AEC1999

Natural Church Development and the New Testament:
Comparison and Assessment

Tom Yoder Neufeld

I want to acknowledge at the outset of this presentation that I am not an expert in matters of church growth. I spend much of my time teaching the Bible, in particular the New Testament, in both college and congregational settings. I am, at the same time, deeply committed to the development and growth of the church. I am thus very grateful to have been invited to take a look at natural church development in relation to the New Testament. What follows is, of course, not the New Testament view, but one person’s reading of the New Testament. Even so, I believe I am expressing widely shared views of the New Testament, views shared well beyond Anabaptist circles.

To compare the New Testament with natural church development is somewhat like comparing apples and oranges. Unlike the natural church development material, the New Testament is not a manual nor a distillation of a research project. The New Testament is more a file drawer into which various kinds of writings have been placed over many decades by a church that heard in them the word of God. Some items reflect the missionary activity of the early followers of Jesus as they attempted to persuade others of his importance as Christ and savior. Other items are correspondence from church leaders to congregations around the empire. Absent from this rich portfolio of writings are manuals that reduce the manifold wisdom of God to principles or abstractions related to the process of congregational growth. True, there are fundamental convictions, hopes, and radical practices that mark the lives of early communities of faith, many of which, as we will see, are directly and indirectly related to the growth and development of communities of faith. But they have not been distilled into a program or a specific approach. The early witnesses and the Spirit guiding them saw fit not to homogenize, not to distill, but rather to hand us a bulging set of file folders reflective of their varied efforts at faithfulness.

Natural church development, on the other hand, is a decidedly modern undertaking. Massive amounts of data, collected from a thousand congregations around the world, have been processed and "abstracted" into eight quality characteristics and six biotic principles of growth. That specific number of qualities and principles has been distilled not from Scripture but from an empirical process of statistical analysis, resulting in the identification of those qualities and characteristics that all growing congregations share, regardless of size, location, and culture.¹

To evaluate natural church development in light of the richly textured witness of the New Testament is to evaluate apples in light of oranges. That does not for a moment mean that there is not great value to the list of Schwarz’s qualities and principles. Nor is to suggest that they are antithetical to the New Testament (see below). It is only to say that to compare the New Testament and natural church development is not like holding up a program to an original blueprint to see how it measures up. For such comparison the New Testament is ill-suited. Something else is required. What we need is a sense of the gist and vision informing the New Testament writers. Then we can evaluate natural church development in light of that set of impressions and ask whether it adequately reflects such a vision.

Given the particular nature of our Bible, tracing the gist or vision of the New Testament within the confines of this presentation is not easy. But let me try my hand at sketching it out in large sweeping strokes.

a. The New Testament is largely silent on methods of church growth. It is not the case that the early followers of Jesus were not interested in the growth of the church. They were—and passionately so—even if they had little choice in the matter. Acts suggests that numerical growth largely overwhelmed them. Apparently they needed to spend little time strategizing and maybe even less time counting.

What is particularly opaque is how "ordinary" church members fit into the picture of this growth. They must have been involved, but we are frustrated if we look for precise information. In the Gospel narratives they are present in the form of stand-ins, namely, the disciples of Jesus, whether we think of Peter and the Twelve or of Mary Magdalene and the circle of women who accompanied Jesus (cf. Luke 8:1-3). But nowhere do we get a picture, other than perhaps in the sending-out passages in Matthew 10 and Luke 10, of "ordinary" folk being organized for outreach and church planting. And those particular passages are not easily adapted for such a purpose. In those passages Jesus’ followers are sent out two-by-two as messengers of peace, announcing the reign of God in word and deed. Acts, with its primary objective of telling the story of the Spirit-driven spread of the Jesus movement through the exciting exploits of two of the more memorable missionaries, Peter and Paul, gives precious little information on church life or involvement of its "ordinary" members in the process of growth and outreach. The letters too give us little information on what was expected practically of church members in terms of outreach and evangelism. We know that believers gathered for worship were to behave properly because, in Paul’s view, such activity was public (cf. 1 Corinthians 11, 14). They were also to behave in their daily lives in a manner befitting their high calling (Ephesians 4:1) since their lives were to be lived to the glory of God, a temple visible to the world around (1 Corinthians 5-6; Ephesians 2:19-22). Beyond that we learn very little indeed that would relate directly to acts of outreach or strategies of church planting, at least as it relates to the participation of ordinary folk.²

