The year was 1976 and the church growth movement was beginning to start. Peter Wagner, a former missionary to South America, was on the forefront of this movement due to his job at Fuller Theological Seminary’s new church growth department.

The church growth movement, in a nutshell, was a movement that placed the focus of the local church on increasing the number of members attending said church. This in turn led to “seeker friendly services” and the attractional church model (i.e. do whatever it takes to get people to come to your church). Now the times have changed a bit, if you’re looking for more members for your church or maintain records these Church Software Solutions from Drupal could be a helpful start!

The sad thing about this movement was that it tended to a) leave out certain groups of people and b) create churches full of attendees, or spectators, and not true followers of Christ.

Willow Creek in Chicago is a prime example of this movement. They are also one of the first mega-churches to recognize the flaws in their church model (Bill Hybels releases an internal study a few years back showing that while lots of people attended his church, very few of them actually changed their live style in accordance to the Bible).

With this said, I don’t think we should throw away everything connected with the church growth movement (which, by the way, was coming again a mindset that churches did NOT have to grow to be healthy). Instead, I think we should take a good long look at the factors that led to the movements’ failure – and try to learn for it.

____________________________________________________

On a side note, it was interesting to see a blueprint of the Vineyard in Peter Wagner’s book “Your Church Can Grow.” Of course, this wasn’t too big of a surprise as Wagner was heavily involved in the beginning of the Vineyard due to his friendship with John Wimber. In fact, Wimber wrote the ‘study questions’ in the book….