some sixty volumes had been published.

Two churches came to embody the movement at its height. Saddleback Community Church, begun in a home in 1980, climbed past nine thousand in attendance to become the fastest-growing church in the history of the Southern Baptist Convention. And Willow Creek Community Church, outside Chicago, became the flagship and training center of the seeker-service model.

Where We Are Now (2026)

This history, as first written, closes around 1990 — with Fuller at the center and Saddleback and Willow Creek rising as the models. The thirty years since have written several more chapters, and the surprising shape of the story is a return.

The seeker movement crested and then turned a corner with a remarkable act of honesty. In 2007 Willow Creek published the results of its own multi-year self-study and admitted the hard finding: more programs and higher attendance were not, by themselves, producing mature disciples. That candor marked a hinge — the dawning recognition that we had become very good at gathering crowds and not nearly as good at making disciples, which is the very thing the Great Commission commanded.

Out of that recognition came the missional turn. Where the attractional church said come and see, the missional church said go and be — the neighborhood, not the auditorium, is the field. By our own day the verdict is widely shared: the attractional model, faithful and effective in its time, has largely run its course. Alongside it came the church-planting turn — and here the movement’s father would have smiled, for it is his own first instinct come home. Networks rose to make new-church planting the main engine of growth again, and a thoughtful, city-facing ministry took root in places the seeker suburb had never reached.

And the largest movement of all was the one he began with: the church’s center of gravity returning to the mission field. He started overseas, and after a long North American detour the whole story has swung back south. The explosive growth is now Pentecostal and charismatic and in the Global South — so that, in a real sense, the Book of Acts is being written again in languages Luke never heard.

So the history comes full circle. The movement began with three convictions — make disciples, not merely decisions; plant new congregations; and keep your eyes on the whole world. It wandered for a generation through the megachurch and the seeker service, and has now, chastened and instructed, found its way back to exactly those three. That is not a defeat. It is a homecoming.

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