b. On the other hand, and this needs to be stressed forcefully, the New Testament is decidedly interested in church development. Such growth is of prime concern for many writers of the New Testament. Not surprisingly, many of the images they use for the church imply growth as development: e.g., body, plant, tree, and vine. They also refer to the process of growth and development in architectural terms (e.g., temple, building, home, foundation), perhaps more interchangeably than does Schwarz who tends to see biological imagery as dynamic and architectural imagery as static (NCD, 84ff.). In 1 Corinthians 3:5-17 botany is seamlessly mixed with architecture. In Ephesians 4:16 biology is mixed with architecture: the "organic" body "builds" itself up in love (cf. also 2:11-22).

What we should not miss in this mix of metaphors is that they are employed largely in relation to intra-church relationships. Members of Christ’s body are to build each other up and, in the process, the body of Christ; they are to recognize their mutual interdependence even as they grow together into Christ (Ephesians 4:7-16).

c. Having said that, each of these metaphors of growth and development is related implicitly to the church’s mission. On the one hand, the need to stress intensive growth (development) is a direct consequence of successful extensive growth: the kinds of problems addressed in the New Testament are for the most part all related to the success of having drawn to the church the strong and especially the weak, insiders and especially outsiders, rich and especially poor, men and women, young and old. It is such success that would have rendered worship and ethics a battleground. These metaphors of growth reflect that this highly diverse community of believers is nothing less, after all, than the body of the Messiah. Is it conceivable that anyone in the first century would have mistaken that prime metaphor for the church as not only a matter of identity but also as a matter of task and mission?

To understand the identity of the church as the body of the Christ requires that one look at what the Messiah does or did. The portrayal in the Gospels of Jesus reaching out to those on the margins, blessing them with the promise of a world changing reign of God, was understood by authors and readers alike as an implicit challenge to the church. In recalling to memory their Lord, believers were addressed with respect to issues of prejudice, openness to outsiders, impediments to reaching out, etc. This is made explicit in the sending out of the Twelve and the Seventy in Matthew 10 and Luke 10 and in the farewell speeches in the Gospel of John (cf. especially 14:12: "Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father."). It is made most shockingly explicit in the call to take up the cross in Mark 8:34: "He called the crowd with his disciples and said to them, ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.’" What kind of a life leads to the cross? The life that seeks the reign of God and its peaceable brand of justice above all else. We would likely all agree that nowhere does that come to clearer and more succinct expression than in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7).

This emphasis on identification with the full range of features in the story of the crucified and risen savior comes to expression also in the letters. The imitation of Christ typically centers on the most radical features of love and self-giving, to the point of death (e.g., Romans 12; Philippians 2:6-11; Ephesians 5:2; Colossians 1:24; Hebrews 13:12-13). Good Friday is not separated from Easter, to be sure, as is illustrated in Romans 6:4 and Ephesians 2:5-10.

d. Let’s draw some conclusions for growth and development from this all-too-brief sketch. What is to grow? Is it not the sphere of God’s reconciling and restoring reign? It is the growth of the kingdom of God that matters finally and not simply that of the church. True, the church too is to grow and develop, but it is the church as the Messiah at work announcing and ushering in that kingdom. Church growth and development must not be severed from the prime concern for the reign of God.

This identification is confirmed in the case of Paul’s letters. Why else call the church the body of the Messiah, the body of the Christ? That is the case no less in the Gospels which recall a half century after the events they describe that it is the kingdom of God and its justice that is to be sought above all. At the cost of overstatement, the point of the Messiah’s coming, the point of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, was not to start churches but to announce and make real God’s reign. Why else tell the story of Jesus that way? Because early believers—Jews and Gentiles alike—knew that as the body of that Messiah they were caught up in that larger event. That is why they needed to pay so much attention to building each other up, because in the process they were building up the body of the Messiah. And the body of the Messiah was being built up so as to fulfill God’s dream of gathering up all things in and through the Messiah (see especially Ephesians 1:10, 2:11-22, 4:11-16).

This brief sketch reminds us that New Testament writers view the church not as an end in itself but as part—albeit an essential part—of the larger project of God’s restoring of creation. The church is called to participate in that larger project of extending and deepening God’s gracious reign.

