De-Sizing The Church: How Church Growth Became a Science
Then an Obsession,
and What's Next
Karl Vaters - Moody Press April 2024
240 pages
Karl Vaters studied at Bethany College of the Assemblies of God and Vanguard University of Southern California where he gained a Masters in Church Leadership.
He is the Teaching Pastor at Cornerstone Christian Fellowship affiliated to Bible Assemblies of God in Fountain Valley Orange County, near Los Angeles in southern California. He is contracted to write a blog for Christanity Today and to write books for Moody Press. In addition he writes his own blog while producing and hosting his bi-weekly podcast, The Church Lobby: Conversations on Faith & Ministry.
Vaters is the author of ‘The Church Recovery Guide’ (Moody, 2020), ‘100 Days to a Healthier Church’ (Moody, 2020), ‘Small Church Essentials’ (Moody 2018), and ‘The Grasshopper Myth’ (New Small Church, 2013).
His first four books have generally concerned themselves with encouraging those who serve in small (by American standards) churches, but in this one he addresses the church at large with the thesis that: “We have an unhealthy relationship with bigness in the church. Especially in the American church. And it’s killing us. The rate of church closures, departing members, and pastoral burnout is growing exponentially.”
Roughly the first third of this book is concerned with how Donald Mc. Gavran’s contribution to world mission got subverted in the modern Church Growth Movement and where in the American psyche that came from. There are some perspectives in this section that UK based Evangelicals might not recognise, but in the last analysis these don’t throw the book’s main thesis into question.
The second third of the book deals with why what he described in the first part is a problem, and the third part of the book deals with what Vaters says needs to be done to correct this.
There is a lot here that describes the position many of us will have arrived at already about the Church Growth Movement and the Megachurch Movement. Few would doubt that size has always been a poor indicator of the value of a church or ministry, whether in areas of low population density like rural Wales or in urban churches in university towns, although as Vaters suggests it is clearly the case that the larger a church becomes, the more important numerical metrics (trends in membership, attendance, baptisms, giving etc.) also become.
In any event in rural churches located in areas of low population density typical of rural Wales, it is more arguably obvious that the quality of discipleship, relationships in the church and care for our communities are more valuable metrics of a church’s health and of its attraction for those who are not yet believers to a place where they will consider Christ.
The main soundbites to take away from this book seem to be: ‘Discipleship fixes everything (except the size of the church)’ and ‘Integrity (not technique) is the new competence’. And Karl Vaters makes a good and an encouraging case for these!
Of course, much in this book seems particularly relevant to southern California. But whether the nitty gritty details of Vaters’ analysis of the modern Church Growth Movement and the sociology of the United States is accurate or not, and whether he is right or not to see obsession with numbers as the root of what’s gone wrong in the church in the West, these seem far less important for us than his exposition of what characterises the sort of quality and value that we should aspire to in a church or a ministry.
It is likely to be in this issue that the significant value of this book lies for us, whether we ourselves are called to serve the Lord in churches that are large or small.
