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UNDERSTANDING
CHURCH GROWTH
Third Edition
UNDERSTANDING
CHURCH GROWTH
Third Edition
by
DONALD A. McGAVRAN
revised and edited by
C. PETER WAGNER
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Grand Rapids, Michigan
Copyright © 1970 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Revised edition copyright © 1980 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
Third edition copyright © 1990 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
255 Jefferson Ave. S.E., Grand Rapids, Mich. 49503
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Reprinted 1998
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McGavran, Donald Anderson, 1897-
Understanding church growth / by Donald A. McGavran;
revised and edited by C. Peter Wagner.—3rd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-80280463-2־
1. Church growth. 2. Sociology, Christian. I. Wagner, C. Peter.
II. Title.
BV652.25.M293 1990
266—dc20 89-39252
CIP
CONTENTS
PREFACE TO THE THIRD (1990) EDITION
PREFACE TO THE REVISED (1980) EDITION
PREFACE TO THE FIRST (1970) EDITION
PARTI THEOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
1. The Complex Faithfulness That Is Church Growth
2. God’s Will and Church Growth
3. Today’s Task, Opportunity, and Imperative
PART II DISCERNING THE OUTLINES
4. The Marvelous Mosaic
5. A Universal Fog
6. The Facts Needed
PART III CAUSES OF CHURCH GROWTH
7. Discovering the Why of It
vi UNDERSTANDING CHURCH GROWTH
8. Sources to Search for Causes of Growth 107
9. Helps and Hindrances to Understanding 118
10. Revival and Church Growth 133
11. Divine Healing and Church Growth 144
PART IV THE SOCIOLOGICAL FOUNDATION
12. Social Structure and Church Growth 153
13. Without Crossing Barriers 163
14. The Receptivity of Individuals and Societies 179
PARTY SPECIAL KINDS OF CHURCH GROWTH
15. The Masses, the Classes, and Church Growth 195
16. Halting Due to Redemption and Lift 209
17. People Movements 221
18. Kinds of People Movements and Their Care 238
PART VI ADMINISTERING FOR CHURCH GROWTH
19. Stream Across the Bridges 253
20. Set Goals 265
21. Make Hard, Bold Plans 282
REFERENCES CITED AND
CHURCH GROWTH READING LIST 295
INDEX 311
PREFACE TO THE THIRD (1990) EDITION
by C. Peter Wagner
One of the greatest privileges of my life has been to associate closely with
Donald A. McGavran. After sixteen years as a missionary to Bolivia, I ac
cepted his call in 1971 to join him on the faculty of the Fuller Theologi
cal Seminary School of World Mission in Pasadena, California. For ten
years, until his retirement in 1981, we worked together teaching church
growth, supervising graduate theses and dissertations in the field, train
ing missionaries and pastors, and consulting with churches and mission
agencies. I was honored in 1984 to be invited to become the first incum
bent of the Donald A. McGavran Chair of Church Growth.
Understanding Church Growth is one of those classics which has be
come the indispensable foundational text for an academic field. No one
can claim to be a serious student of church growth who has not read and
absorbed the content of Understanding Church Growth. I was one of the
first to be introduced to the content of this book, in classroom lectures in
the late 1960s while it was yet being written. The first edition was pub
lished in 1970, and the revised edition was expanded and updated by
McGavran in 1980. In this 1990 edition the language has been modern
ized, the flow of ideas somewhat streamlined, the content also reduced,
mostly by eliminating redundancies, ideas and illustrations updated, and
a bit of new material such as the chapter on divine healing introduced. But
through it all, Donald McGavran is the one who speaks. This edition is
not a Wagnerized version of McGavran. My own contributions are ade
viii UNDERSTANDING CHURCH GROWTH
quately represented in more than thirty books, some of which are listed in
the updated reading list at the end of this volume.
Some years ago, Tyndale House Publishers released Church Growth:
State of the Art (1986), which I had the privilege of editing along with
Win Am and Elmer Towns. The first chapter of that book was a tribute to
Donald A. McGavran, the father of the Church Growth Movement. With
the permission of the publishers I am concluding this introduction with
that tribute. New readers of Understanding Church Growth will be well
served by taking a few moments to get to know its distinguished author
more intimately.
DONALD A. McGAVRAN
“We stand in the sunrise of missions.”
This is perhaps the most characteristic phrase proclaimed through the
years by Donald A. McGavran, regarded by many as the twentieth centu
ry’s premier missiologist. At eighty-seven years of age, he still makes that
statement with the twinkle in his eye and the determination on his lips that
have always been a part of his outgoing and forceful personality.
Donald McGavran was bom of missionary parents in India before the
turn of the century. His grandparents had also been missionaries to India,
sailing around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope to get there. He is a graduate
of Yale and Columbia. He has climbed the Himalayas. He has produced
motion pictures. He was the director of a missionary agency. He managed
a leprosarium and supervised a school system. He went one-on-one with
a wounded tiger and met a wild boar in combat. He is fluent in Hindi and
Chattisqarhee. He stopped a cholera epidemic. He was the founding dean
of a prestigious missiological institution. He has written twenty-three
books on missions and church growth. His travels have taken him to vir
tually every nation of the world.
