Chapter 30

Other Models, Strategies, and Assessments

Thus far we have looked at both denominational and congregational models for the future, along with vignettes of innovative ideas, projections, programs, and organizations that seem poised to meet the challenges of the next century. In the final chapter of this section, I want to survey an additional sampling of innovations and ministry trends that, I believe, gives clues to America's future religious landscape.

   Churches "in the new century will have a lot of innovation," speculates Win Arn of the Institute for American Church Growth. "Some will be successful, some won't. Those that will grow will have a philosophy of ministry and a clear target audience and will build in things to make that [philosophy] happen. Those doing business as usual are the ones that are going to go down."1

   The survivors will be innovators.

Page 292

   Small groups, or cells, make up the vibrant, throbbing pulse of what Elmer Towns calls the "Body-life" church.2 In these cell groups, people get real. Caring happens. Spiritual growth surges. Members look to one another — not a pastor — for support, fellowship, and ministry.

   Towns and George Gallup both see cell groups as the wave of the future. To be a whole church, it must have the cell as well as the celebration, Towns quipped at a conference on innovative church leadership.3

   Gallup, speaking to a group of business and religious leaders, went so far as to say that small groups are "the most encouraging trend in religion today." For in them, he added, members learn the Bible, and how to pray and are empowered for social service.4

   "Covenant" cell groups are called together for a certain purpose and time period. Another style of small groups meets indefinitely. Perhaps the nation's most effective cell ministry of this type is administered by the Rev. Dale Galloway at New Hope Community Church. This megachurch has more that 5,000 members and a 3,000-seat sanctuary; it's 110-foot cross towers above the Clackamas Town Center mall, dominating the skyline along the I-205 on the east side of Portland, Oregon.

   The experts say boomers prefer short-term commitments, but New Hope members seem to be an exception. They like belonging to ongoing groups. Unlike people at Willow Creek Church, who are assigned to specific cell groups, people at Galloway's church attend whatever TLC group they prefer.

   "Cells are not another ministry of our church," Galloway told Towns. "Cells are the church." Indeed, in 1990, some 500 lay pastors directed TLC (Tender Loving Care) groups weekly. Galloway's goal is to have 1,000 lay pastors directing 10,000 cell-group members by 1995, holding to his vision of one cell group for every ten members.5

   The threefold TLC purpose is discipling, evangelizing, and shepherding. Every group, Galloway explains, is expected to lead one new family to Christian faith every six months. The one-hour meetings begin with short conversational prayer and end with fellowship and food. Galloway writes the Bible-study lessons to go

Page 293

along with his sermon topics; the lay pastors teach the lessons in interactive style.6

   The TLC group "makes" his week, one man told Towns: "The first thing we do is get caught up on the news of the week in everyone's lives. We talk to one another, then we pray for one another. Then we discuss the lesson. Everyone gets into it with their opinion. Finally, we order in pizza and keep on fellowshiping while we eat pizza and drink coffee. I wouldn't miss it for anything!"7

   New Hope TLC leaders fill out weekly ministry reports which are discussed and analyzed at staff meetings. That's accountability for you.

   Galloway, who comes from a Church of the Nazarene background, is convinced that his approach is the model for effective churches of the 1990s: "The successful church will be relational, need-oriented, relevant, and aimed at helping people."8

Affinity Groups

   Green Valley Evangelical Free Church near San Diego, a 500-member congregation led by pastor-author Robert William Hull, had experimented with small cell groups based on affinity.

   Affinity groups are tightly knit cells organized by age, interest and marital status rather than by geographical location or schedule. For example, the church has had groups composed only of Sunday school teachers for toddlers, of men interested in sports, and of single parents of junior-high-aged youngsters.

   "A small group is a way of life all your life," declares Randy Knutson, who shared pastoral leadership with Hull after Green Valley was founded in 1983. "That's where the nurture comes from. The small group leader is the one who will show up at the hospital bed" when you're sick, Knutson explained. Each group meets a minimum of a year, but never longer than eighteen months, Knutson told me.9 Then it may split or take on a different focus. The cells are small and each cell leader has an apprentice. The leaders and apprentices are part of another group called "leadership community." Leaders with a "specific affinity" for special types of people are encouraged to develop their ministry gifts.

