Zettle

Values, Not Numbers

30 min read

Growth in American Churches

It is true that mainstream Christianity is declining in numbers and vitality. But it is equally true that other sectors of Christianity are expanding rapidly and with great creative energy. For example, in 1970 the United States boasted 10 “mega-churches” with over 2,000 members. By 1995 there were 300 mega-churches, with a combined membership of 1 million. By 2002, USA Today reported that there were 700 such churches, with a combined weekly attendance of some 3 million.1 Hartford Seminary reports that in 2009 America had 1,384 mega-churches, so the trend is continuing strongly. The blessed are getting more blessing, and from those who don’t have much, even what they have is being taken away.

Mega-church growth in the USA (churches with over 2,000 members):

  • 1970: 10
  • 1995: 300
  • 2002: 700
  • 2009: 1,384

Which churches are growing? Conventional wisdom has it that the conservative, evangelical, non-denominational, independent churches are growing fastest and the Hartford study bears this out. I did a rough count, and of their list of 1,384 mega-churches, 464 are non-denominational, 371 are Baptist of some sort, about 200 identify as Pentecostal and 55 are Calvary Chapels. The largest mainstream group is the Methodists, with 70. There are 55 Christian churches, 51 Presbyterian, 26 Lutheran, 5 Anglican or Episcopal and 1 Roman Catholic. Thus 80% of the mega-churches, about 1,110 out of 1,384, are from outside the old mainstream.2 It is safe to say that a very large percentage of the old mainstream Protestant congregations on the list have adopted contemporary church styles and strategies, such as the Lutheran “Community of Joy” in Phoenix and SpiritGarage in Minneapolis, and numerous contemporary style Methodist congregations.

To explore church growth in America today, let us examine some case studies. Let us consider two Christian movements that emerged in southern California around 1970, the Vineyard Fellowship and Calvary Chapel. There were about 600 Vineyard churches, with 406 in America, and 700 Calvary chapels in 1996, with 614 in America, giving them approximately 120,000 attendance (Vineyard) and 140,000 attendance (Calvary) at a typical Sunday service (in 1992),3 in America. Between them they had over a quarter million in attendance in 1992. In a 2009 phone interview, the Vineyard database coordinator, Pam Trautman, informed me that currently there are 1,500 Vineyard churches worldwide, with 575 in the United States — up from 406, and 130,000 members in the US, which would indicate 400,000 to 500,000 members worldwide. So the Vineyard movement grew by 45% between 1996 and 2009. It is possible to grow churches in America. People do it.

We can look at three churches in the Minneapolis area for a micro example of the mega-trends among US churches. Each has a graduate of Luther Seminary as senior pastor. One, Spirit of Christ Community, is a traditional congregation. It represents the merger of two small churches, and has “more than 100” people in attendance each Sunday. It is growing at a rate of 15 percent in two years. A second, called Mercy Seat, presents “a radical, grace-based, Trinitarian-theology-of-the-cross message rather than attempts to be ‘relevant’.” They have about 100 a week in attendance. The third, Jacob’s Well, is formed down the street from another Lutheran church but “was originally created to serve those not reached” by the other, traditional congregation. Pastor Greg Meyer combines “Lutheran core theology, without a lot of the traditional practices of Lutheran congregations” that makes Jacob’s Well “look a lot different” including “the lack of a formal liturgy, the non-traditional building, the music, the nature of the sermons, the use of multimedia, the predominance of young people… and the casual nature of the community.” Meyer strives to reach people “wary of the institutional aspects of traditional church. ‘We want to be the church, not have a church.‘” The congregation was founded three and a half years ago, September 2006, with 42 people. It averages 220 per Sunday and recently topped 300. How fast is it growing? “Outgrowing current space. Needs to add a second Sunday morning service to increase seating capacity and allow growth, and a second worship site, targeted for March 2010, to better reach the surrounding community.” Jacob’s Well meets in a middle school, shopping center and park bandstand in the summer. The lesson to those who want to grow their church could not be clearer. The traditional church is doing well; the intellectual church is on a plateau, and the contemporary church is bursting at the seams.4

Let’s not talk about numbers. America’s fast-growing churches, in fact, do not focus on numbers. What do they focus on? They want to save people. Unificationists also want to save people. We know that every person on this planet needs to receive True Parents, and that if they do not they will have less than the optimum experience in the next. To express that, we are in the process of building guest-oriented evangelical programs in our local churches, based upon an intelligent concept about witnessing.

