The Big Sort (24 page)

McGavran's ideas weren't really rejected or reviled; that would come later. They were ignored. McGavran couldn't find a publisher in the United States for
The Bridges of God.
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When he moved back to the States, he opened the Institute for Church Growth at the out-of-the-way Northwest Christian College, an unaccredited school in Eugene, Oregon. He held small classes for missionaries—very small: the "institute" consisted of McGavran and two or three students sitting around a table. McGavran was ready to shutter his institute when he received a call from the president of Fuller Theological Seminary.
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The Evangelical school in southern California wanted him to move his operation to Pasadena. It was the spring of 1965—ten years after publication of
The Bridges of God
and ground zero for the shifts that would alter American political and religious life.

There is nothing remotely reminiscent of colonial India at the Second Baptist Church in Houston. American churches the size of Second Baptist—40,000 members and growing—have a Starbucks quality. The furniture may be arranged differently place to place, but the pieces are all the same. The big-church prototype isn't the heavenly aspiration of Chartres or the Zen contemplation of the Rothko Chapel. Its model is the cruise ship. Second Baptist—"Exciting Second," the church's phone operators answer—has a fitness center, a school, pool tables, football and soccer fields, daycare, a stadium-style worship hall, and a food court (offering chicken with sun-dried tomatoes and Asiago cheese, when I was there, to be served in the adjacent "Walking on Water" room). There is a well-appointed bookstore where one can buy a biography of Charles Colson, Karen Hughes, or Clay Aiken.

And there's parking. Goodness knows, they have parking. (The one time Rick Warren's Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, paused in its growth was a period in the late 1990s when traffic around the 118-acre campus began to clot. Saddleback spent $4.5 million on a mini—highway project, and the people returned.)
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For a time, Second Baptist named sections of its parking lot after locations in the Holy Land. (Second Baptist's pastors picked up this idea at a seminar that the Walt Disney Company held for churches.) A driver just needed to remember whether he or she parked in Bethlehem or Gethsemane. It was purifying for Jesus to wander forty days and nights in the desert, but in the planned-by-the-minute world of the megachurch, you don't want stragglers from the nine o'clock service blocking pilgrims arriving at eleven.

Second Baptist was "founded by 171 Christians" in 1927, according to a plaque on the church grounds, and had only two hundred or three hundred members when Dr. H. Edwin Young arrived in 1978. Young targeted an audience in the growing middle-class suburbs west of Houston. He sped up the service, added music, and, as the church grew, began to attach members of his larger church to smaller groups. The danger of a church this big is that people will have no personal relationships tying them to the larger group. How can a person be "found" in a crowd that would fill an NBA stadium? The solution adopted by large churches is a system of cells, or, at Second Baptist, "shepherd groups." ("Cells" sounds a bit Maoist.) Every organization at Second Baptist—from Sunday school class to choir—is divided again (and again), so that each person is a member of a group of no more than ten. For example, there are some five hundred people in the Second Baptist choir. The altos form one group within the choir, but within the altos there are a dozen shepherd groups of altos.

Sunday school classes also are divided by age, sex, and, most important, attitude. Twentysomethings at Second Baptist have the MTV-sounding "Real World" class. There's also the Greatest Generation-sounding "Boot Camp," "Basic Training" for the over-fifty set, and "Fresh Start" for single parents. The list of classes reads like a satellite radio channel guide. Parishioners are encouraged to shop for the group most like themselves. "If I go to the upper-forties group and it seems like they are fuddy-duddies because I'm in my younger forties, I may want to go to a younger group," the Reverend Gary Moore told me. "You just kind of go in and see the content of who's in there and if you like those folks or not ... By and large, people tend to herd up according to people they identify with."

Nine out of ten megachurches establish a cell structure of small groups.
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Malcolm Gladwell, writing for
The New Yorker,
described Warren's Saddleback Church as "the cellular church."
¹⁹
Gladwell attributed Saddleback's success to the "stickiness" of small groups. Cells have a tendency to bind people together within a larger institution. But church "shepherd groups" weren't a 1970s innovation devised in the American suburbs. They came from a Korean minister named David Yonggi Cho. Pastor Cho created the largest church in the history of Christianity in Seoul. His Yoido Full Gospel Church (a Pentecostal congregation) grew to more than 8,000 members in the 1960s. As Pastor Cho tried to care for such a massive flock, he was hospitalized for exhaustion. To save himself and his church, he began the cell system. He trained mostly women (men were reluctant to make home visits to organize the cells) to link groups of ten to sixteen parishioners to the larger church. The cells met weekly and still do. They minister to the day-to-day needs of cell members and recruit converts to the church. The Yoido Full Gospel Church now has more than 800,000 members, a congregation knit together by tens of thousands of cell groups. Pastor Cho believes that the cell groups are the primary reason his church has grown so large. The idea of the cell group, he has said, was a revelation from God. For American ministers, the "cellular church" was certainly a revelation from Pastor Cho.
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Attendance at mainline Protestant churches began to fall in 1965, reversing a two-hundred-year record of growth. At the same time, however, Evangelical denominations and independent churches started to pick up members. By the early 1970s, church leaders and scholars noticed two distinct trends: (i) people were leaving mainline Protestantism—Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians—and (2) people were joining Evangelical and conservative churches that were often independent of any denomination. A debate ensued about why conservative churches were growing while the sanctuaries at mainline denominations were emptying. Some argued that the 1960s counterculture led baby boomers out of their parents' churches. Others said that churches would naturally decline as society became richer—the old secularization argument that as societies grow more educated, people become less likely to be formally religious. Dean Kelley, author of
Why Conservative Churches Are Growing,
argued that mainline denominations had gotten flabby. They no longer provided much leadership or discipline. Liberal churches were declining, wrote Kelley, because they had lost, or abandoned, their ancient purpose "to respond to the basic human search for meaning."
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The old American denominations had loosened their grip—a relaxation long in coming, perhaps. Wednesday and Sunday evening services had been thinning out over the past several decades. The churches had become less strict. Before World War I, Presbyterians had rules against worldly amusements and immodest dress. Those strictures had faded, as had all the customs and laws that limited activity on the Sabbath.