   "We create evangelistic fishing poles . . . using affinity to draw

Page 294

people in," Knutson says. "We are trying to bring back to the cardio-vascular system of the church more biblical teaching and integrity."

   Churches committed to the idea of cell ministry attempt to identify the "gifts" of members. Some use assessment devices, such as the Church Growth Institute's "Spiritual Gifts Inventory Questionnaire," to help people discover and understand their spiritual gifts. This can happen "in less time than it takes to drive to your nearest McDonalds" promises the accompanying literature.10

Ministries to Those with Disabilities

   Because of the encroaching transformations in family life, it is no surprise that churches of the 1990s and beyond will need to revamp (and re-ramp) their ministries to persons with disabilities. "Families of persons with disabilities have come to expect something approaching the lifestyle of typical Americans," family ministry specialists Richard Olson and Joe Leonard point out.11

   Also, technological advances as well as longevity extension have increased both the opportunities and the difficulties and dilemmas of living — and dying — with handicaps.

   Olson and Leonard conservatively estimate that 10 percent of the U.S. population, or about 25 million persons, have some kind of disability. Perhaps as high as 20 percent of all families are affected to some extent. "Think about your congregation," they suggest. "Try to name the households in which someone is coping with physical disabilities or chronic illness or permanent injuries, caring for a frail elderly relative, concerned about a family member with long-standing psychiatric problems, or raising a child with developmental disabilities. How many can you identify?"12

   Churches and synagogues of the late 1990s and early 21st century will be pushed by conscience and advocacy groups to do a better job of counseling, supporting, and planning programs for persons with disabilities. These families are certainly entitled to their place on the church agenda!

   Also, with new employment regulations mandated by the 1991 Americans With Disabilities Act in place, groups like the Christian Council on Persons With Disabilities will gain a significant and

Page 295

much-needed visibility. The organization is a national consortium of some 180 leaders and ministries that advocate a Christian perspective regarding people with disabilities and their part in the church.13

Targeting

   Millennial ministries that address only a few specific needs in their area of influence — rather than trying to be all things to all people — will do well; those that don't won't.

   That's a key finding of a Barna survey about what successful churches have in common. According to the 1990 report, growing congregations "refused to be enticed into areas of ministry in which they discerned no special calling. Instead, they concentrated on doing what they were called to do," such as focusing on teen-agers, single adults, the disabled, or the elderly.14

   That is a cornerstone philosophy of Willow Creek with its marketing survey. Target marketing is aiming the message and ministry at the group of people most likely to need and desire it, rather than broadsiding a larger, more heterogeneous audience. "Each church has been called to uniqueness and ought to explore ways of exploiting its uniqueness in service to God," the Barna report says.15

Metro Assembly

   When Bill Wilson went to a Spanish Pentecostal Church in Brooklyn in 1979, he decided to relate to the street urchins in one of the nation's toughest, crack-infested ghettos. Fielding forty full-time and 200 volunteer staff, Metro now transports 8,000 children in thirty buses to Sunday school each week.

   The staff and volunteers faithfully visit all the children and their families every week. The children are "mostly poor, mostly living in horrifyingly dangerous areas, many in families that don't care one way or the other whether their little church member lives or dies," writes John Gallagher, telling the story of Metro's street ministry.16

   Wilson, a dynamic and moving speaker whose raspy voice betrays his frequent outdoor preaching, still drives one of the buses every

Page 296

weekend. When he picks up the little kids, he often says to himself, "That was me,"17 for before his conversion at age fourteen, he was indeed one of them.

   By targeting his ministry to a specific urban wasteland, one man and a small band of believers have built one of the largest Sunday schools in America — a ministry corps now influencing evangelical outreach around the world as the program is duplicated in other big-city ghettos.

Campbell Farm

   On the opposite side of the continent is a unique ministry that is a combination farm and conference center.

   Cragg and Barbara Gilbert, both graduates of Princeton Theological Seminary, grew up in the northwest, shared a background in northwestern agriculture, and wanted to start a nontraditional ministry. They got the chance in 1980 when a woman bequeathed a forty-acre farm to Central Washington Presbytery. They turned Nellie Campbell's legacy into a fruit and vegetable enterprise — with a difference.