The "how" of such participation is, as I said earlier, remarkably elusive as it relates to the New Testament, most particularly when we go beyond the actions of apostles such as Peter and Paul and ask about congregational outreach efforts. Perhaps the reason is that participation in extending the kingdom of God is by its very nature a highly varied enterprise and only in small measure institutional. Second, the whole frame of reference in the New Testament for both identity and task of the church is thoroughly eschatological. That is to say, early believers understood themselves to be the beachhead of the future now already breaking into the present. They believed themselves to be on the cusp of God’s cosmic revolution, one in which they knew themselves to be participants. Such a consciousness may not have invited a focus on church growth but rather on attention to what God was doing in the world and on living in keeping with the dawning day of salvation (e.g., Romans 13:11-14). That this would been expressed also in an urgency to get word out to as many as possible should not surprise us. How this evangelistic enterprise affected "ordinary" folk in the churches beyond living out the kingdom of God in everyday relationships remains peculiarly out of view. What is crystal clear is that they were expected to live selflessly, lovingly, peaceably within and without the church. As we might say it today, the practice of peace and justice was understood to lie at the core of what the church is about—a necessary "quality" of a community that aspires to derive its identity from Jesus (e.g., Matthew 5-7; 25; Romans 12-15; Ephesians 4-6, etc.).

So there is the apple. What does the orange look like? Or better, is natural church development in character and approach consistent with what we have found in the New Testament?

To begin with, we should keep in mind that unlike the New Testament, which is, as I have said, more like a portfolio than a manual, natural church development is quite intentionally a particular program, a specific approach to a specific objective: church growth. Without rehearsing here the details of the program, let me begin with what I believe is highly consistent with what we find in the New Testament.

First, and perhaps most important, the stress in the natural church development literature on quality, on growth and development as a God-given phenomenon, has a great deal in common with what we find in the New Testament. For example, according to Schwarz one can remove impediments to church development ("environmental resistance"; NCD, 10) but not "make it happen." Schwarz expresses this with the felicitous reference to "God’s growth automatisms" (NCD, 12). This mix of creation and salvation very much reflects biblical sensibilities. It is quite analogous to the wisdom traditions in the New Testament, whether we have in mind the parables of Jesus that focus on planting, growth, and harvest, or the biological and architectural imagery of Paul. In natural church development it comes to expression specifically in relation to the principles of growth and development, in particular to the biotic principles of interdependence, multiplication, energy transformation, and functionality, to name some of them. I found this to be a rich set of ideas, accessible to a wide range of church members, young and old, sophisticated and unsophisticated. Schwarz correctly sees this set of ideas as more than a metaphor, however expressive, on how God has fashioned creation.

If I have a caution here, it is the danger of absolutizing one set of metaphors, thus running the danger of reductionism. Even so, there is something wonderfully enticing and evocative in the clear and illuminating way Schwarz uses nature imagery and language to speak to some thoroughly biblical ideas.

Schwarz begins, however, not with growth principles but with the qualities or quality characteristics a church must have if it is to grow. I find this a helpful corrective to the rush to method and strategy, even if Schwarz remains vulnerable to allowing strategic interests to determine too quickly which qualities are to be stressed. It is consistent with his fundamental metaphor of biology to ask first what kind of a seed will grow and in what conditions.

So, let me begin by making a few biblical observations of the qualities Schwarz has distilled from his research.

Schwarz mentions first "empowering leadership" (NCD, 22-23). If he means not in the first instance "empowered leadership" but rather "leadership that empowers," as I believe he does, then this is highly consistent with what we find in the New Testament. Jesus taught it and modeled it (e.g., foot washing; John 13). Paul too taught it and modeled it (see especially 1 Corinthians 4; 1 Thessalonians 2). Even in late writings reflecting a later sociological reality such as Ephesians 4:11-12, the emphasis falls not on those who are clearly identified as leaders but on their function as equippers of "the saints" for their ministry of building up the body of Christ.