But the matter goes deeper than building a program. It goes to the spiritual values and the heart that underlie the impulse to witness one’s faith. This chapter is devoted to exploring these spiritual values. My main resource is Mark Mittelberg, Director of Evangelism at Willow Creek Community Church. He analyzed the spiritual foundations for church growth enjoyed by his church and came up with seven core values. These are generic spiritual principles involving human relationships and dealing with cultural realities we all face, applicable to any style of church. We will grow as we look at these values and own them on our own terms.5

The matter goes to the spiritual values and the heart that underlie the impulse to witness one’s faith.

Value 1: People Matter to God

The first point is also the most simple. Evangelism begins with knowing in our hearts that each and every person matters to God. Because God loves everyone, we should love them as well. “This belief — that all people matter to God — is the hardest one to fully absorb into our value system,” Mittelberg writes. We say we agree with this value, but we don’t practice it. What we do with every other concept in his book, he says, will depend directly on the degree to which we own and apply this first value, the reality that people matter to God, in the very core of our being.

Rate yourself, says Mittelberg. Look at your calendar and checkbook. They will tell you where you are investing your time and money. Are you investing your time and money trying to reach people outside the family of God? Or are you doing everything but that? One is reminded of Jim Collins’s conclusion in Good to Great, that the “stop doing” list is more important than the “to do” list.6 In order to spend more time with unchurched people, one needs to spend less time with church people. So healthy churches invest in getting their members out into the community, to rub shoulders with new people.

In order to spend more time with unchurched people, one needs to spend less time with church people.

When you start to rearrange your life, or your church’s life, the priority of saving lost people will be tested immediately. The question naturally arises, whether aloud or below the surface: what is really important to my church? Other values start competing with and crowding out witnessing. The most difficult ones to deal with are the habits of one’s own church, the routines that we associate with godliness, the offerings that we think will get us to heaven. The tasks are endless; they multiply themselves. The problem is, these all happen inside church walls, out of sight and out of mind to the unchurched world. The response of people who have heard of Reverend Moon is, “Is he still alive?” or “I heard he’s very sick.” Back in 1976, I introduced myself to a lot of people in parking lots as “Tyler,” and one gentleman deep in the West Virginia coal country responded, “Tyler Moon?” Rev. Moon was definitely alive back then, because we were out there. When I asked a Jehovah’s Witnesses member this spring why his church is growing, his answer was simple: “We’re out there.”

People matter to God, and so they should matter to us. The Divine Principle is eloquent on this matter. In its General Introduction we read that Unification believers have a truth that “should be able to reveal the Heart of God: His heart of joy at the time of creation; the broken heart He felt when humankind, His children whom He could not abandon, rebelled against Him; and His heart of striving to save them throughout the long course of history.”7 Cain did not matter to Abel. If Abel had loved, valued and served Cain, would Cain have killed him? Esau mattered to Jacob. Reverend Moon teaches that Jacob spent his 21 years in Haran longing to reunite with Esau. All people, the poor, the outcast and lame as well as society’s leaders, mattered to Jesus, and they matter to True Parents. For Mittelberg, this awareness that all people matter to God is evangelism value #1.

