Transcript
You have, and one could point to examples of this all over the world, you have the famous mission compound, which begins with a missionary's house, you then have a school, a church, a hospital, and perhaps later a farm colony. You have all kinds of things. One of the most beautiful examples is the famous mission compound at Medoc of the British Methodists, a vast, immense estate surrounded by an immense high wall covering several hundred acres, including everything
that you can possibly think of. The story is told that when Mr. Posnett, who created this mission compound, invited Bishop Azariah, the first Indian bishop of the Anglican Church in India, to visit it, Azariah was so speechless that all that he could think of saying was, you seem to have absolutely everything except a swimming bath. And Posnett said, my word, I never thought of that, and immediately proceeded to have a swimming bath. Well, the mission station,
you see, becomes a place where standards are set, where there is a school, where things are under the supervision of the missionary and then of his Indian successors. And in the early stages, in many places, the convert was rejected by his own family, and if he was to survive, he had to be brought into the protection of the mission compound. There are many places where the first Christian converts were absolutely disinherited and thrown out, and there
was no possibility for them, except that they should be brought within the walls of the compound, so that they are withdrawn out of their own communities and attached to the community which is led by the missionary. Now, it doesn't matter whether the missionary is a Christian or not. It doesn't matter whether the missionary is a foreigner or not. That's not the point. Of course, in the colonial situation, that exaggerates the difficulties, but principle applies wherever you
start by saying, here is what it means to be a Christian. Now, we are going to attach other people to this by detaching them from the culture in which they live. So, it doesn't really make any difference at all whether the man sits there or the woman sits there. It doesn't make any difference at all whether the man sitting in the middle is a foreigner or a native of the country. It can apply equally in any
situation. But the point is that you withdraw the convert from his own situation, from his little piece of the mosaic, and you bring him into another place where he has to learn to live a different kind of life, where he learns the ways of the existing Christians, where he is trained up. And you can read classic manuals of not so many years ago on missionary principles, where it will be laid down that the missionary will pick
out the brightest boys and girls in the schools and the villages and bring them into the central school where he has a higher elementary school and then eventually a high school and then eventually a theological seminary so that he is training. He will pick out the bright young things and bring them in, train them up, and then when they are fully formed according to the image which the missionary accepts as the true image, when they are
properly trained theologically and so forth, when we can rely upon them, when we can rely upon them, then they can be sent back to become the… so-called native leaders in the villages. This is the classic pattern by which… I'm not just talking about foreign missions in Asia and Africa. It's the classic pattern that has shaped our missionary principles. Now, says McGovern, this is to destroy the possibility of real church growth. The way the church really
grows is by what he calls people's movements. And that, in this point, McGovern is simply true, I think, that if one looks at history, and certainly he is looking at the mass movements in India in the earlier part of this century, what happens is that somehow or other a spark begins to develop into a little flame, and then it becomes a flame, and in a whole community a conviction begins to emerge that they want to follow
this new way. But it is all still within their own culture. It's all within their own way of life. And the sound principle for the missionary is simply to nourish that where it is, not to try to train up, educate, teach, perfect these people into the model of a fully trained literate, if possible, graduate Christian in the Western model or the model of the foreign missionary, but to allow the gospel to take shape within this culture
in its own forms. And this means that you do get a spontaneously growing church. The other method, the method of the mission station, sterilizes all the movements of conversion because it removes the first converts, especially the brightest of the first converts, the ablest, right? of their own community, attaches them to an alien community, and then sends them back again to become essentially the agents of an alien community. And in fact, if you look at the history
of the world, the vast majority of the peoples of the world have become Christians, not through what one might call the mission station approach, but through what one might call the people's movements approach. Gospels spreading along family lines, whole peoples moving together. And McGavern insists that it is wrong to make people, to insist upon a break with the natural community in the way that missions have done. To insist upon a break. To insist upon a break
with the natural community produces uprooted individuals. It does not produce growing churches. He insists that this is a wrong application of St. Paul's word, that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, etc. That this is a wrong application of Paul's words. And that, on the contrary, Paul insisted that the Gentiles would remain Gentiles even when they are Christians. They are not to be made into Jews. And so, your little community here
