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Concept and Movement of Church Growth
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Paul Jang
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2008-03-29 01:53:58, hit : 4,004 |
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Concept and Movement of Church Growth
The term "church" has just been designated qahal (or kahal) derived from an obsolete root qal (or kal), meaning "to call"; and 'edhah, from ya'adh, "to appoint" or "to meet or come together at an appointed place" in the Old Testament, and ekklesia, from ek and kaleo, "call out," and sunagoge, from sun and ago, meaning "to come and to bring
together" in the New Testament (Berkhof 1971, 555). Dr. Hyung Nyong Park also has explained the church as an assembly or a congregation consisting of the members who are called and come together out of the world (Park 1973, 17). In fact, "church" is to be preferred on etymological grounds as such (Kittel 1965, 3:531).
In the light of such interpretations, the term "church" must be close to the "growth" (of church) because they imply the same meaning "to call and come together." Church
growth at first must be achieved by calling and gathering many people into the Church of God, namely an organization as the kingdom of God: an important strand of Christian tradition identifies the kingdom with the church as a visible institution on the earth even though their relationship has been represented in various ways (Snyder 1991, 67). Of course, it must be given by God (Bartel 1979, 1). This may mean an evangelism for quantitative growth of church, but maturity of church members for qualitative growth begins with their involvement in church activities.
A. R. Tippett has emphasized the necessity of continuity of growth, both quantitative and qualitative (Tippett 1978, 27). In this sense, church growth can be compared to the growth of a physical body (Huffard 1983, 93) and to the growth of a tree (Dudley and Cummings, Jr. 1983, 13) because in them are life.
Church growth is not an event nor does it deal with spiritual addition, but a process of spiritual reproduction which produces Christian converts and Christian churches (Miles 1981, 50). The church, therefore, must plan not only evangelism but care of the convert (MacRAE 1982, 81). In a word, church growth must be quantitative and qualitative.
The term "church growth," in church history, has been derived from the theory (McGavranism) of Donald A. McGavran who founded the Church Growth Movement in 1955 (Wagner 1976, 13; 1989, 21). From that time the principle of church growth has begun to be positively applied to the churches in the world. Of course, early in the Church Growth Movement the evangelistic elements of the Great Commission were emphasized, but it must be based on total church involvement including discipleship. C. Peter Wagner says:
Church growth means 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. (Wagner 1989, 177)
Church growth through the disciple making program speaks to human and divine aspects of church growth and it features the key biblical concepts (Matt. 28:19-20; Acts 6:1, 7; Eph. 4:15), imageries (Matt. 13:33; 5:16; 2 Cor. 4:6; Acts 26:18; John 4:35; Matt. 13:31-48; John 15:5, 8; Eph. 2:21, 22, etc.), and the dynamics of the disciple making which produces lasting church growth as asserted by John T. Sisemore (Sisemore 1983, 6).
The divine aspect of church growth could be identified with God's supreme order for evangelizing and discipling the people, and the human aspect with man's obedience to perform His supreme order through the programs for church growth such as evangelism, Sunday school, disciple making, and so on.
So many movements for church growth have risen in Christianity, generally classified as church movement and parachurch movement. The latter is a movement outside the institutional church for evangelism or mission such as Campus Crusade for Christ (CCC), Navigators, University Bible Fellowship (UBF), Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF), Joy Mission, Youth for Christ (YFC), Student Bible Fellowship (SBF), It includes all sorts of mission movements: is an inside revival movement in ministry such as revival meetings and Bible study meetings usually called Sa Kyung Hoe in Korea (Ro and Nelson 1983, 322). It is no doubt that such movements have contributed to the growth of the church.
Recently a new sort of lay movement called the discipleship training for church growth led by pastors of the local church has widely taken root in the local church in Korea. This has added to the effective growth of the church. Rev. Han Hum Ok, senior pastor of Sa Rang Church located in Seoul, Korea who has been a successful model case of the church growth pastor through the disciple training program, has insisted that the training program is necessary a task of the pastor of the local church, in his work, Call to Awaken the Layman (Ok 1984, 35).
As a matter of fact, the business of making disciples throughout the world for church growth also is the primary work of the church (Green 1972, 81). C. PeterWagner has pointed out that the growth of church much depends upon how pastors motivate their laypeople. He stresses:
Pastors of growing churches, whether they be large or small, know how to motivate their laypeople, how to create structures which permit them to be active and productive and how to guide them into meaningful avenues of Christian service. (Wagner 1976, 69)
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Introduction
Ch Growth 