When, one or two generations from now, historians of religion look
back to the twentieth century, McGavran will most likely be remembered
chiefly as the father of the Church Growth Movement. Seed thoughts for
the movement began to germinate in the 1930s when he was executive
secretary and treasurer for the United Christian Missionary Society in
India. He was in charge of eighty missionaries, five hospitals, many high
schools and primary schools, evangelistic work, and a leprosy home. It
was a formidable missionary effort. But through decades of hard work the
PREFACE TO THE THIRD (1990) EDITION IX
net result of the mission’s work had been only twenty or thirty small non
growing churches.
This was the pattern of many missionary groups in India at that time,
and still is for some. But Donald McGavran could not live with it. The
conventional wisdom among missionaries was that India was a resistant
country and that they should not expect many converts. But McGavran
did not agree. It occurred to him that obviously there was a way of doing
missionary work so as to produce few or no churches. But there must also
be other ways of doing missionary work that God would bless with the
establishment of many churches. At the time McGavran did not know ex
actly how the methodologies of the two approaches differed, but he de
termined to find out. As he declared in the preface to a book he coauthored
in the 1930s, he had dedicated himself to “discarding theories of church
growth which do not work, and learning and practicing productive pat
terns which actually disciple the peoples and increase the household of
God.”
In order to gather the experience necessary to undergird the theories
of church growth that were developing, McGavran left his administrative
position and spent seventeen years in planting churches. The work bore
substantial fruit, and some 1,000 Indians now owe their conversion,
humanly speaking, to McGavran’s efforts. More significant than the im
mediate results, however, were the strong convictions about the growth
and nongrowth of churches that were forming in McGavran’s mind. These
convictions led in 1955 to the publication of The Bridges of God (rev. ed.,
Friendship Press, 1981), the landmark volume that launched the Church
Growth Movement.
The book was read and discussed by missionaries and mission execu
tives on all six continents. Its ideas were new and controversial. Four
principal points of discussion were raised: a theological issue, an ethical
issue, a missiological issue, and a procedural issue.
The theological issue suggests that the central purpose of missions
was to be seen as God’s will that lost men and women be found, recon
ciled to himself, and brought into responsible membership in Christian
churches. Evangelism was seen not just as proclaiming the gospel whether
or not something happened, but as making disciples for the Master.
The ethical issue is one of pragmatism. McGavran became alarmed
when he saw all too many of God’s resources—personnel and finances—
being used without asking whether the kingdom of God was being ad
vanced by the programs they were supporting. McGavran demanded more
x UNDERSTANDING CHURCH GROWTH
accountability in Christian stewardship. He wanted efforts evaluated by
their results. His attitude reflects these words of Bishop Waskom Pickett,
McGavran’s mentor in the early years in India: “It is disturbing to read
book after book about modem missions without finding so much as a hint
about either what helped or what hindered church growth. In many books
the author seems eager to prove that the missionaries have done every
thing according to God’s leading and that if no church has come into being
it means only that God’s time for saving souls has not come: ‘The dis
ciples’ duty is to sow the seed and leave it to God to produce.’ How dif
ferent this is from the command of Jesus, ‘Make disciples of the nations! ’”
(Pickett 1933).
The missiological issue is McGavran’s people movement theory.
Before the days of the conscious application of cultural anthropology to
evangelistic strategy, McGavran intuitively recognized the fact that deci
sion-making processes are frequently quite different from one culture to
the next. Whereas most Western missionaries and their converts were
preaching an individualistic gospel and expecting people to come to Christ
one by one against the social tide, McGavran, with Waskom Pickett’s en
couragement, concluded that this was not the way multitudes could or
would come to Christ. Important decisions, according to their worldview,
were community decisions. Therefore, the way to approach many of the
world’s peoples with the gospel had to be through the encouragement of
a multi-individual, mutually interdependent conversion process whereby
members of families, extended families, clans, villages, and tribes would
become Christian at the same time. This process was labeled a people
movement.
A corollary of the people movement theory is the homogeneous unit
principle. “People like to become Christians without crossing racial, lin
guistic, or class barriers,” said McGavran. Conversion, he argued, should
occur within a minimum of social dislocation. This principle has become
the most controversial of all church growth principles because critics have
interpreted it as classist or racist. Nothing could be further from McGav
ran’s mind, however. As the prototype of a world Christian, McGavran
does not have a racist bone in his body. The homogeneous unit principle
is an attempt to respect the dignity of individuals and allow their decisions
for Christ to be religious rather than social decisions. It is developed in
detail in McGavran’s magnum opus, Understanding Church Growth.
The procedural issue is the distinction between discipling and per
fecting as two discreet stages of Christianization. Discipling brings an un
believing individual or group to commitment to Christ and to the body of