is to remain essentially what it is as a community. It is not to be. It is the body of God which can lead, assimilated into the Christian community. And of course, this therefore touches the whole question of ethics. At the end of yesterday's lecture I talked about conversion necessarily involving a change in the pattern of behavior. But McGavern insists that it is not the business of the missionary to insist upon a change in the pattern of
behavior that belongs to the business of teaching which comes later belongs to what he calls perfecting and we have no right to demand a particular change in the style of behavior for example the insistence upon monogamy in the evangelization of Africa was a wrong missionary principle the insistence upon education I was horrified to find when I first visited West Africa that in the Methodist Church in West Africa one could not be confirmed and become a communicant
member without being literate that illiterate was not allowed to be a communicant I said shall be we rewrite the New Testament and say Jesus Christ came into the world to save literate they said oh but we can't allow standards to fall well that is a sure way of sterilizing church growth except in the temporary period when everybody wants literacy and therefore they are prepared to become Christians in order to to get literacy which produces a certain
kind of church but I think McGovern is perfectly correct in this kind of insistence that who identified Christianity with a certain set of moral standards whether it be for example monogamy as against polygamy or whether it be literacy as against illiteracy or whether it be a certain stance in request in respect of social issues of liberation and so forth, that this is wrong, and that it produces a sterilization of church growth. There are many illustrations that
one could give from experience in India. There are early missionaries who adopted the policy of removing their first converts from the villages to which they belonged, and creating Christian villages where they would live all together as a Christian community under the leadership of a Christian pastor, and so forth. One can say quite confidently that those Christian villages, create some of the worst problems that one ever has to deal with today. I always remember an illustration that
struck me as having a lot of lessons to teach. When I first went as a young missionary to Kanjipuram, there was a village called Muthuvedu, where there were only two Christian families. And I wondered why this church was so totally static, until I found that my predecessor, in an attempt to help the two converts to survive in this wicked world, had purchased a piece of land and divided it into two and given it to these two
families. Well, of course, the conclusion was obvious, that if there were a third Christian family, that land would have to be divided into three, and therefore it could be absolutely guaranteed that there would be no further Christians in that village. It's a small thing. It's a small thing. It's a small model, of the kind of issue that MacGavran is talking about. And finally, Mac Gavran's insistence is that if we get our principles right, then there is
no limit to the possibilities of church growth. One of MacGavran's favourite adjectives is the adjective fantastic and, er, he is constantly telling us, that if If only we will follow the right principles, there are, as he says, fantastic possibilities of church growth. And he gives many illustrations from different parts of the world that this is so. If I could summarize McGovern's position in the terms of his speech at the Lausanne Congress, he made there six points.
That there are vast numbers of unreached peoples, his famous two and a half billion, which he speaks so much about, and that specific efforts must be made to reach them. Secondly, they must be reached in terms of their own cultures, because God accepts world cultures. Thirdly, even in areas where there are already strong churches, there are unreached peoples who will not be reached except by deliberate transcultural outreach. Deliberate transcultural outreach. If I could give an illustration
from my own. In my own home country, in the 5th century, 6th century, there was already a Christian church in Britain. The ancient Celtic church. But there was no possibility that that Celtic church could evangelize the Anglo-Saxons. Because the hatred against them was so deep. Because the Anglo-Saxons. The Anglo-Saxons had ravaged the country, destroyed the church, decimated the population, and driven the remnants of the old population into the western hills. And there was
no possibility that the British would evangelize the Anglo-Saxons. There had to be a transcultural mission from Rome, Gregory sending Augustine to Canterbury, in order to begin the evangelization of the Anglo-Saxons. It was no good for Gregory to say, there is already a church there in Britain, I don't need to worry. The British could not evangelize the Anglo-Saxons because the gulf between them was so deep. So, says MacGyver, and there are many situations where
there is a church there already, but it cannot evangelize the other group which has not been reached. There has to be a deliberate transcultural outreach. Fourthly, it is God's purpose that there should be a church within each cultural group, within each homogeneous unit. If I take an example from not my native country, but my adopted country, in India, MacGyver would say that there should be a separate church, for each caste. One of his disciples has done
a study of the church in Madras, which I know fairly well. And the Christians in Madras regard caste as an evil thing out of the past which they must get rid of. And when there are caste disputes within the church, people feel ashamed of it. But MacGyver said, he says that we should deliberately encourage the development of caste churches, churches for separate castes, that if we would do that, we would evangelize the city of Madras in