Value 2: People Are Spiritually Lost and God Is Suffering

In Luke 19:10, Jesus said his mission was “to seek and to save what was lost.” Lost is not derogatory or an insult; it is just stating a fact about life without God. Jesus was saying that there is a deep chasm between fallen human beings and God, the chasm of sin. The world is not at all as God intended it to be, and government programs, education or medical services cannot fix it. Sin is a radical problem, deep in the root of human existence. In Jacob Dylan’s words, evil is alive and well. Divine Principle is more specific: “there is one social vice that human efforts alone can never eradicate. That is sexual immorality. Christian doctrine regards this as a cardinal sin. What a tragedy that today’s Christian society cannot block this path of ruin.”8

Reverend Moon teaches relentlessly that there is a huge chasm between human beings and God, and it has to do with the spiritual dimension of human sexuality, the relationship of man and woman. No matter how “good” people are, if they do not have this resolved, they are caught in the satanic blood lineage, “children of your father the devil” (John 8:44), and will be unable to access God’s deepest love in eternity. No matter what the occasion, this is his message.

To generate energy in the direction of sharing the truth and love that saved one’s life from degradation and despair, one needs to penetrate the superficial appearance that everyone is okay, that people are really doing well, and grasp the insight of Paul when he wrote, “There is not one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.” Divine Principle states that people “have become like refuse, fit to be discarded.”9

So the second spiritual value is to be fully aware that people, no matter how ship-shape we appear, are spiritually lost, far away from where God created us to be. Dr. Bruce Wilkinson gives a sterling example. As a result of his “Jabez prayer,” God guided him to approach a well-dressed businesswoman at an airport terminal and ask her, “What can I do for you?” He persevered through her attempts to brush him off, and then she disclosed that her marriage was on the rocks and she was about to file papers for divorce. Through his counseling in the terminal and on the plane (where God intervened to put their seats together), “she was still hurting, but she was at peace, determined to give her marriage the commitment it deserved.”10

We should be sensitive to human pain and, even more, that God is suffering in loneliness. God is in the wilderness with men and women, crying out for His lost children, enduring agony separated from us. Unification evangelism begins with Reverend Moon’s heart of the 1940s to comfort God in the midst of prison. His motivating energy came directly from his contact with the Father’s lonely, loving heart, knowing that people are suffering and God is suffering. Mittelberg tells us we need to clear away the curtains that conceal from us the suffering of others and the suffering of God, and to be vulnerable to this aching need in the world. This is evangelism value #2.

Value 3: People Need God’s Intervention

This is another fact that people tend to avoid, but Mittelberg is all over it. Forget relativism, he says, the view that every path is the same, that every religion is okay. Religion rides on the personal and particular. For him, every person needs Jesus. Unificationists agree and add the breaking news that Jesus sent True Parents and that everyone we know needs to receive and own the Blessing. In the words of Divine Principle, “fallen people [need to] restore their heart toward God through God’s life-giving Word, [be] saved both spiritually and physically, and inherit God’s lineage.”11

Christians who are growing their churches are dealing with an equally confrontational message. “We have an unpopular message, and we have been commissioned to present it boldly,” says Mittelberg. Unificationists need to own this desperate attitude that is necessary for effective evangelism. Unificationists attribute to True Parents the power of God’s salvation. We proclaim that True Parents are the bridge across the gap separating fallen men and women from God. That Jesus and the Holy Spirit are working on earth for complete salvation through True Parents. There is no doubt about this; it is not one truth among many, one path among many. There are dead ends, and people and cultures do end up in them and need to back up and get on the right path.

From a sociological viewpoint, Hadaway’s research shows that churches whose members are clear about their mission and purpose and have a plan to recruit new members grow, whereas the members of dying churches respond that they are not clear about their church’s mission and purpose and lack such a plan. Moreover, churches with a strong conviction in their faith grow, while churches with a middle-of-the-road theology do not.

In his mud hut, True Father did not design a social movement or self-help society. No religion grows because it models on the Elks Club or a Scout troop.

In his mud hut, True Father did not design a social movement or self-help society. When people joined, he called them to offer their lives, their schooling, their careers, and their marriages. Through him, God intervened in people’s lives decisively. Religions grow because they offer a radical vision of what it means to be fully human and on that basis empower people to solve real problems in their life and in the world, as well as find inner peace. Growing churches include this life-changing faith experience as normative. In the final accounting, the world needs God’s truth and love incarnate. Because we believe ourselves to be graced to be a messenger of that which every human being needs, that will liberate and release them into full humanity, we can generate the heart to talk to someone about it. This is evangelism value #3.