What I appreciate in Schwarz’s treatment of this quality characteristic is that it is not identified with any particular structure of leadership, even if I get the impression that he has in mind fairly traditional structures of leadership—all the more reason for him to stress this point, I should think. Of importance in leadership questions is whether members of the church are being empowered for ministry. This is an area worth pondering for congregations with highly defined leadership structures. But I would argue that it is equally relevant to congregations that have more egalitarian structures. In such settings one might well ask whether sensitivity over issues of power and authority aids or (ironically) undermines the release of power in, into, and through the church. Whatever the structure and wherever the pendulum may be taking us at the present time, Schwarz is absolutely in tune with Jesus and his first followers that leadership has one purpose, namely, the empowerment of the members of the body for faithful service and ministry.

It goes without saying that the emphasis on "gift-oriented ministry" (NCD, 24-25) is deeply rooted in the New Testament, most particularly in the Pauline emphasis on the Spirit and/or Christ giving the church what it needs (see, e.g., Romans 12; 1 Corinthians 12; Ephesians 4). I need not say much more here, only to affirm the ongoing importance of this stress. It is certainly at home in our ecclesiology and in our tradition.

Let me add this, however: as important as gifts are in the New Testament, we are once again baffled by how little attention is given in its pages to how they are discerned and nurtured. Are they discerned by the leader(s)? By a discernment committee? By members of the church on their own? Only in the late letters such as the Pastoral Letters do we find a mechanism described, namely, the laying on of hands in ordination. I note that Schwarz leaves the door open to a variety of models of gift discernment when he suggests that church leadership helps members identify and integrate their gifts into the mission of the church (IG, 56-57).

The emphasis in the New Testament falls on what the gifts are for, not who has them. Gifts are for the common good of the body and its mission, not for the one who has the gift (1 Corinthians 12:7; Ephesians 4:11-12; 1 Peter 4:10-11). This is most radically expressed in 1 Corinthians 13, where Paul states emphatically that even the greatest gifts are hollow if not governed by love.

Since I have mentioned love, I would like at this point to go to the last in Schwarz’s list of qualities, "loving relationships" (NCD, 36-37). I found myself wishing for much greater depth and comprehensiveness in this discussion. While in the Implementation Guide the specific nature of what constitutes love is largely left undefined, the examples of love Schwarz gives in Natural Church Development are how often people invite each other over for coffee, have extra-curricular events at church, how much laughter is present in the life of the church, or how frequently they affirm each other (NCD, 36). These are by no means unimportant, and I would certainly want to be part of a joyful congregation. But I think that the love of which Jesus speaks in John 15, for example, or of which Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians 13 is broader and deeper, most especially if its absence can render even the most spectacular of gifts null and void (1 Corinthians 13). Schwarz would agree, I’m sure. It’s just that such love is virtually impossible to measure and quantify, and measurability and quantification are, after all, necessary to the approach of natural church development.

Where love finds its most radical and comprehensive expression is in loving God and the neighbor as oneself (e.g., Matthew 22:36-40; Romans 13:9-10; Galatians 5:14; James 2:8). And as radically related as such love is to the exercise of peace, justice, truth, and reconciliation in human relations (e.g., Galatians 5:22,23), it is intimately related to living all of life as a passionate act of gratitude to God (Romans 12:1-2).

It is this passionate love for God that takes us back to Schwarz’s list of qualities—"passionate spirituality" (NCD, 26-27). This quality is thoroughly rooted in New Testament injunctions to love God with all one’s might, but also in the injunctions not to quench the Spirit (1 Thessalonians 5:19) nor to flag in zeal (Romans 12:11) and to pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17; Ephesians 6:18).

This quality lies also at the heart of the New Testament call for joy (Philippians 4:4). It is rooted in the disposition of gratitude for God’s grace. It finds expression equally in joyful praise and worship (Ephesians 5:18-20), in "hilarious" mercy (Romans 12:8), and no less in "hilarious" giving (2 Corinthians 9:7). Such joy is undaunted, even by suffering (cf. 2 Corinthians 13:8; Philippians 2:17-18; 1 Peter 1:6, 4:13).

In Schwarz’s stress on "passionate spirituality" lies a biblical challenge to discipleship-oriented communities, where the practice of discipleship comes so easily unhooked from the disposition of gratitude, from the insight that all "good works" are finally the result of God’s grace and salvation (e.g., Ephesians 2:8-10).