no time, because the church should be represented within each homogeneous unit. Fifthly, that there is today an unprecedented receptivity, that is quotation from his speech. Among the great masses to whom the future of the world belongs. And therefore, sixthly, that spontaneous church growth is not enough. It is not enough
to say there are churches all over the world, let them grow. There have to be deliberate transcultural missions. So that in each of the units of this mosaic which makes up the human scene, there will be a distinct church which can win that unit for Christ. Well, that is stating MacGyver's position positively, as he did at Lausanne. Well, that is stating MacGyver's position positively, as he did at Lausanne. Now, that is stating MacGyver's position positively, as
he did at Lausanne. And that is to repeat the negative points which I think are very strong in MacGyver's position, his negative criticisms of traditional missionary methods. But the positive point I think on which we have to concentrate is MacGyver's insistence that the one criterion by which missions are to be judged is the criterion of Christ. growth are they in fact discipling the nations not that perfecting is not important but it is not the business of
missions that is McGovern's position well now I think we must look at this in the light of Scripture it seems to me that I I don't apologize for devoting a whole lecture to this because McGovern's position is a very important one one that is widely influential and is is clear-cut and calls for an answer and I think that one could begin to say certain positive things about what McGovern teaches firstly they have to do with
the fact that there is just a simple obvious point that anyone who knows Jesus as Savior will want others to know him and in that sense church growth is obviously something that we ought to want and ought to be concerned about if it is not happening and secondly of course it is natural that any human organization will tend to measure its success in terms of numbers it's a simple measuring rod and thirdly there are of course
texts in this New Testament which show an interest in church growth and these texts I think are all in Acts and they are texts of which McGovern makes great deal of use let me just direct your attention to some of the texts that McGovern frequently refers to Acts 2:41 the end of Peter's sermon those who received his word were baptized and they were added that day about 3,000 souls verse 47 the Lord added to
their number day by day those who were being saved chapter 4 verse 4 many of those who heard the word believed and the number of the men came to about 5,000 chapter six verse one number of the disciples the disciples were increasing in number and therefore problems arose between the greek-speaking and the Aramaic speaking members of the congregation verse 7 the Word of God increased and the number of the disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem
and a great many of the priests were abused to the faith. Chapter 12, verse 24, the word of God grew and multiplied. Chapter 16, verse 5, the churches were strengthened in the faith and increased in numbers daily. These are the texts, I think the only texts, where the New Testament certainly does show an interest in the numerical growth of the church, and McGovern makes good deal of use of them. I would also say, as a fourth
point, that it is very clear, as I have said, that there are bad reasons for stagnation. For lack of church growth. The kind of reasons that McGovern draws attention to. Reasons which are basically concerned with legalism, with the imposition of a law at a point where it is not appropriate. Now, we are going to have to come there. There are very, very difficult questions. I said yesterday that one cannot conceive of conversion without some change in
the pattern. I think no one would be content to say that one could be satisfied with mere baptism and church membership which carried with it no kind of change in behavior. And yet McGovern also is right in saying that the church has often stifled church growth by a wrong insistence on certain kinds of change. I have often reflected on an experience of my own, where in an area, in that area that I told you about earlier,
where we had a very rapid period of church growth. One of the new converts, a man called Jesu Dawson, was of the Paria community. Paria, the word Paria means drummer. And his work was drumming. He was a very skillful drummer. And therefore, naturally, a good deal of his work was in connection with Hindu festivals, where he was called upon to be a drummer. After he was converted and baptized, he continued that occupation. And during a period
of three or four years, he was the means of bringing many scores of people to Christ. He was the means of bringing several whole village communities to Christ. I never raised with him the question whether it was right for him to continue to play his drum at Hindu festivals while he was a Christian. But after a period of some years, he himself came to me and said, I think I ought not to be earning my living
anymore in this way. I think I must find another way to earn my living. I think if I had said to him at the beginning, you can't be baptized unless you stop drumming, I think that would have been the end of that movement. And I cannot myself doubt that it was right, that it was left to him to come to that decision, that the Holy Spirit led him to that decision himself rather than that I should
impose that decision upon him. But there would have been certainly, I'm sure that my predecessor, the senior missionary whom I succeeded, I'm sure he would have not baptized that man unless he had promised to stop drumming at a Hindu festival. So I think I would hold that McGovern has much truth on his side when he says that church growth has been stopped through a wrong kind of imposition of standards of behavior. But now I've come to