   The Gilberts also turned it into a conference ground where hundreds of youth and adults, up to thirty at a time, come to do farm work, study the Bible, worship, and "learn to recognize their place in creation a little better." The programs, explains Campbell Farm board member Judith Hill, "are always theological, agricultural, or global, often a combination . . . And because of its congeniality and location, the Farm has hosted hard, gap-bridging discussions between farmers and farmworkers, farmers and consumers, and urban and rural dwellers in such issues as pesticides, hunger, and the church's role in America's rural crisis."18

   After eleven harvest seasons, the Gilberts are reaping more than edible produce; their specially targeted ministry is yielding a bumper crop of applied theology. Ministries like Campbell Farm that combine areas of expertise with a need or opportunity won't expire in 2001.

Jesus People USA / Covenant Church

   A very different example is the commune-style, inner-city ghetto ministry of Jesus People USA. At first impression it seems more a

Page 297

throw-back to the early Jesus movement of the late 1960s and 1970s than a model for 2001. I'm counting on it to endure, however, because it has tenaciously found its target niche.

   Jesus People was started in 1972 with the arrival in Chicago of a West Coast couple who had "found Jesus." They began to minister to youth on drugs. Moving from its early housing in a former wrestling rink, the community, numbering about 450 in 1991, occupies a ten-story apartment building in the "Uptown" ghetto area. Members live communally.

   "We lived together for years before discovering that what we were doing was called 'Christian community,' " says Jon Trott, assistant editor of Cornerstone, Jesus People's award-winning and artistically avant-garde magazine, which prints 100,000 copies. "Likewise, we began feeding the poor and housing the homeless without much reflection on the supposed dichotomy between evangelicalism and social action."19

   JPUSA supports itself through a half-dozen or more community-run businesses (income is pooled for the community), and it sponsors a wide variety of local and national outreach ministries. These include:

   "Music is almost continuous throughout the day from celtic bagpipes on the lawn to rap over by the skateboard ramp," according to handout material. "Cornerstone offers a unique combination of . . . punk, metal, hard-core, thrash, rap, 'nu' music, blues, urban dance, and straight-ahead rock 'n' roll."20

   Jesus People's best-known outreach is probably its band REZ (short for Resurrection), a touring, recording quintet that grinds out startlingly raw music with blues-based hard rock and gut-wrenching

Page 298

vocals. The band, says lead singer Glenn Kaiser, is "intense rock 'n' roll with a conscience."21

   Lately, Jesus People — if not REZ — has mellowed a bit, becoming an affiliate member of the Evangelical Covenant Church. The unlikely mixed marriage with the pietistic, largely middle-class denomination of about 100,000 has been amicable, both sides say.22

   But JPUSA hasn't lost sight of its original goal — to reach the radical and often ragged fringes of society with a conservative, straight Bible message. Now twenty years old, JPUSA, like its heavy metal band, seems to have a way of reinventing itself to keep up with the times while never lifting an eye off the target.

Cooperation

   The art and spirit of cooperation is another vital strategy for 2001. It will spell the difference between failure and success for ministries that want to gain new ground.

   Cooperation worked recently in the rural hamlet of Deer Creek, Indiana (population 200). The town's only business, a gas station, had closed and the people of Deer Creek were isolated from one another. But Deer Creek Presbyterian and Faith Lutheran — two churches that had never joined in a project before — teamed up, with the help of a Lilly Endowment, to tap new resources for growth and change.

   The town needed help, said Mary Blue, chairperson of the congregation's Active Care Develops Community project. "The [Presbyterian] church was one community and the town . . . was another . . . Our paths never crossed. There was no central meeting place to get together to know each other."

   When a couple decided to buy the abandoned gas station to start a community store, members of the project joined in. "Now," recounts John Long, "Betty's Stop & Shop, with its little tables for having coffee, links community and church together."23

   A town sign with movable letters was set up in front of Betty's a community newsletter was published, and the Presbyterian Church's annual mission bazaar was expanded into a yard sale for the whole town. Funds from a beautification campaign were used to buy dumpsters. And so on . . .

Page 299

   Community spirit and cooperation also touched the project's board of directors; once half Presbyterian and half Lutheran, it now is divided into thirds, with the new representation being from the community. And leaders were talking seriously about building a new community center in 1991.