Value 4: People Need Cultural Relevance

The fourth value has to do with strategy — strategy not for its own sake, but for the sake of expressing heart and love effectively, and clarifying that what we represent is the pure, unadulterated love of God and not our own cultural tastes.

The value that “people need cultural relevance” is based on the perception that if your neighbors recognize they are standing next to the chasm, and if they can see down the gaping hole and they know that there is something wrong with the world and themselves that no religion has solved, then they might be ready to hear the gospel of True Parents. The problem is that secular people do not live close to the chasm of sin. There is an expanding spiritual landscape, and they wander all over the map. Mittelberg addresses this practical reality.

Before getting into it, a proviso: the target audience for growing churches is not people who are actively committed to their own faith. We have para-church organizations to minister to and with members of other faith communities. The target for evangelism is people who are seeking, searching for a new community, who are not satisfied with traditional answers, or just plain uninspired about the religions they encountered. Such folks tend to adopt a secular worldview. Between unchurched people and the truth are walls of secularization: anti- or unreligious narratives, explanations, solutions, entertainment, diversions and values.

These worldviews and their entertainments and benefits are formidable competition to the message of any church, including ours. Contemporary culture rejects many godly values, like sexual purity, marital fidelity, chastity, honoring parents, the sanctity of life and so forth. A few decades ago, a couple could not rent an apartment without a marriage certificate and proof that they attended a local church. We live in a post-Christian age. How do we reach people in this culture? First, we have to come to grips with where the vast majority of people are at. Next we have to determine to make our message understandable. To do so, we need to speak in a language the hearer can understand. Listen to Elijah Waters, of “Generation Church,” a campus ministry in Seattle. His sermons are a lot like our Founder’s: earthy, honest, in-your-face and totally from the heart, and his following is in the thousands.

A few decades ago, a couple could not rent an apartment without a marriage certificate and proof that they attended a local church. We live in a post-Christian age.

My experience with an activist neo-Buddhist movement illustrates the value of cultural relevance. I encountered the group in 1969, when Japanese women speaking broken English physically pushed me into a car to take me to a lecture. An American gave the lecture, but all the other members I saw were Japanese. After the lecture they gathered around me and pushed me to buy a prayer scroll, which I did. I won’t continue the story except to say that I didn’t join and not many others did either. This particular movement has a negligible presence in America to this day. Why? Because they never adapted to this culture. Pushing people into cars and selling them prayer scrolls does not make it in this country, even in Berkeley.

In the Unification context, too, members in the past associated church growth with standing on the street trying to strike up a conversation. Reverend Moon himself has tried to revise this concept. He told members in the 1980s that church growth will not happen by witnessing on the streets.

If you witness to someone on the street, it has only the significance of that individual. …it is a one-to-one relationship that does not go beyond that level.

Do not witness so much in the street because you don’t know anything about the people you meet. You may meet many people in the parks but most of them do not stay and those who do often have many problems. You know that people [with potential] are always busy and don’t hang around parks, while those who have nothing to do go to the park all the time. We want to witness to the best people. We don’t want 1,000 people who can follow a leader; we want one leader who can lead 1,000 people.

So far you have worked very hard and found one thing: even when we work hard the fruit of our witnessing is often dispersed and leaves little benefit in the center. We have done all kinds of pioneering work and witnessing on the streets, but somehow the people who come into the Church do not understand clearly and soon leave again. Then we get some more people and then they leave. The results do not remain here for good.12

In the experience of the growing churches, new members do not come through short-term encounters. To succeed in America, a group from another culture needs to translate its message and practices into forms that Americans can relate with and become part of their world. It’s not just good manners; it’s the only way to accomplish the mission.

Mittelberg writes about a man named Jim, who had a passion to reach people for Christ. The people God called him to reach were not like the normal people of his church, so he decided that he would have to change to fit their culture. He shaved his head, except for a ponytail that he grew. Then he dyed the ponytail. He gave up business attire and dressed like this crowd of people. He ate their food and learned their street vocabulary, read their papers and got to know their points of view. He moved into their neighborhood, although they didn’t seem interested at all in what he had to say.