critical points as against McGovern's position. Apart from those texts which I have read, I find in the New Testament as a whole a very different picture from what McGovern gives. There is no suggestion, for example, that Jesus is interested in large numbers. On the contrary, even in Luke, the Gospel which is written by the same author as the author of Acts, even in Luke we find such phrases as Luke 12:32,
fear not, little flock, it is your father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom... and an enormous amount of social services, in fact just that and I think that my friend was right in saying yes of course we're trying to convert you because what we're concerned about is that people shall be so changed that
they become agents of change we're concerned with a radical change but it is not just something for this man as an individual for his own personal security it is something which is part of the action of the kingdom of God if we go back to the very beginning of the gospel as we have it in in mark you have this first announcement the kingdom of God is at hand immediately followed by repent and believe turn round
face the other way believe and then immediately followed by the story of the calling of the first disciple follow me I think we have to take all of this into consideration and I think we have to take all of this into consideration and I think we have to take all of this into consideration and I this whole lot together to understand what conversion mean it is to be so turned round as to become part of God's
saving action through Jesus Christ by the power of the Spirit and if conversion is understood in that way then it seems to me that all of our activity in mission is directed towards conversion being so turned round that we are followers of Jesus and part of his action for the kingdom of God now that means three elements in conversion which all of which I think are essential there is the first element which is a personal relationship
with Jesus Christ if that is not present then relationship with Jesus Christ if that is not present then you get into the realm of the law then conversion is just commitment to a ooh you get into the realm of the law then program and that can happen the first the first thing is a personal kills rear tua with Jesus Christ and I think that I find myself falling back on this very simple point again and again
we are seeking to bring every man and woman into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and if that's not there then as I say you end up with some kind of crusade, some kind of program, some kind of movement but in the end it's in the realm of the law not the gospel then secondly it means participating in the community of those who follow Jesus it means participating in a community a community which is sent into
the world to be the agents of the kingdom and then thirdly it means what shall we call it a pattern of behavior a way of living, a style of life what is involved in following Jesus a personal relationship with Jesus Christ a sharing in the community of those who follow Jesus if we are not willing to share with those who follow him we cannot follow him ourselves we cannot follow him alone and thirdly a pattern of
behavior which is conformed to him to the cross now of course the relationship between these two is very difficult to define what is the pattern of behavior what is the pattern of behavior there cannot be a true conversion which does not involve some change in the way we behave and yet if you identify conversion with a particular change in the way we behave then you get legalism as you know there are certain situations where conversion means
stop drinking stop smoking stop dancing stop going to the cinema okay these may be good things to stop but and it doesn't say anything about enormous spectrum of human behavior outside of that you can continue to live a basically worldly or even demonic kind of life but if you don't do these things you're all right or in another context it's another thing the pattern of behavior is something to do with your attitude to racism or sexism
or or capitalism or something well sexism that's women we've just come out of a situation where that is the situation and you identify conversion with a particular ethical standpoint on a particular issue and and then you're you're not in the field of the gospel then you're in the field of the law so this is a very very delicate thing and we're going to come to this when we look I think it's tomorrow at the whole question
of church growth McGovern's yes it's tomorrow so we will go into that more fully but there is a whole I think that we have to say that conversion must always involve a change in a pattern of behavior but it is a change I believe which will finally be determined by the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the person and not by a law which is laid down from above by the evangelist the missionary
the church but all of this depends upon our being clear about what it means to be a chosen to be called and chosen if it means that we are called and chosen to be saved then conversion will always be subject to suspicion but if as I plead in the Bible to be called and to be chosen is to be called and to be chosen as agents of God's salvation as signs instruments agents heralds of God's salvation
for the whole world then conversion will not be subject to that criticism on the one hand if the first is the case the church is called to conversion comes to look like the call of a separatist group interested only in its own salvation and therefore a threat to the unity of mankind but if it is understood in the second way the call to conversion is seen as a call to be the servants of the true unity
