Missional vs. Church Growth

Here's an excellent article by Gailyn Van Rheenen entitled Contrasting Missional and Church Growth Perspectives at www.missiology.org.

SheHe defines missional churches as "theologically-formed, Christ-centered, Spirit-led fellowships who seek to faithfully incarnate the purposes of Christ."

This definition is not all that helpful, because most churches would say that it describes them.

It is often more helpful to talk about what missional is not. And so she contrasts a missional approach to ministry with church growth philosophy.

Church growth employs "tools from the social sciences to analyze culture and to use this analysis to develop penetrating strategies for reaching both searchers and skeptics with the gospel of Christ." However,

Practitioners succumbed unintentionally to the humanistic suppositions of the Modern Era. Assuming that they could chart their way to success by their ingenuity and creativity, Church Growth practitioners focused on what humans do in missions rather than on what God is doing. They saw the missional task as setting goals, developing appropriate methodologies, and evaluating what does or does not work.

Here is a chart she provides that contrasts the various aspects of these two mindsets:

	Missional	Church Growth
Orientation/ Perspective	Theocentric	Anthropocentric
	Theological	Practical
	Postmodern	Modern
Theological Focus	Missio Dei	Great Commission
Beginning Question	What is the gospel?	What makes the church grow?
Perspective on Scripture	Narrative of God's purposes	Propositional truth
How does missions happen?	By the Spirit (God's "surprises")	By strategic planning
Nature of community	Inclusiveness, unity of the body of Christ	People groups
Focus of Evangelism	Initiation of people into the kingdom of God; holistic understanding of "making disciples"	Differentiation between discipling and perfecting, individual salvation
Orientation toward Social Action	The Gospel, evangelism, and social action cannot be separated	Priority of evangelism and church planting over social action; Reactive to the Social Gospel

(The emphasis is mine.)

Church growth is pragmatic by design, "Church growth determines effective practice and then seeks to validate this practice by the use of Scripture. The movement emphasizes growth rather than faithful proclamation of the gospel and faithful living of the gospel."

SheHe advocates what she calls The Missional Helix. It is composed of four elements: Theological reflection, Cultural analysis, Strategy formation & Historical perspective.

The diagram is a helix because theology, history, culture, and the practice of ministry build on one another as the community of faith collectively develops understandings and a vision of God's will within their cultural context. Like a spring, the spiral grows to new heights as ministry understandings and experiences develop (emphasis in original).

In my experience, there are many who see the missional approach as simply a new form of church growth thinking. Perhaps this article will help demonstrate the difference.

Pastor Rod

"Helping You Become the Peron God Created You to Be"