Jim’s church associates were upset. They maligned Jim for giving up the true gospel, watering it down and changing it just to make it convenient for these strange people who nobody cares about anyway. But today, countless people from those neighborhoods now know and serve Jesus Christ. Jim — or as he’s more widely known, James Hudson Taylor — is the man who more than a century ago built the China Inland Ministry. More than anyone else, he is credited with bringing Protestantism to China.

To put one’s message into the common language is called “contextualization.” In Aubrey Malphurs’s words, “Many older churches reflect the culture that surrounded them some thirty or forty years ago and clearly aren’t in touch with the culture around them now. The result is that the unchurched lost in our present culture see this and reject the biblical beliefs of these churches because they sense that they’re out of touch with reality and what’s taking place in the world. They know a dinosaur when they see one!”13 The Divine Principle is clear about the need for contextualization, as it pleads for the establishment of a common language for all people to share their hearts and deepest values. “As offspring of the same parents, all of us have the same feelings of joy, anger, sorrow and pleasure. Yet we cannot share our deepest feelings with one another because we speak different languages. Is not this one of humanity’s greatest misfortunes?”14

As offspring of the same parents, all of us have the same feelings of joy, anger, sorrow and pleasure. Yet we cannot share our deepest feelings with one another because we speak different languages.

Contextualization is necessary because secular America is a foreign culture and speaks a different language. Before people can even get a glimpse of our theological message, we need to cross the “culture chasm.” Culture is spiritually neutral but separates people from the Blessing. How do we cross the culture chasm?

In the words of Bill Hybels, Senior Pastor of the Willow Creek Community Church, this means to “crack the cultural code.” Mittelberg discusses language (make what you say easy to understand), clothes (wear the same styles as your target audience) and music (use the style they like — which probably is one you like as well). For example, when I encountered the Unification community, I heard music with which I could relate. I remember Phillip Schanker singing a Cat Stevens song with an acoustic guitar before the message was given. This went down well with me. If they had had Phillip’s 50-year-old father playing “How Great Thou Art” on a pipe organ, my spiritual mother would have had to tackle me to keep me from leaving.

American members in New York chuckled for years over an otherwise esteemed elder from overseas who persisted with the expression, “follow my behind.” Such a small verbal miscue, especially repeated so often, would turn a counsel to humble obedience into a moment of eye-rolling levity.

Mittelberg counsels us to utilize cultural points of reference that are familiar to the audience. We cannot expect new people who do not know or care much about us to cross the culture chasm from their side. We have to cross it from our side. Bridging the chasm of sin is God’s responsibility. Bridging the culture chasm is our responsibility. I will deal with this topic more fully later. This is evangelism value #4.

Value 5: People Need Community

More and more families are broken. Even intact families spend less and less time together. “The Annenberg Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California is reporting this week that 28 percent of Americans it interviewed last year said they have been spending less time with members of their households. That’s nearly triple the 11 percent who said that in 2006.”15 People are scattered far and wide from their loved ones. People need friends, community and cultural identity. When I visited neighbors in Barrytown in June of 2010, I asked what they would like to see in a local church, and everyone’s first response was, community.

If the Unification Church is to grow, it must provide meaningful community. Mittelberg states, “Our responsibility is to build churches where true community can flourish.” When I joined, I did not join a book; I joined a community. I joined because of the love and value I felt from the people and from a strange warmth (to borrow John Wesley’s term) within my heart. This was love from a community plus spirit world, the community on earth and in heaven. So we need to build community that welcomes and offers a place at the table for new people. We should note well that the most successful evangelism in America was done where our family organized as the “Creative Community Project.” In a recent survey of members of my church, the provision of community life for one’s self and one’s family was the strongest positive value.

I did not join a book; I joined a community. I joined because of the love and value I felt from the people and from a strange warmth within my heart. This was love from a community plus spirit world, the community on earth and in heaven.