   Says Blue: "It doesn't take money to solve problems. It takes people . . . action by people who care." Says Long: "Now, other communities in the same region of Indiana are calling the folk in Deer Creek to find out how they did . . . [it]."24

Music and Entertainment

   The greatest revolution in the modern church, in the opinion of Elmer Towns, is in worship. It's also the source of the greatest controversy, he says.25 Nowhere is the dissonance greater than in discussions about what's "proper" in "Christian" music. Expect the syncopated tempo to pick up as we head for 2001.

   "Praise" music like that of Vineyard Christian Fellowship has already worked its way into evangelical churches. Praise songs also have the charismatic Catholic community singing and swaying. In addition, the songs and "majesty worship" style of Jack Hayford, pastor of the booming Church on the Way in Van Nuys, California, is making an indelible imprint upon the way many churches integrate music with worship.

   On that note, I am persuaded these trends and influences will play fortissimo beyond 2001, especially as new songbooks, lyrics, and Christian artists gain attention.

   "If you take time to study the impact of music on our culture," writes pastor Doug Murren of Eastside Foursquare Church in Kirkland, Washington, "you will find that the music of the baby boomer generation [predominantly rock 'n' roll] is likely to dominate the culture of our society well into the next century. Even our children," adds Murren, himself a boomer, "are very comfortable with our musical tastes and identify easily with them."26

   Murren and his staff have identified their target audience in the Pacific northwest: boomers who are "nominal Christians." The church's philosophy of ministry has integrated that target into its

Page 300

approach to music. In his book, The Baby Boomerangs, Murren says that all music in his congregation

   Eastside's music isn't just tuned to rock 'n' roll rhythm; the music leaders often take the tune of a popular hit from the last several decades — many in the service will recognize it — and rewrite the lyrics into a spiritual adaptation.

   Meanwhile, over at Overlake Christian, another Kirkland megachurch, up to 40,000 people are drawn each year to performances of the church's annual Living Christmas Tree musical extravaganza. In 1990, the audience lapped up the Overlake spoof of the Twelve Days of Christmas:

   "Ten Rose Bowl tickets . . . five credit cards . . . two studded tires . . . and a ten-pound jar of Vick's VapoRub."

   "This is our gift to the community," intoned tuxedo-clad Bob Moorehead, Overlake's pastor, speaking about the musical. Later, fifty church members took telephone orders for a free tape of Moorehead's sermon on the end of the world. The offer was also made on the air when the Christmas concert was broadcast on local TV.28 Other musical outreach programs at Overlake include an Easter pageant and a patriotic celebration in July.

   Bible-based preaching and first-rate entertainment are combined at Overlake. With more than 6,000 members, it is the largest congregation in all of Washington and Oregon.

   Indeed, innovative music and entertainment may draw people to this and other enterprising churches of the future, but it takes something more to keep them coming. Moorehead says it's the unequivocal message of salvation he preaches that gets them in the fold.

   My daughter-in-law, Lorie, who sang in the Living Christmas Tree, says it's also the friendliness, follow-up, and target ministering.

   Lorie and Colin moved from a Southern California church, where they knew everyone, to one in the Northwest, where they knew no one. After visiting five congregations, they settled at Overlake for

Page 301

four reasons: It was the only place where people greeted them after the service; lay ministers called in their home within a week of their visit (though they filled out cards at the other four churches, no one called); the callers inquired about Colin's and Lorie's "spiritual status," which they appreciated; and Overlake was the only one of the five churches with a Sunday school class for young married couples.

   For these reasons they put up with the traffic congestion, which — along with more restrictive zoning regulations for churches in suburban and residential areas — may hamper future big-church growth.

   "It's a fun church," says Lorie. "It's not boring."29

   And it's a worshiping church — which Pastor Hayford of the Church on the Way in Van Nuys says is the church of the future.

   "The freedom to worship openly and expressively, with substance, depth, and joy, will become the hallmark of those whose liberty is due to their having grasped . . . that truth frees — and the dynamic of a church liberated to worship is a dynamic that liberates others. Vibrant worship is the key to vital evangelism."30

Chapter Thirty-one  ||  Table of Contents