At the same time, one must wonder how closely tethered to each other are passion, spirit, and ethics in Schwarz’s mind. He is suspicious of churches that "tend towards ‘legalism’" (NCD, 26), clearly having in mind churches that stress orthodoxy and orthopraxy as well as church membership. Such churches reflect a lack of spiritual passion, in his view. I have no doubt that this is the greatest vulnerability of those who have made "doing it right" or, as we might say, discipleship, the central focus of their piety. But a stress on discipleship and a mix of legalism and off-putting judgmentalism are by no means necessary corollaries. Jesus asked his followers to "outdo the Pharisees" in doing right, in the practice of righteousness and justice (Matthew 5:17-20). If Matthew 11:19 is anything to go by, such "super-righteousness" did not for a moment put a dent in his or his followers’ social life.

While not said explicitly, I wonder whether Schwarz’s suspicion of such churches reflects a common notion that a stress on radical discipleship is necessarily related to inhospitality and legalism and thus represents a serious impediment to church growth. It is a notion not unfamiliar in Anabaptist circles as well, especially in our evangelistic and missionary endeavors in the past. The New Testament writers knew legalism and dead religiosity. Anabaptists have known it no less well. Interestingly, the Jesus New Testament writers remember was scandalously hospitable but, for all that, no less rigorous in his demands on those he befriended. They insisted in the way they wrote the Gospels that the one who preached the Sermon on the Mount must not be separated from the one who ate and drank with prostitutes and con-artists. Just so, the one who ate and drank with sinners must never be separated from the one who preached the Sermon on the Mount.

What God has put together we should not put asunder. Passion and zeal, joy and celebration, are not the enemy of radical faithfulness but evidence that it is the spirit of Christ that is inspiring faithfulness.

Schwarz’s stress on the functionality of structures is strongly consistent with what we find in the New Testament (NCD, 28-29). The early churches strike me as having been highly innovative and creative in their structures, modeled to varying degrees on synagogue, voluntary associations, philosophical "clubs," and not least on the extended family.

For all their innovation, however, early believers were drawing on existing traditions, even as they adapted and modified them to suit the needs of congregational life. Present day church growth approaches are no less "traditional," even if those traditions are the more recent traditions of market analysis, sales tactics, and effective management—all very familiar to our culture. Schwarz’s rather glib dismissal of "traditionalism" easily misses the degree to which the traditions of the market or present day institutional structures (e.g., Schwarz’s "department heads") are also "traditions," even if they are largely invisible to us as such in our own day, vying as they do in our churches for hegemony with older traditions. That is not for a moment to dismiss the very important insight in Schwarz’s call for "functional structures" as a quality characteristic.

I found Schwarz’s discussion of worship services very insightful, not least his intent to remove some of the fixation around certain kinds of music and the use of certain kinds of technology as particularly well suited to the church’s public witness (NCD, 30-31). The technologization of worship and most especially music is a matter well worth demythologizing. Schwarz does a good job here. I’m less sure that "inspiring" should be related as quickly as does Schwarz to "having fun." That gathered worship may on occasion be "fun" is not to be doubted. But that too easily puts "worship" into the category of entertainment rather than the service of God.

In the New Testament worship is an offering to God of life itself, as Romans 12:1 suggests. "Fun" is hardly a meaningful biblical quality. It is entirely possible that the folks in Corinth were having a lot of fun at gathered worship. Paul’s instructions regarding head-covering (1 Corinthians 11:2-16) and his placing of limitations on glossalalia (1 Corinthians 14) may indicate that they were having too much of it. Perhaps the food and drink excesses that led to Paul’s insistence on the tradition of the Lord’s Supper in 1 Corinthians 11:17-34 illustrate this as well.

But fun is not the same thing as joy; entertainment values are not the same thing as "inspiring." It is such "fun" that in our day contributes to the fixation on technology and contemporaneity, however much it has been alloyed with the desire to attract people to the church.

I would like to see "inspiring" refer to being filled with the Spirit, being empowered for transformation and nonconformity (e.g., Romans 12:1-2, 9-13; Galatians 5:13-26; Ephesians 5:2-21). Inspiring worship which is not inextricably linked to the practice of radical grace and justice in everyday life is not inspired by the Spirit of God (Isaiah 58; Matthew 7:21; James 2).

