Question. Per causa-decades-long-strategy-as-template-for-church-growth, Hendricks’s strategic lesson is that the Berlin Wall fell because of decades of disciplined, ideologically-grounded, strategically-intelligent UC anti-communism work — and that comparable discipline is required for UC church growth, with an objective “as clear and simple as ‘the end of communism.‘” Does the UC (mainline FFWPU, in 2026) have such a campaign in place, with comparable budget allocation, generational planning horizon, talent recruitment, message discipline, and measurable objective? Or does the church-growth aspiration exist mainly as exhortation without strategic infrastructure?
Why it matters. The whole BR argument is operationalizable only if there is somewhere for “the populist church transition” to actually get planned, resourced, measured, and iterated over decades. CAUSA had budgets, conferences, publications, journalists, university affiliates, political access — a machine. If church growth has no equivalent machine, then BR is essentially an individual-pastor self-help manual dressed as a church-strategy book, and the structural critique BR makes against UC drift is unanswered. This question is the natural escalation of the uc-has-drifted-toward-denominational-mainline-pattern diagnosis.
Current best guesses. Difficult to answer from inside without privileged access to FFWPU strategic planning. Inferential indicators:
Suggesting yes, partial:
- HJ Cheonwon training programs (post-2013) have multi-year curricula and member tracking
- The 2010s wave of pastor training in US (Lovin’ Life era) had institutional backing
- Cheon Bo Won “absolute good ancestors” providence has a decades-long arc
Suggesting no:
- No public 10-year UC membership-growth target with reported progress that I am aware of (analogous to “1 million members by 2030”)
- Pastoral training programs appear to come and go with leadership transitions rather than persist as institutional fixtures (Lovin’ Life was largely wound down post-2012)
- The post-2012 succession fracture absorbed strategic bandwidth and talent for over a decade
- The CAUSA-comparable external-facing message machine (publications, journalists, conferences with measurable outcomes) does not have a clear UC-church-growth-focused equivalent today
Best honest answer: probably no machine of comparable scale. The implication is that BR’s exhortation has been received intellectually but not institutionalized strategically. This is worth a thread eventually if more atomic material accumulates.