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The Ethnocentricity of the American Church Growth Movement
by Michael Horton

In October of 1999, a group of missiologists, missionaries, and church leaders gathered in Brazil for an important event sponsored by the World Evangelical Fellowship, based in Singapore. These leaders from fifty-three countries, many of them from the two-thirds world, rallied to the cause of world mission--but with a somewhat surprising twist. As Christianity Today editor David Neff reported, attention came to focus on the criticism of North American paternalism (December 6, 1999). And the form of that paternalism? Pragmatic marketing paradigms, among others.

As Neff reports, Peruvian missiologist Samuel Escobar went after the "management missiology" whose "distinctive note ... is to reduce Christian mission to a manageable enterprise." "Escobar called this statistical approach 'anti-theological' and said it 'has no theological or pastoral resources to cope with the suffering and persecution involved because it is geared to provide guaranteed success.'" He was not alone, as Neff's report observes. "Joseph D'Souza, chair of the All India Christian Council, also indicted missiological trends that 'have tended to turn communication [of the Gospel] into a technique where we market a product called "salvation." The consumer is the sinner and the marketer is the missionary.'" Frustration was expressed concerning the obsession with quantifiable success, where crusades, marketing, and other campaign blitzes were expected to usher in the consummation by the year 2000. But American strategists are not apparently shaken in their confidence. Steve Hoke of Church Resource Ministries responded with a familiar refrain, "If all truth is God's truth, we can borrow principles from marketing. Jesus was very felt-need-oriented in his approach." ...

... Having been a part of a similar gathering of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, with similar concerns, issuing a similar statement (viz.., the 1996 Cambridge Declaration), I was particularly intrigued by the fact that two-thirds world missiological sentiment appears to be far more self-critical than North American Evangelicalism. Our concerns have been somewhat marginalized, while much of the same thinking appears to be emerging out of a quite different context. In my own limited missions experience and travel to two-thirds world churches, I have seen this played out time and time again, with the clear sentiment expressed, "Keep American pragmatism and consumerism out of our churches!"

All of this has led me increasingly to think that many of the movements in American Evangelicalism--especially those purporting to be multicultural and outreach-minded--are actually promoting and exporting a curiously sectarian and ethnocentric religion. No wonder my Reformed and Presbyterian brothers and sisters in rapidly growing churches in Nigeria, Brazil, and China complain of American paternalism. ...

...We must resist the logic, then, which suggests that we need to rid our churches of a substantially Word-and-Sacrament based ministry in order to be truly engaged in outreach, mission, and multicultural unity. A growing chorus of church growth "experts" encourages us to abandon even the sermon in favor of a more entertaining medium, despite the apostolic promise that "faith comes by preaching" --not only in "tradition-bound" churches, but "for the Jew first, and also to the Greek." Modern evangelicals in America have not given up being tradition-bound (as if anybody could), but are merely bound by a narrower, younger, ethnocentric tradition that is deeply indebted to the very worldliness it routinely decries. The logic that comes across in the church growth literature is not only market logic, it's the logic of white, upscale suburban marketing. Ever read a good book or know of a famous church whose goal is to show you how to build a megachurch in a depressed urban area? It's a religion of the mall, by the mall, and for the mall.

Furthermore, make of them what you will, the ancient creeds, confessions, and liturgies represent the most genuinely multicultural agenda. The Gospel preached has been "the power of God unto salvation" in every culture since Jesus issued his great commission....

...So what if Boomers are too lazy to listen to a sermon, participate in a liturgy, and sing the faith of generations that lived before we were graced with their appearance on the stage of human history? And why should a generation that has largely sacrificed little, prospered enormously, lost interest in God and truth, contributed self-esteem to philosophy, and the sit-com to cultural enrichment decide how much of Christianity we keep for the next generation? Are we going to abandon the "cloud of witnesses" across time and geography to satisfy the narcissism of a single generation in a single place? The day that "outreach" is set against God's ordained means of grace is the day that we cease to plant churches of Christ and instead open franchises of religious consumerism. Who feels more at home in the spiritual equivalent of a shopping mall than a middle-class American? Some multiculturalism, isn't it?

Our brothers and sisters gathered in Iguassu, Brazil, this past October might teach us a thing or two about what it really means to be multicultural.