The mistake made by the mainline denominations, said the conservatives, was that they had placed their concerns for society—civil rights, the environment, women's rights, the Vietnam War—ahead of saving souls. Mainline church leaders in the 1960s had preached that the "purpose of church is mission." Evangelicals were saying that the purpose of church was to fulfill the Great Commission.

According to the Gospels, Jesus issued the Great Commission after his Crucifixion. After he rose from the dead, he sent word to his disciples to meet him in Galilee. As instructed, the eleven came to a mountain, and Jesus appeared. He told them: "Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you" (Matthew 28:16–20). The Great Commission was the animating force behind Donald McGavran's work—to discover how churches grow. It was—and still is—the primary directive of Evangelicalism. Here is a fundamental difference between Public and Private Protestantism. While liberal denominations profess their faith by trying to make the world a better place, Evangelicals believe that the world would be a better place if more people became Christian disciples. From Donald McGavran's perspective, the church could build hospitals or gather God's lost sheep. The Great Commission told McGavran it was more important to gather the sheep.
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"Due to the social upheavals of the decade, church leaders who were deeply involved caused their denominations to put a ministry of social concern in a higher priority position than evangelism," wrote C. Peter Wagner, a former missionary and one of McGavran's colleagues at Fuller Theological Seminary. "This produced a wave of dissatisfied customers, so to speak, who deserted their churches in droves."
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(Wagner promoted homogeneous church congregations in his book, brazenly titled
Our Kind of People.
) The 1960s and 1970s brought a "collapse of the middle" in American church life, according to Martin Marty, then the dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School. The survivors in this religious transformation, according to Marty, "were polarized into right-wing churches" (a term Marty said that he did not use "invidiously") and "secular humanist culture, which could not have cared less what was going on in the subculture of conservative religion." The "middle" that was disappearing consisted of Marty's Public Protestants, the tradition of socially involved, liberal Christianity that extended from Walter Rauschenbusch's outpost in Hell's Kitchen to Eugene Carson Blake's stand on the frontlines of the civil rights movement.
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The middle has kept dwindling to this day. As late as 2004, a longtime student of church membership trends found that "oldline Protestantism only leads the Judeo-Christian tradition in the United States in the physical condition of its buildings."
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Marty wrote of the Evangelical churches, "After about 1968 their inning came."
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And they had a surprise cleanup man in Donald McGavran.

Nobody approached the Great Commission quite like Donald McGavran. Newly arrived at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, he began by displaying graphs and charts, business school—type data on how and why churches grow. Charles Fuller, the school's founder, was cool toward McGavran, whom he considered more a technician than an evangelist. After McGavran finished with his first statistics-chocked presentation at the seminary, Fuller made no comment, only asking the audience to join in a chorus of "Heavenly Sunshine," the confection of a song that always ended his enormously popular radio show, the
Old Fashioned Revival Hour.
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The emptying pews at the mainline denominations had spurred an interest in theories of church growth in the United States. Unlike the 1950s, McGavran now had an audience—preachers hungry for ways to bring Americans back to church. Students interested in domestic ministry took McGavran's classes, and then working pastors began attending. His message to American preachers was the same advice he gave missionaries in
The Bridges of God:
culture matters. (The first person McGavran hired at his Fuller church growth institute was an anthropologist.) Ministers everywhere should design their churches for a culturally defined "homogeneous unit," he advised.

The cultural tribes developing in suburbia were more apparent to others than to McGavran. In
The Bridges of God,
he wrote, "Western nations are homogeneous and there are few exclusive sub-societies."
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But American ministers consumed by the Great Commission and the ideal of "church growth" soon came to understand that McGavran's stories about evangelizing "peoples" in the Third World could be applied to the United States, particularly to the "homogeneous units" that were developing in American society. The ministers who formed the vanguard of what became known as the church growth movement studied the Old Testament and the census. They conducted market research. They took an anthropological interest in their communities, noting the kinds of music people who lived there listened to and the kinds of clothes they wore. They designed their churches to appeal to targeted groups, demographic types. People wouldn't be attracted to a church filled with a diverse membership, these ministers learned from McGavran. But they would come to a church custom-built for people like themselves. The megachurch's ample parking, kicking sound system, and casual dress were the bridges these ministers built to Dockers-clad tribes. McGavran's legacy wasn't a missionary reform. Instead, the bewhiskered gentleman with the sparkling eyes changed how a new generation of American ministers thought about the relationship between the community and the church.

Members of the "disappearing middle" objected to McGavran's tactics. To some, the goal of the church was diversity (a Public Protestant virtue), not growth (Private Protestantism as defined by the Great Commission). "The church is called by Christ to be a transformer of culture," wrote Robert Evans, a theologian at the Hartford Seminary Foundation. "I can find no emphasis in the New Testament on a self-conscious strategy for growth." Jesus' kingdom was a feast, and those "at the table would be Samaritans and Jerusalemites, Pharisees and slaves, harlots and the holy," Evans continued, taking dead aim at McGavran. "It is, if I understood the image correctly, the greatest breaking down of homogeneous units we will ever know."
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The World Council of Churches issued a warning against ministers finding safety in "the power of their race, class or nation."
²⁹
The magazine Rick Warren picked up in 1974 warned that McGavran could be "dangerous." These were words from the listing ship of liberal Christianity, however, and the warning was lost in the waves of ministers clamoring for their churches to grow.