of mankind which can only be a unity based on Jesus Christ and we come back then to the basic meaning of baptism itself which is the point at which I think most of these questions find their focus traditionally and rightly it has been understood that the work of a missionary is directed towards conversion and baptism and this is right provided that we know what baptism means baptism if it is the baptism of Jesus and not the
baptism of John not baptism for my salvation baptism is my incorporation into that one baptism of which Paul speaks that one baptism which is the baptism of Jesus begun in Jordan filled out through the ministry in Galilee and Judea consummated in the cross the one baptism which is Jesus identification of himself with the sin of the world to bear and bear away the sin of the world if we understand baptism that way that it is my
incorporating into my being incorporated into that one baptism of Jesus which is for the sin of the whole world and therefore I become part of this action of Jesus for the salvation of the world then baptism is the true end of all that we are seeking to do conversion and baptism and I believe that within the whole mission of the church which is directed to conversion and baptism dialogue is a proper part not the whole of
it but is a proper part of it a necessary part of it because above all it is the place where real communication can take place and where the church itself is being changed as we see the church being changed through the meeting of Peter and Cornelius so that it can be guided into all the truth to use the language of John 16. so that the church itself may become more truly the sign of the unity of
the whole of mankind into which all the treasures of the nations are brought and therefore a sign of that city of God which we see coming down from heaven in the book of Revelation into which the kings of the earth bring their treasures Relationship coffee we will look at some of the rather heated remarks about dialogue which we find in these texts. [?] We've been talking a good deal about the aspect of mission which concerns God's work in history about mission and development
mission as action for social justice and so forth but of course that forces us back to the question who is to take the action if you have read chairman Mao's little red book which is not as popular as it used to be and you find on the first page the very sensible remark that if you want to have a world revolution the first thing you need is an effective Communist Party and so if we're talking about
mission as God's action in history for social justice we have to ask about who is the body of people that is going to carry this out and we therefore come back to the church I have taken as the starting point in all of these lectures the initial understanding of the role of the church in the development of social justice and also the given statement of the gospel and so speaking of social justice and also the given
statement of the gospel at the beginning of Mark the time is fulfilled the kingdom of heaven is at hand repent and believe the gospel but then in the very next verse we see that this is immediately followed by the call follow me follow me follow me and that is obviously of the essence of the matter and those who are called to follow are called to follow the word of in order to be sent I will make
you fishers of men and it's I think of inexhaustible significance that Jesus apparently was not interested in leaving behind an authentic written record of his teaching there is no trace of him ever having written anything except when he stooped down and wrote on the ground when the adulterous woman was brought before him but that the central concern of Jesus was to create a community which would be his representatives and ambassadors to the world the creation of
the church in a sense is the central interest of the gospel and that church is created in order to be sent go into all the world and disciple the nations and therefore there is a reasonable there is a rationality about the view which puts the growth of the church at the center of the missionary concern this is of course not a new idea the idea that missions are about making people Christians is certainly not a new
idea but it has been elevated to the position of a sort of mission theory by the work of Donald McGovern and his church growth school Donald McGovern was a missionary of the disciples in Central India for two or three decades and was working in as an evangelistic missionary in rural areas during the period in the early 1950s. of what are often called the Christian mass movements, the period when considerable numbers of people, whole communities, were coming
and offering themselves for baptism at the same time. This was happening in some places and not happening in other places. And Donald McGovern became concerned about the question what are the factors which favor and which hinder this kind of movement. It was not difficult for him to show that in roughly similar circumstances there were some places where the church was growing with immense rapidity, thousands of new members every year, and in other places where the same
kind of conditions seemed to progress. The church was static. And therefore he became concerned about the factors which favor and which hinder church growth. He published a number of books. I suppose the main ones called How Churches Grow and The Bridges of God, I think are the two major ones. Then after he retired from India, he established a thing called the Institute of Church Growth, which is attached to the Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, and
