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Hendricks Adopts Mittelberg's Seven Evangelism Values as the Spiritual Foundation for UC Church Growth

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Claim. Hendricks adopts Mark Mittelberg’s seven core evangelism values (from Building a Contagious Church, Willow Creek 2000) as the spiritual foundation a populist UC church must own — translating each value into UC-specific application rather than inventing UC-native ones from scratch.

Elaboration. Hendricks’s method (growth-in-american-churches): these are generic spiritual principles applicable to any style of church, and UC will grow by adopting them on UC terms.

The seven values, in Hendricks’s reordering:

  1. People matter to God — diagnostic: look at your calendar/checkbook; UC application via value-1-people-matter-to-god
  2. People are spiritually lost and God is suffering — UC sharpens this via sexual-immorality-as-root-chasm-per-smm
  3. People need God’s intervention — UC application: True Parents as the bridge across the gap
  4. People need cultural relevance — “culture chasm” vs sin chasm; cite smm-1980s-teaching-street-witnessing-doesnt-grow-church
  5. People need community — operationalized via creative-community-project-as-most-successful-uc-evangelism
  6. People need answers — operationalized via conscientious-common-sense-uc-introductory-method
  7. People need time — culminating in holy-spirit-feminine-and-populist-style

The methodological move is significant: rather than treating evangelism as something to be derived from UC theology de novo, Hendricks takes a Christian-evangelical practitioner framework, validates it against UC sources (Divine Principle, Father Moon’s teachings), and applies it. This is consistent with his broader claim (core-uc-message-is-the-true-parents-claim) that UC stands on the biblical-historical foundation of Christianity rather than parallel to it.

The cost (worth flagging for future wrestling): adopting a framework from another tradition shapes what questions one asks. If Mittelberg’s framework misses a category that’s distinctive to UC (e.g., lineage transmission, indemnity work), Hendricks’s evangelism strategy will inherit that blind spot.

See also. evangelism-as-root-of-peace-building, core-uc-message-is-the-true-parents-claim, populist-church

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