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 sustainabilty.
- 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.
"I will build my church, and all the powers of hell will not conquer it." -- Matthew 16:18,
New Life Translation
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:
- Why are some churches healthy and growing and others are not? Is it simply something
random, or are there things to be learned?
- 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
"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
- 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 were going to 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
Writing Standards
Most courses at SNU
contain a writing component.
I expect students to produce written work that is
focused, well-developed, organized and relatively free of grammatical, punctuation, and spelling
errors.
Papers falling short of this standard will not be graded. Those papers will be returned to the
students for revision and resubmission.
See my writing
checklist. |
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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Resources (OER)
-- Howard Culbertson,
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