which is... It's the center of a very vigorous teaching movement that extends throughout the world. The Institute of Church Growth has commissioned studies all over the world to investigate why churches grow and why they don't. Something like 20 volumes have come out of the Institute, at least 20 volumes, discussing particular situations. There is a church growth bulletin, and there is an increasingly massive machinery of propaganda in favor of the basic concepts of church growth, which McGovern
has worked out. Now, what are the basic convictions that... that... that McGovern came to? I think perhaps, if I may just go back for a moment, the two primary books of McGovern are the one called How Churches Grow. I think the first one is called Bridges of God, and the second is called How Churches Grow. But then there is much more later material by other writers. And the most recent... and I think most mature statement of
the church growth philosophy is a book called Understanding Church Growth, which is a festschrift for McGovern done by a group of his disciples. Well, what are the basic principles of McGovern's thinking? The first is that the priorities... of the Great Commission must be observed. McGovern draws attention to the actual wording of the text of Matthew 28:18 and following, where Jesus says, go and make disciples of all nations. Literally, one should translate that, go and disciple
all nations. It is a single verb with a direction. It is a direct object. Disciple the nations. It doesn't imply that you pick some people out of the nations and make them disciples. It says, disciple the nations. It's a verb with a direct object. Baptizing them and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded. Disciple, baptize, and teach. And McGovern says, that this order is decisive. And that the specific task of missions is to disciple
and to baptize. That it is not the specific task of missions to teach. And McGovern uses very frequently the word perfecting to describe what is included under this third heading. The business of missions, says McGovern, is to disciple the nations and to baptize them. And teaching, perfecting, helping them to grasp all the implications of discipleship is something which will come gradually and will take time. But the immediate task is discipling. And it is discipling the nations,
not individuals. Of course, I'm rather exaggerating to bring out the point. But McGovern insists that the nations are the essential objects of God's commission. And the nations are the human communities in which mankind lives. McGovern has one of his key phrases, is what he calls H-U-P, the homogeneous unit principle, H-U-P. H-U-P is one of the sort of slogans of the school. The homogeneous unit principle. I was hoping to have for
this lecture McGovern's address at the Lausanne Congress, but I've not been able to find the Lausanne Congress report in the library. I've asked the librarian to find it. McGovern, in his address at Lausanne, likens humanity to a mosaic. Humanity is not a single sort of pavement. It's a mosaic made up of innumerable pieces, each of which has its own color. And God likes it that way. That's the way God's made it. And the essential point is
that each piece in this mosaic should be discipled. And therefore we have to take the nations seriously. Each unit must be reached by the gospel in terms of its own culture. Because, to quote McGovern, God accepts world cultures. But we'll come on to that in a moment. But the essential thing is that the priorities must be right. And the business of missions is number one and two. Disciple and baptize. And the yardstick by which the work
of missions is to be judged is simply are they or are they not making converts, baptizing the non-believers. The question of perfecting, of teaching and so forth is of course absolutely necessary, but it is not the job of missions. That is a job to be done by other people later. And, says McGovern, it is the failure to observe these priorities which produces stagnation in the work of missions. That missions become, as it were, bogged down
in the task of perfecting. And they lose the drive for discipling. They become primarily interested in perfecting the disciples that they've got. Let me read one paragraph here. Perfecting often hinders discipling. True, it sometimes assists discipling, particularly where church growth is going on. But it is common for churches to get wrapped up in types of perfecting which result in no discipling at all. Where the population is not very responsive and there are abundant mission resources, tremendous
expenditures of mission effort in a perfecting which does not break through to discipling is a common phenomenon in world missions. Loving assistance of congregations which seldom have a conversion from the world, training ministers who are content with or resigned to non-growing churches, and rich services to the people of the world in the vicinity of such churches absorb disproportionately large shares of the men and money of mission and church. When this takes place in the face
of open doors and ripening fields, perfecting hinders discipling. And McGovern, with considerable justice, sees the world missionary enterprise of the churches and here of course he is thinking of the mainline missions primarily, tied down in a vast program of education, of medicine, of industrial training, social services and development services of all kinds, all of which are no doubt excellent, all of which are no doubt in accordance with the will of God who wills to have abundant
life for all men. But it is not the job of missions. It causes missions to neglect their primary job which is to disciple and baptize. It's the result of getting your priorities wrong. This leads on to, or it is intimately connected with, McGovern's second great point. And that is the distinction which he makes between what he calls the mission station approach and the people's movement approach. The mission station and the people's movement. So all those things are not an issue here...