Communities have general characteristics. One, they are local. You see people regularly; you don’t need to make a great effort to get together. Two, the community offers an identity that people want to share. Three, communities provide personal enrichment. Four, communities embody implicit or explicit values, norms and ideals. Five, communities are more about friendship than beliefs. Six, communities are fun. Seven, communities, at least healthy communities, are transparent, open and inclusive. They contain windows for people to enter and exit. Churches today are realizing that more than teaching truth, they need to help people make connections and form community. Hence successful churches provide comfortable coffee shops, gathering places and other venues for people to connect. One reason for the success of Starbucks and the thousands of independent coffee houses is that they provide space for community life.

In Taylor Clark’s study of what makes Starbucks attractive to customers, “the interviewees talked very little about the coffee itself, but quite a bit about feelings and atmosphere. …they craved a sense of relaxation, warmth, and luxury, all within the safe coffeehouse social sphere. ‘The coffeehouse, when it’s as good as it gets, is much like a public living room.‘” A good coffeehouse is “a quintessential ‘third place’” between home and work. Churches are advised to pay heed: growing churches, seeking to become that third place, often install comfortable coffeehouse environments. In January, 2010, Jason Mitchem, author of Revivify: Restoring Failed Leaders, disclosed to the author his team’s strategy to plant a new church in Augusta, Georgia. They are going to conduct Bible studies in coffeehouses, six evenings a week. Patrons who are interested in the subject are welcome to sit in. Some will be invited to join their celebration worship on Sunday morning.16 Community is evangelism value #5.

Value 6: People Need Answers

People are dummies. My evidence? The enormous success of the “How To…” books “for dummies.” The last time I checked there were 75 and counting. The success of this series is due to the fact that the books respect people enough to address their questions with straight, simple answers. There are thousands of evangelical books that make the Gospel clear and simple. Unificationists need to do the same with their core text, the Divine Principle. The Divine Principle not only has to be declared, but it has to be defined, defended and dumbed-down.

The Divine Principle not only has to be declared, but it has to be defined, defended and dumbed-down.

We have to remove the intellectual roadblocks. People are programmed in school to question everything, especially God and traditional values. So we have to learn what the questions are and how to answer them. Even with the finest theology, if one doesn’t know how to use it to answer people’s questions, it is of no value. The great American evangelist, Charles Finney, got his start in the small towns of upstate New York, where people said that “he doesn’t preach; he explains what the other fellows are preaching about.” So we need to slow down and get into the listener’s shoes. To love the enemy, we need to know their questions and respect them. Everyone has simple, basic questions, such as “Does God really exist?” “Why is there so much evil in the world?” and “What is the purpose of my life?” The Divine Principle has answers, including to the biggest one of all: “How can I be happy?” These are the same questions that drove the teenage Sun Myung Moon to God and Jesus. His ministry is one of answering these questions.

The most successful Unification evangelism in America proves the point. The introductory presentations were simple to a fault, laced with humor and common sense. One great virtue was that they gave the listener nothing with which they could possibly disagree. They called it “conscientious common sense,” and it talked about the truth being something that holds at all times, in all places, in all cultures and is practical and useful. It talked about human responsibility and freedom being the reason that God could both be loving and suffer the existence of evil. It resolved profound theological dilemmas that block people from faith in God. They made it very simple and returned constantly to the issue of individual responsibility. Then they opened people up for prayer and people met God.17 This is evangelism value #6.

Value 7: People Need Time

Mittelberg’s culminating value is a simple one: effective evangelism allows people to move ahead at their own pace. Today’s society is far more structured and confined than the America of the 70s. He writes, “Pressing people to take steps for which they’re not yet ready will backfire. In some cases it can even short-circuit the whole process.” Conversion of one’s life is a process. It is not accomplished through one event, but rather by deepening trust and understanding over time. During this time of patient support, the church community is desperate in prayer and fasting. Churches do prayer walks, fasting, vigils, counseling, outreach, service, Bible study — spiritual disciplines. Unificationists in our periods of growth did the same. The world is saved by ideal families, not idle families.

