“…obliviousness to results, deploying pastors without regard to their fruitfulness, pastors shrinking churches…and churches having a grand old time…without inviting, seeking, and saving those outside the church, do not make for faithfulness.”

It’s well known that all but a handful of Christian denominations are declining in membership and many have been since the mid-1960s.

At the Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly in July, a statistical report showed that it is down to about 2 million members, about half of what it had when the denomination was formed in 1983 through the reunification of the Northern and Southern branches of the church.

Not only the mainline denominations but also evangelical ones are declining. It’s part of a long-term trend. Our churches are aging and shrinking. The Greatest Generation is almost gone, Baby Boomers were never enthusiastic joiners and their children and grandchildren are even less interested.

Almost as soon as the decline started, a movement, fueled by denominational officials and consultants, sprang up to combat it. We still see the fruits of this “church growth movement” today in megachurches. The techniques do work. They’re based on tested marketing principles. Critics say that it produces “consumerist” churches that simply aim to please their members.

I mention all this because of a couple of interesting recent perspectives on church growth I’ve seen recently. The first was a provocative essay by William Willimon, bishop of the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church, that has sent out ripples of reaction.

The second was a passage in the recently published memoir of Willimon’s good friend and sometime collaborator, the equally provocative Duke Divinity School theologian Stanley Hauerwas, that seems to be at vehement odds with Willimon.

Willimon’s essay was first distributed in May to the churches of his conference and later published on several websites and finally in The Christian Century magazine. He began it this way: “How do we Methodists define effective clergy?
We do it with one word: growth. Effective clergy know how to grow the church in its membership, witness, and mission.”

Willimon went on to say that thanks to John Wesley, the early Methodist movement kept a close watch on the numbers of those joining its ranks, and if there were declines, steps were taken to remedy it.

He concluded with this: “(S)tudied obliviousness to results, deploying pastors without regard to their fruitfulness, pastors shrinking churches, pastors keeping house among the older folks left there by the work of a previous generation of pastors, and churches having a grand old time loving one another and praising God without inviting, seeking, and saving those outside the church, do not make for faithfulness.”

All this may sound pretty logical to many. Americans are all about results, and this sounds like the kind of bottom-line accountability that we have come to expect. But Willimon did get a fair amount of criticism from people who questioned whether numbers are really the best way to measure the effectiveness of a pastor or a congregation.

Then there is this from Hauerwas. He recounts how he and his wife had been members of a small, close-knit Methodist congregation that they loved, under the leadership of a faithful and spiritual pastor. But then the pastor had to retire for health reasons, and the district superintendent appointed a young pastor who recently graduated from Duke “who was as ambitious as she was misdirected,” in Hauerwas’ assessment.

The new pastor, with the blessing of her superiors, had a plan to increase membership in the church. Her methods included introducing a second worship service with contemporary music and random phone calling to invite new members. And, she said, the church had been too close-knit, meaning that visitors might feel excluded. The “services” offered by the church were more important than community, in her view.

When Hauerwas complained that her methods were wrong, she said surely he wanted to bring people to Jesus. He said he replied, “(T)he problem was not that she wanted to bring people to Jesus, but that she wanted to do so with means shaped by economic modes of life incompatible with the gospel.”

Do the means justify the ends? Who’s right?

My own sentiments lie more with Hauerwas than Willimon. The problem with numbers is that if a church grows, it is impossible to tell by numbers alone if it is shallow and self-centered or trying to do the long, hard work of becoming better Christians.

I wonder what Willimon would have done if he had been the bishop over the church where Hauerwas belonged. And I wonder what Hauerwas would have said to him.

Cary McMullen is the religion editor for The Lakeland (FL) Ledger

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