Church Health and Growth class resources

• Donald McGavran, former missionary to India, explored the principles and patterns behind healthy, growing churches.
• Church leaders need to move beyond mere program implementation to finding and applying reproducible principles that truly foster church health and sustainability.
• Pastors and other church leaders need to shift from a passive "cruise ship" mentality to an active, messy, and impactful approach to battling darkness while compassionately loving others.
• People interested in studying church health and growth can find a wealth of resources, including videos, presentations, and articles that tackle topics ranging from spiritual growth strategies to demographics and evangelism tactics.

This church health and growth class will focus on developing healthy, growing churches and planting new ones. This is not about a list of programs to be implemented but a serious study of questions like:

1. Why are some churches healthy and growing and others are not? Is it simply something random, or are there things to be learned?
2. Are there reproducible principles or patterns which church leaders can prayerfully employ in a variety of congregations?

The course will lean heavily on the foundational work of Donald McGavran, the man many call "the father of the modern Church Growth movement."

Course resources

• Syllabus in PDF format

"Most of us go to church expecting it to be a cruise ship. 'Provide me with this program and that program. Cater to my every want and need.'

"But Christianity isn't supposed to look like that. It is supposed to be a battleship fighting the powers of darkness, and that isn't pretty. It can be really messy loving our neighbor and having compassion on the forgotten ones of this world." Sarah Dupray, Northwest Nazarene University student

• PowerPoint presentations
  • Church health and growth studies     |     open as PowerPoint
  • Donald McGavran biography     |     open as PowerPoint
  • Definition of "Church Health and Growth"   &nbvsp; |     open as PowerPoint
  • Church pathology: diseases that inhibit local church development     |     download as PowerPoint
  • Obstacles churches face     |     download as PowerPoint
  • Student-prepared PowerPoint presentations of material in George Hunter's To spread the power
    • Chapter five: Multiplying recruiting units     |     download as PowerPoint
    • Chapter six: Ministering to people's needs
    • Chapter seven:
      • Indigenizing the church's ministries -- Hadaway     |     download as PowerPoint
      • Exegeting the culture     |     download as PowerPoint
• Lessons learned from research on the health of churches[ read article ]
• Five Five church planting steps
• Why do pastors resign their churches?
• Pie graph: Ages at which most Americans come to Christ
• Class handout: Identifying receptive people
• Indigenizing ministries: key questions
• Resources for local church study
  • Analyzing numerical graphs
  • Sample graph comparison assignment submission
  • Assimilation analysis
  • Leadership survey
  • Exit interview guidelines and suggestions
  • Sample surveys
    • Survey of performance and programs
    • Interest and skills survey
  • Local church research
• What do you see? — exercise about how people viewing the same data can come to different conclusions
• Group presentation resources
  • Don't be an unwelcome group member
  • Creative teaching methods
• Institutions: Help or hindrance to Church health and growth? Growth? — a position paper by Malachi Makhubela
• Does the Colonel have something we don't have? -- thoughts on Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants and church planting
• Exam study guides

• Donald McGavran article on "conglomerate" churches
• The Gray Matrix builds on the Engel Scale. Developed by Frank Gray of FEBC, the Gray Matrix helps us visualize where individuals stand spiritually. It, therefore, points out the need for different strategies to reach them. It also helps us to understand and validate different types of evangelism. | PDF
• Religion statistics: Statistics covering membership in various "religions, churches, denominations, religious bodies, faith groups, tribes, cultures, movements, ultimate concerns, and such like. It has indexes of religion by country and statistics on the largest communities of religions by countries and states of the U.S
• Resources for planting churches in the U.S. among specific unevangelized minority groups.
• Demographic information on the area around your church

"Reaping isn't all there is to evangelism. In fact, reaping isn't even the hard labor. Any farmer knows that. It takes one day to harvest what you've cultivated and nurtured for months. Furthermore, the disciples would reap a harvest they hadn't sown. I planted, Paul said, Apollos watered, and God gave the increase. Paul handed off some souls to Apollos. God gave the increase. The soil must be cultivated, the seed planted and nurtured, and then comes the harvest."

      — Joseph Aldrich in Gentle Persuasion, published by Multnomah Press

Tempted to cheat on some schoolwork? Before you do, read SNU's academic integrity policy

"Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood.: -- Acts 20:28

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