This is an important emphasis, the most important for growth and development of congregations, according to Schwarz³ (NCD, 32). No doubt this emphasis would have ready and enthusiastic support in early church life, as it does in Anabaptist circles today. It would seem, however, that in the first century small groups were not so much a strategy as a function of economy and social convention. Most scholars assume that the kind of church life reflected in Romans 16 (cf., e.g., also 1 Corinthians 1), for example, is house based, with believers utilizing the properties of members with rooms or court yards big enough to accommodate their gatherings. Necessity colluded with good sense in that the intensity of mutual relations, the alertness to each other's needs, and the honing of new life in Christ would all be nurtured most effectively within the intimacy of small group interaction. It is no doubt such intensity that provided the natural context for the familial language of "sister" and "brother." In highlighting the importance of small groups, Schwarz is on solid biblical ground.

It is fascinating to compare how the term euaggelizomai is used in the New Testament and how "evangelism" is used in Natural Church Development (NCD, 34-35). In the New Testament the term refers to:

Evangelism is as dynamic and as varied as is the multifaceted and diverse wisdom of God (Ephesians 3:10). At heart it is announcing the "good news" God’s saving intervention in a broken world. In the New Testament "evangelism" is not yet a particularly technical term, even if the inclusion of "evangelists" in Ephesians 4:11 suggests things moved quite early in that direction.

Two issues are worth raising here. First, in natural church development evangelism is largely subsumed under the personal individual engagement of the 10 percent gifted for this task.⁴ In other words, it is the gift exercised by evangelists rather than the "good news" enfleshed in the words and deeds and, indeed, in the culture of a faithful community of faith. Second, rather than seeing evangelism as "news" of the generosity and grace of God being proclaimed to an unsuspecting world, Schwarz views it as focused on where non-Christian individuals identify their own needs.

As to the first point, I do not for a moment want to disparage the need for members of churches to witness to their neighbors. There is an enormous need in many Anabaptist congregations for persons with the combination of conviction, love, and freedom to give voice to the good news of God’s grace and to invite persons to faith. And I dare say many a pastor can only fantasize what it would be like to have 10 percent so gifted. But personal individual witness is surely only one dimension of the church’s role in the informing not only neighbors, but the principalities and powers, of the manifold wisdom of God (Ephesians 3:10). The New Testament writers view the "good news" as extending beyond any one person’s need, as much as it encompasses it. It extends to the human community as a whole, most particularly to those pushed to the margins by oppression, poverty, and sin.

For evangelism to be a quality characteristic consonant with the New Testament will require that it go beyond individuals, as much as it will encompass them, and that it go beyond a personal individual encounter with God, as much as it will encompass it.

Second, evangelism should be need-oriented, but it will not rely solely on those in need to define their need. This must to be considered delicately, since there has been entirely too much speaking and too little listening in the evangelistic enterprise. At the same time, the "good news" is at root a matter of divulging a secret, of God surprising an often unsuspecting world of both grace and its need for it. That too needs to be part of the evangelistic enterprise. For such a varied agenda, requiring a highly diverse set of gifts and abilities, more than 10 percent of the church’s membership will be required.

Schwarz concludes his study of quality characteristics by insisting that all eight of them must be present: "No quality characteristic may be missing" (NCD, 38). His emphasis on giving priority attention to the "minimum factor" (NCD, 50-53), that is, to the weakest of the qualities in any particular congregation, is directly related to this strategic emphasis. This "minimum factor" is determined through a rather elaborate inventory of strengths and weaknesses arrived at via questionnaires and statistical analyses, which then allows for a scientifically sound, practically do-able approach to getting your congregation into the kind of state in which "God’s growth automatisms" can begin to work.

There is much wisdom in Schwarz’s approach. This is most particularly the case in his insistence that quality, when allowed to find expression in the life of the church, will make for growth "all by itself."

But it is precisely here where we must ask a number of questions: how does natural church development arrive at exactly this list of the necessary eight? Did they emerge from a study of the Bible? It would appear that they did not. They emerged as abstractions from the results gleaned from asking what churches that grow have in common. In other words, a quantitative approach has led to the identification of qualities. There may be nothing wrong with this, but it is at least worth noting.⁵

The more important question is whether such an approach to determining quality characteristics of growing churches catches the qualities that make a church worth growing. Is it possible that some things go missing in such a method? Does such an approach let us determine whether what is growing is fully in keeping with the Christ found in the New Testament, with the mission of the church as Christ’s body? Or does Schwarz’s approach necessarily relegate biblical testing to at best a secondary check on qualities identified otherwise?

