Plant for the unchurched

In the last eighteen years of the twentieth century, the goal of Christian mission should be to preach the Gospel and, by God's grace, to plant in every unchurched segment of mankind--what shall we say-- "a church" or "a cluster of growing churches"?

In the latter half of the twentieth century one of the most influential areas of research from a theoretical and methodological foundation has been that of the church growth movement. Church growth can be defined as:

Church growth is that discipline which investigates the nature, expansion,
planting, multiplication, function and health of Christian churches as they relate to
the effective implementation of God’s commission to “make disciples of all
peoples.” (Mt 28:18-20) Students of church growth strive to integrate the eternal
theological principles of God’s word concerning the expansion of the church with
the best insights of contemporary social and behavioral sciences, employing as the
initial frame of reference the foundational work done by Donald McGavran.

In 2005 one of the visions put forward by the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada (EFC) was that evangelical churches would aim to have an evangelical church per 2,000 people in an given geographical area (they point out, however, that an area is “generally viewed to be reached when there exists one evangelistic congregation for each 1,000 persons”)

According to Hawthorne missionaries should aim to draw converts from one segment of society. While a church movement should aim to grow a cluster of congregations generally to aim for a single sociopeople.  It's very important that people feel a sense of belonging in a church movement and this is best achieved through a single cultural identity of a single people group. Often a missionary will try to start a church and people from various social groups will join and it'll start up as a sort of segmented social unit that is all it's own. Unfortunately this approach is not effective because people leave their sociopeoples to join the new hybrid social unit and the rest of the people in those sociopeople groups consider the converts traitors.  Church movements grow very slowly when done this way. The approach of pulling people from various people groups to a single church movement is effective in countries where Christianity is loved and considered a good thing. It is a much wiser approach to concentrate all efforts on a single people group instead of attempting multiple people groups at the same time.

Encourage converts to remain thoroughly one with their own people in most matters. They should continue to eat what their people eat. They should not say, "My people are vegetarians but, now that I have become a Christian, I'm going to eat meat." After they become Christians they should be more rigidly vegetarian than they were before. In the matter of clothing, they should continue to look precisely like their kinfolk. In the matter of marriage, most people are endogamous, they insist that "our people marry only our people." They look with great disfavor on our marrying other people. And yet when Christians come in one-by-one, they cannot marry their own people. None of them have become Christian. Where only a few of a given people become Christians, when it comes time for them or their children to marry, they have to take husbands or wives from other segments of the population. So their own kin look at them and say, "Yes, become a Christian and mongrelize your children. You have left us and have joined them."

Today more than ever we need men and women who, on the basis of their experience of accompanying others, are familiar with processes which call for prudence, understanding, patience and docility to the Spirit, so that they can protect the sheep from wolves who would scatter the flock. We need to practice the art of listening, which is more than simply hearing. Listening, in communication, is an openness of heart which makes possible that closeness without which genuine spiritual encounter cannot occur. Listening helps us to find the right gesture and word which shows that we are more than simply bystanders. Only through such respectful and compassionate listening can we enter on the paths of true growth and awaken a yearning for the Christian ideal: the desire to respond fully to God’s love and to bring to fruition what he has sown in our lives. But this always demands the patience of one who knows full well what Saint Thomas Aquinas tells us: that anyone can have grace and charity, and yet falter in the exercise of the virtues because of persistent “contrary inclinations”. In other words, the organic unity of the virtues always and necessarily exists in habitu, even though forms of conditioning can hinder the operations of those virtuous habits. Hence the need for “a pedagogy which will introduce people step by step to the full appropriation of the mystery”. Reaching a level of maturity where individuals can make truly free and responsible decisions calls for much time and patience.