The early years of Church Growth
Ray Hurn, executive director of the Department of Home Missions, hired C. Peter Wagner and John Wimber, then director of the Fuller Evangelistic Association, for a day of consultation in the fall of 1977 to talk about church growth and the Church of the Nazarene. Together, the three of them mapped out a strategy for the entire denomination. Hurn later was elected general superintendent of the denomination and served in that position for eight years before retiring. Having a Church Growth person as the head of the denomination was strategic in allowing these ideas to move forward in its plans and programs.
Wagner and Wimber trained all of the district superintendents in fall 1977 and spring 1978 in basic Church Growth concepts. Wagner and Wimber taught at these events, which introduced Church Growth to the denomination. Hurn purchased the training packet, "A Church Growth Diagnostic Clinic" (1977), from Fuller Evangelistic Association and distributed it to the district superintendents who attended the training events. This was a seminar and notebook developed around Wagner’s resource book, "
Your Church Can Grow." Each of the district executives took the seminar manuals back to their districts to use in training their pastors.Following these initial training events for district superintendents, Hurn hosted another session with all district superintendents in Vail, Colo. At the Vail conference Hurn invited representatives from the Nazarene seminary, colleges, and Bible schools to participate.
In 1978, "
Get Ready to Grow" by Paul R. Orjala, the first book on Church Growth for the Church of the Nazarene, was released as a denomination-wide Christian service training tool."That was the book that really brought Church Growth to the Church of the Nazarene because it was a denomination-wide Christian Service training course," Bill Sullivan wrote. Orjala’s book was used as a denomination-wide Christian service training (CST) course in 1978 and sold more than 55,000 copies, the largest selling Christian service guidebook ever sold.
Division of Church Growth
In January 1981, Sullivan was elected as director of the new Division of Church Growth. A statistical analysis of Nazarene Churches in 1983 showed that "nearly 90 percent have fewer than 200 members. Indeed over half of the churches have fewer than 75 members." Thus, while completing his study of the Nazarene Church, Sullivan became interested in the challenge of churches enlarging past 200. After conducting further research to see what factors caused churches to remain below that mark, as well as how churches effectively broke that barrier, he published "
Ten Steps to Breaking the 200 Barrier." In 1988 the prototype of a new denominational magazine, GROW: A Journal for the Development of Missional Leaders&Missional Churches, was distributed at the General Assembly. The magazine promoted Church Growth thinking by highlighting the stories of growing churches, as well as by presenting growth insights and trends from recent research.Church-size strategies
In 1989, a new direction called "Church Size Strategies" focused Church Growth training into three categories. The Small Church Institute was designed for churches with just a few members up to 100 members in size. The Intermediate Church Initiative was developed for churches between 100 and 250, and the K Church Project was organized for churches with 250 to 1,000 members.
Dale Jones, manager of the Church Growth Research Center, wrote regarding church size strategies, "This concept recognizes that churches have different needs depending on size."
The Church Size Strategies developed by the Division of Church Growth was based on three principles:
1. The principle of delivery
How the denomination delivers training is a fundamental foundation of Church Size Strategies. For small churches a national training conference was designed to train one or more representatives from each district. The representatives then returned to their respective districts and began teaching the four lessons in Church Growth to their pastors. In the Intermediate Church Initiative, the key was to deliver the training to the lay leadership. While pastors of intermediate sized churches could be easily trained, the barrier to growth was that pastors could not gain ownership of growth ideas among their leaders after returning to their churches. Lay leaders blocked the growth of the church. The K Church Project was the easiest one to deliver because the pastors of the larger churches had the money and time to attend a training event. Thus, a School of Large Church Management was established to train pastors in how to manage a large ministry.
2. The principle of process
People do not change by going to one seminar. It takes a process of regular training to change pastors and church leaders. For example, K Church pastors attended training twice a year for three years. The principle of process was also developed in the Small Church Institute and Intermediate Church Initiative, as ongoing training was offered to gradually change the thinking of pastors and people.
3. The principle of networking
People learn best from each other as they meet and talk together about their challenges, struggles and attempts to see growth happen in their churches. Thus, regular times of networking were designed for each church size strategy session to give pastors an opportunity to learn from, and support, each other in the total process. The K Church Project has been the most successful, as far as measurable results are concerned. In the first 80 years of existence, the Church of the Nazarene saw only 12 churches reach an attendance or membership of 1,000 or more people. However, through the K Church Project, the total number of churches over 1,000 in attendance doubled to 24 in eight years.
Conclusion
The Church of the Nazarene is an excellent example of a denomination that embraced the American Church Growth movement wholeheartedly. While other denominations were declining, the Church of the Nazarene has seen attendance in Canada and the United States of America increase from 460,000 in 1981 to 525,000 in 2004, and is beginning to see a harvest that is likely to continue for years to come.
Adapted from the Journal of the American Society for Church Growth, Fall 2007.
