The Science of Church

A piece was recently posted on an admittedly unscientific survey of CRCs that have grown by 20% in the last 5 years. It drew some comments on CRC Voices and other places. I thought it might be good to just reflect on a few things in the light of the inevitable conversation such pieces prompt. This approach has often been called the “church growth” approach. Sometimes it is a associated with business methods, and I’ll get to that association in a bit.

The scientific method continues to have great power in our culture as a means by which we can discover and create community around truth. Should we apply this method to church?

1. It is inevitable. The process is so deeply ingrained in the way we approach the world, we will employ it and it will be employed upon the church from the outside.

2. Why not? We are inquisitive creatures and we will analyse, form opinions and biases about the church. The method just presses us a bit to challenge our biases and communicate with others.

3. We should. If we are to be stewards of the institution we should use our best tools to study it. There is much we can learn with these tools and the application of them can reveal sinful conditions, habits, behaviors and blind spots.

Limitations

Having named some positive things about the approach I think there are some negative aspects to it as well.

It is reductive. The scientific method attempts to understand cause and effect relationships by reducing the number of variables in play. While this is a helpful move in the context of very large and complex objects of study like people, groups and institutions the process by this nature tempts us to reduce the whole into something overly simplistic.

An example of this was a generation ago the impulse to move from organ music to contemporary music. It was observed that growing churches had contemporary music and so when churches wanted to grow they threw out the organ and brought in the guitars and drums. To the dismay of many it didn’t “work”.

By its nature almost any treatment using this method will approach reduction. What we will tend to do to limit the reductive element here will be to develop a list of factors, 3, 7, 10, 12 or even 20 factors, etc. The problem with this is that the more factors you recognize you blunt the approach. Now instead of just inviting the learner to engage one or two variables you greatly expand the variable stretching our capacity to focus and control thus the tool loses its usefulness.

As human beings we can only focus on one thing at a time. As we try to scale up we may multiply the number of people involved in the process by having managers or “champions” of certain goal areas but the more people you add into the mix the more complex again the whole thing gets. Then we inevitable need to have people these “champions” report to for accountability, control or focus but this again then reduces what the organization prioritizes and can focus upon.

The truth is that reality, people, institutions, communities, and organizations are all enormously complex and even as we study them, needing to focus to analyse we can never see the whole in all of its complexity and all of the factors in play.

Humanity’s Chief Sin

Part of the tricky part of this is the motivational matrix. The project is deeply connected to control. The promise is that if I can find the key variable through technique I have the power of controlling the outcome. It may be a good outcome in my opinion, but it is a narrative where I am the life giver, the outcome producer and when it comes to people there is something deeply idolatrous at work.

Churches and pastor will dress it up in all sorts of ways but I really don’t think we can get around this. Throughout human history the subjugation of the rest of our species has been our great preoccupation. It is exactly how CS Lewis imagines the devils.

To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing. One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself –creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because he has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His. We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons. We want to suck in, He wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself; the Enemy wants a world full of beings united to Him, but still distinct.

Screwtape letters, pg. 46

To my shame and judgment I would use even the church as my tool in this. Can there be a more terrible sin?

My good friend Curtis Earnest when first he learned that I was a pastor said to me “Pastors are kingdom builders. They build their own kingdoms.” This is from a guy who works in the political sphere so he’s seen plenty of secular kingdom builders.

Church growth methodologies so often excite this part of my heart. I would, like Sauron in the LORD of the Rings make the world my own by looking for “the key” and I would do it behind a churchy, Christian disguise.

Empire

The other most obvious thing about this is that it just doesn’t work.

Let’s admit first of all that the church borrowed a lot of this from the business world which is both much freer to pursue it with fewer scruples and more resources than the church has. Business is all about finding a market and trying to dominate it. It’s all about trying to gain a monopoly.

When monopolies are achieved we quickly find them deeply problematic. Our greatest monopolies are actually state institutions. Our states then try to dominate the world, and we call this empire. The Bible can in fact be read as one long critique of human empire. The only empire the Bible finally sanctions is the Kingdom of God because the Bible asserts that only God can be trusted with a monopoly.

The church has tried monopoly at various times and places. In every case it has failed. Now America tries a market approach, and that while avoiding some of the control issues has its own shortcomings.

The Seeker Movement

In my lifetime the Seeker movement was the poster child for the church growth movement. With all of the tools available to it an industry arose (and continues to arise) to teach us how to build “a prevailing church”.

In many ways the seeker movement died of its own success. Many of its precepts have taken over the majority of American churches today. Contemporary music has become the norm, rather than traditional. Sermons are practical guides to wisdom and living “God’s way”… Do all who employ such methods “succeed”? Is this kind of church on a path to cornering the market?

What we see is that this mode of church follows a trajectory like Starbucks. For a while it seems that there is one on every corner and we will not be able to open our mouths without filling it with a Starbucks drink or treat while listening to Starbucks music. But of course at some point the anti-Starbucks movement arose (think Emergent Church movement) and fractured the market again.

So Yes and No

So on one hand I’m still a sucker for studying the church. I always learn something and as I said it’s a good thing to do.

At the same time I always see it with some suspicion because of my sinful heart. I need to keep it at arms length and remember that God alone can be trusted with monopoly because of his humility, that my heart is deceitful and can’t really be trusted with too much power or information, and that all people are image bearers of God and must be loved and not used.