I recall the testimony of a young man who joined in New York City in the mid-70s. His spiritual mother one evening brought him seven rice balls, and encouraged him to enjoy them. He was a student living in an apartment in the city by himself and he enjoyed the delicious meal. When he finished, she informed him that those seven rice balls represented a seven-day fast she had just completed for him. The emotional love this ministry inspired in him brought him to True Parents.

The Holy Spirit is a feminine presence that gives rebirth. I want to suggest that we take a cue from the advent of the age of women, the age of the heifer, or age of the wife. The Divine Principle explains this in terms of the biblical story of Samson. Samson could not be defeated by masculine means. He was defeated by the soft, feminine voice of his wife. The way to bring a positive outcome is through the Holy Spirit, utilizing the populist style.

This is evangelism value #7.

Conclusion

Willow Creek outlines a seven-step path for members to trace as they walk the way of heart with newfound friends who might like to become part of their church community. The first step is to build a personal relationship of trust. This can take months and years in itself. Once that trust and personal rapport is established, the second step is to share a verbal witness. Willow provides seminars for members to help them overcome their shyness about this and develop skills to help people turn a horizontal relationship in a vertical direction. If the friend responds positively to the verbal witness, the third step is to bring them to a seeker event, a program guaranteed to be designed with the new friend in mind who doesn’t know anything about the church or its teachings. This leads to (4) a process of education, step by step, and ultimately acceptance of Christ and a joyful, public celebration of baptism. The next steps bring the person into a deeper walk with God, entailing (5) joining a small group, (6) discovering one’s personal gifts for ministry and finding a way to apply them by doing ministry, and (7) supporting God’s work in His church through tithing.

Generating a world-transforming movement, the Unification Church owns these core values. It is activating, inculcating and rewarding the spiritual values that all people matter to God, are lost without Him and need His intervention in their lives in a language they can understand, in a supportive community that gives them the time and respect they need to make up their own mind. These are apparent in our True Parents’ ministry and should be in ours.

Footnotes

Footnotes

  1. Gary L. McIntosh, Three Generations: Riding the Waves of Change in Your Church, p. 17; USA Today, September 23, 2002, p. 2A. ↩

  2. Hartford Seminary research, at http://hirr.hartsem.edu/cgi-bin/mega/db.pl?db=default&uid=default&view_records=1&ID=*&sb=2. Donald Miller, Reinventing American Protestantism: Christianity in the New Millennium (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 191-194. ↩

  3. Sources not specified in original. ↩

  4. Melanie Boulay Becker, “Three approaches, one shared service mission” in The Story (a publication of Luther Seminary), Winter 2010 (26/1): 8-12. ↩

  5. Mark Mittelberg, Building a Contagious Church: Revolutionizing the Way We View and Do Evangelism (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 2000). I have shifted the order in which Mittelberg presents these values. ↩

  6. Collins, op. cit., p. 143. ↩

  7. EDP p. 8. ↩

  8. Ibid. p. 5. ↩

  9. Rom 3:10-12; EDP ch 6, sec 4. ↩

  10. Bruce Wilkinson, The Prayer of Jabez: Breaking Through to the Blessed Life (Sisters, OR: Multnomah Publishers, 2000), pp. 79-82. ↩

  11. EDP, p. 379. ↩

  12. Home Church, pp. 12, 412 ff, 411. ↩

  13. Malphurs, op. cit., p. 69. ↩

  14. EDP, p. 410. ↩

  15. “Family Time Eroding as Internet Use Soars,” http://www.thechurchreport.com/mag_article.php?mid=1784&mname=JuneSurvey: (June, 2009). ↩

  16. Taylor Clark, Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce and Culture (New York, NY: Little, Brown and Co., 2007), pp. 90-92. ↩

  17. Author’s experience joining the Unification Church, October, 1972 - January, 1973, and as a participant-observer, Bush Street Center, San Francisco, and Camp Kay, Mendocino County, summer, 1980. ↩

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