By asking these questions I do not want to disparage the existing eight quality characteristics nor in any way to undermine what I think to be a stress entirely consistent with the New Testament, namely, that quality is inextricable from faithful development and growth. Nor would I want with these questions to cast a shadow on the biotic principles. All of them—multiplication, interdependence, energy transformation, and functionality, to name a few—are critically important (NCD, 61-82). Indeed, Schwarz’s way of working with these principles are eye opening and a helpful prod and guide to action.

But what if we derived necessary quality characteristics not from a bank of data drawn from congregations growing numerically but from an analysis of the New Testament? And, what if, on the basis of such an analysis of the Bible, we then configured a questionnaire that would test what churches that grow and develop share with one another in relation to these qualities? My guess is that we would indeed ask many of the questions put to leaders and lay members of churches in the natural church development profile. But we might want to add some questions that are not now on the questionnaires and which therefore do not get to affect the database of "growing" churches.

Let me present a brief list by way of illustration, based on a number of key passages in the New Testament which define the work of Jesus and of the church, e.g., Matthew 5, 10, 11, 25; Luke 4; Romans 12; Galatians 5; Ephesians 4; or Revelation 2 and 3. I’m deliberately if somewhat whimsically putting the questions in a fashion similar to those in the questionnaires. They would be answered on a continuum of very great extent/great extent/average/hardly/not at all:

Should not such questions (stated differently or better—as to their substance it does not matter) have been on the questionnaires if the Jesus we encounter in the New Testament should be reflected in the character and qualities of the community that bears his name? What would such questions have teased out? What kinds of quality characteristics would emerge from such questions? What might they look like distilled and abstracted? Please remember that I am not attempting to replace any of the qualities Schwarz has distilled. Each of the quality characteristics of natural church development is very important. But I wonder whether any church or congregation can be without the quality characteristics we might distill from responses to the statements above and still be the church of the Jesus Christ of the New Testament?

If these qualities emerge from the heart of the New Testament, as I would strenuously argue, then are we permitted to ignore them as too divisive, too political, too ideological, or too rooted in a particular church tradition?

Now it is of course true: qualities such as these may not guarantee numerical growth, if that is the criterion of quality. It all depends on the time and place and what’s going on in the world. For example, in the North American context where persons move easily from one church to another and where church growth is a culturally welcome development, is it conceivable that a church that is faithful might be out of step with such a culture? What sells or attracts in our culture is not necessarily quality; what grows is not necessarily benign. Are churches that are growing possibly sometimes the tares God is generously tolerating, just as God tolerates the old bramble bushes that have been around forever? Is it conceivable that high quality churches in this sense might on occasion not grow numerically but, in fact, go through a time of sifting and suffering and also numerical shrinkage, all-the-while "developing" in the direction of the kingdom of God? I must hasten to add that I don’t want for even a second to provide an alibi for those who would like to use this as an easy explanation for the decline of their congregation (see also NCD, 79).

But if we are talking about the kinds of qualities that make the church the church of Jesus Christ, then we clearly are talking about indispensable—necessary—qualities, and we had better think through our notions of mission, evangelism, and church growth in light of such qualities. If we are talking about development in a more comprehensive sense, one that is not exhausted by numerical growth, then of course we are on the right track, if Jesus is anything to go by. "Seek first the reign of God and its justice. Then all these things will be added unto you" (Matthew 6:33; emphasis added).

I would argue for a respect for the diversity of churches that respond faithfully to the challenges their place in time and culture presents them with. Some will grow extensively; others will develop intensively; still others will, by the grace of God and the right circumstances ("in the fullness of time"), do both. Some congregations will be outposts of change, faithful witnesses to the reign of God, and shining beacons to the good news of God’s reconciliation while not necessarily experiencing numerical growth. They may in fact experience the opposite. I think, for example, of the often small struggling interracial congregations in our tradition that faithfully witness, often in difficult circumstances, to the good news that God has in Christ broken down the wall of separation between races at enmity with each other. Such a church may not be a model for rapid growth. Is it a model for the growth of the reign of God? Undoubtedly, success at "growth" can also be assessed by whether a congregation is leaven, spreading the reign of God, and thus growing intensively, laboriously, even at times "in secret"!

