Much of the confusion that exists in the church today is because of competing agendas about what constitutes real growth.
One of the most influential persons in the church growth movement in the middle of the 20th century was a man by the name of Arthur Flake. His books were required reading in theological seminaries for years and he had a profound impact on Southern Baptists. One of Flake’s principles for growing a church’s Sunday School could be summarized in the words “build it and they will come.”
Flake assumed that Sunday School would always be the primary means of outreach for churches. For decades, he was right, especially in the post-World War II baby boom years. In growing suburbs across America, virtually all you had to do was build a church building, throw open the doors, and find yourself in need of even more space very shortly. Whole generations of pastors and educators were trained in that paradigm of church growth.
Someone has pointed out that Flake’s formula failed to take two major factors into consideration. For one, a day was coming in the post-modern world where, in many places, Sunday School would cease to be the most effective way of reaching people. The major flaw in Flake’s paradigm was that church growth was too narrowly defined by how many people you could get into the church building on Sunday morning, a standard most Baptist churches still use to define the success of their professional leadership.
Another factor overlooked by Flake’s formula was the natural tendency of church people to become territorial. After a few weeks in the same room, that room becomes the exclusive domain of the people who meet there for one hour a week. The result was the billions of square feet at a cost of uncountable billions of dollars have been built since WWII that sits empty for seven days a week, except for one hour on Sunday.
This way of thinking also overlooks the fact that numbers of people have very little if anything to do with whether one is doing the will of God. Frequently, in the Bible, the majority is wrong. If ones agenda is simply to fill a building then it matters very little how you go about doing it. That explains some of the ridiculous and carnal methods that are employed in the church today.
