Church Health and Growth class resources

Donald McGavran, former missionary to India, examined 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 produce healthy sustainable churches.
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 that church leaders can prayerfully use 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 over 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 watched over and nurtured for months. What's more, believers often reap a harvest they haven'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 prepared, the seed sown and the plants 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

Open Educational Resources

This page and the resources on this site linked from this page are Open Educational Resources (OER)

-- Howard Culbertson,

Top Ten Pages on This Site

The Top Ten pages drawing visitors to this website as reported by Google in a recent period are:

Church Health and Growth class resources

Course resources

Open Educational Resources

Related articles

Top Ten Pages on This Site