I hope it is clear that I am not trying to find an alibi for small shrinking congregations. Perhaps some congregations should die! That does not mean that they might not be good humus for subsequent church plants, to speak "biotically." Further, short-term gain and long-term loss often marks fixation on growth in agriculture. Some very important genetic strains have fallen victim to the green revolution. There are churches that appear to be low yield but might just represent important genetic strains without which the church is rendered more vulnerable in the long run. The church’s witness as a whole needs these varieties, these strains. Without them the church’s task of being a harbinger of the kingdom of God is weakened.

What is at stake in this line of analysis is nothing less than the character of the church. Diversity is a good thing, as I have just argued. But in the end, diversity is not the basis for placing the cross at the heart of a church’s life, nor is it the basis for an appeal to make Easter the core conviction undergirding the taking up of the cross. It is not the case that only some churches should heed the life-giving if costly call to take up the cross and live in the newness of life. Every church worth bearing the name of Christ—small or great, well-funded or poor, third world or first—must hear and respond to that call. That is not optional, nor is it a matter of good strategy. It is just as true that a faithful answer to that call will find a myriad of forms of expression, even as the wisdom of God is endlessly manifold (Ephesians 3:10). It is the wisdom of God as expressed in Christ, a wisdom that is the power of salvation (1 Corinthians 1).

In conclusion, I am convinced that the qualities Schwarz has listed, as well as those I ferreted out of the New Testament, need to be placed at the very core of a church that proclaims good news. That is the unavoidable implication of Ephesians 2:11-22 where Christ is celebrated as making and proclaiming peace between outsiders and insiders, through the cross ending an enmity with roots too old to remember. Such a vision anticipates the coming down onto the earth of the new Jerusalem, a city with paradise at its core, a city with no temple because it is one, a city with its gates wide open—an urban vision of diverse humanity having come home to be with God (Revelation 21).

That is a comprehensive message, as comprehensive as is the Creator’s love. And our musings about what kinds of churches we want to encourage coming into existence, what kinds of development we want to nurture, and what modes of evangelism we want to practice must be reflective of that comprehensiveness. There is room for many at this round table.

In keeping with such a stance, we should give God thanks for Schwarz’s program of natural church development. I have no doubt that it will have a salutary effect on many congregations, not least in having us look appreciatively at the gifts already resident in our midst. I’m also grateful that the directions in which Schwarz points are ones we can take and deepen as I have tried to do in these reflections.

Notes

¹ In Implementation Guide to Natural Church Development (Carol Stream, IL: ChurchSmart Resources, 1998; hereafter abbreviated as IG) Christian A. Schwarz and Christoph Schalk indicate that an initial seven quality characteristics were abstracted from existing church growth literature. These were then modified and augmented by subsequent testing (201).

² This is not to take away from the depiction in Acts of Paul’s activity, confirmed in his own words in Romans 15:14-29, as one of hurried proclamation in light of what he believed to be the imminent "day of salvation" (Romans 13:11-14). If there is strategy in this activity, it is an eschatologically driven strategy of spreading news as quickly and broadly as possible, leaving the nurture of resulting congregations most often to co-workers or appointed leaders (e.g., Acts 14:23; 1 Thessalonians 5:12).

³ Editor's note: Of the 170 variables in the natural church development profile, it was the multiplication of small groups (not holistic small groups themselves) that had the highest correlation to church growth and is thus the "most important" principle (NCD, 32, 33).

⁴ Schwarz refers with approval to C. Peter Wagner’s dictum that "the gift of evangelism applies to no more than 10 percent of all Christians" (NCD, 34; IG, 106).

⁵ See note #1 above on the history of the determination of these quality characteristics. I will leave it to statisticians to determine the soundness of the approach taken by Schwarz and Schalk.

Taken from An Anabaptist Look at Natural Church Development (© 1999 New Life Ministries). Permission to reproduce for local church use only is granted. Provided by New Life Ministries, 6404 S Calhoun St, Fort Wayne, IN 46807, through its web site at www.NewLifeMinistries-NLM.org

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