Living Large: The "Church Growth" Movement in a Global Context

This paper approaches the field of world Christianity by reexamining the global megachurch phenomenon of the last forty years.  Megachurches, or Protestant evangelical congregations with over 2,000 weekly attendants, have become ubiquitous features of American Christianity as well as the global South.  Although much of the journalistic and scholarly literature describes the megachurch movement (usually pejoratively) as the “Americanization” or “corporatization” of evangelical Christianity, I will argue that contemporary megachurches must be seen as the product of a different set of cultural sources, namely, the “Church Growth” movement, an international network of missionaries, pastors, educators, and church consultants who were (and continue to be) dedicated to creatively rethinking the tools and methods for efficient and successful evangelization. 

In particular, I will examine the life and work of two early pioneering figures in this movement, Donald McGavran (1897-1990), the founding dean of Fuller Theological Seminary’s School of World Missions (now the School of Intercultural Studies), and C. Peter Wagner (1930- ), the subsequent dean. I will show how McGavran and Wagner, missionaries to India and Bolivia respectively, used their experiences in international missions to develop the programmatic principles behind “church growth”: the leveraging of social scientific and demographic research to map out mission fields, organization of small “cell” groups to ensure proper instruction and discipline, reliance on familial and social connections of converts to increase rates of conversion, and an insistence on measuring “success” in terms of growth rather than sustainability.  Instead of seeing the contemporary megachurch movement as a case of “American”-style churches being “globalized,” I will argue then that the megachurch movement must be viewed as the product of methods already developed in a variety of global Christian settings, which were only later appropriated by American pastors.