Has God ordained certain techniques or forms for the church's growth? The one reliable God-given method is the natural and organic one of baptizing infants born to believing parents.
In the past, confessional Protestants, such as Presbyterians and Lutherans, planted new churches in a remarkably calm way. Several families would move away from a community with an existing congregation to one where none existed. Once this group grew to five families, they would send word back to the office of home missions, the secretary of which would look for a pastor to shepherd the denomination's émigrés. And the rest was history. The denomination would continue to support the mission work until it grew to a size that was self-sustaining. Some of the new growth came from grafting believers from other traditions onto the vine of a particular confessional tradition. Some came from the children who grew up in the new congregation and became families of their own. And, of course, some came from new converts to Christianity. This older model of church growth and planting was inherently organic and covenantal. It ran along lines of familiarity; the core group had grown up in the particular communion. And it was zealous about retaining the covenant children. The church followed those members who had been reared in her bosom, and the success of a new plant depended on another generation of believers remaining in the fold to support the new church.
In and of itself, baptism is a technique for church growth unrivaled by modern methods. What is more, baptism, as the Westminster Shorter Catechism teaches, signifies our "engrafting" into Christ and "partaking" of the covenant of grace (93). It also admits persons into the visible church. In other words, it is a ready mechanism for enlarging the church. But aside from the phenomenological aspects of this sacrament (i.e., how much, how big, how many), baptism also nurtures the qualitative growth of individual believers. In the words of the Westminster Larger Catechism (167), the "duty of improving our baptism" is a lifelong endeavor that consists partly in "growing up to assurance of pardon of sin, and of all other blessings sealed to us in that sacrament." Consequently, baptism gives exactly what church-growth experts want’numbers and spiritual depth. More importantly, baptism is what Christ commanded in the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18-20). Which means that one way to fulfill the Great Commission is to have more babies and see that they are baptized.
It is not sufficient, however, to grow churches merely by reproduction and baptism. The church also needs to see that those babies are instructed in the faith. Of course, this preaching is not just for covenant children. According to the Shorter Catechism (89), preaching is a means of "convincing and converting sinners." One of the proof-texts for that answer is Paul's teaching in Romans 10 that people will not hear the gospel without preaching. He taught that preaching is the means that God has ordained both to convince and convert sinners, and to build up believers in holiness and comfort. In other words, the word inscripturated and the Word incarnate are specific about the right techniques for church growth; they are the divinely given and divinely commanded means of word and sacrament.
On the basis of scriptural teaching, then, one could well argue that as opposed to the industrial and impersonal methods of church growth, the correct method of growing the church is inherently agrarian and personal. And one of the wisest contemporary proponents of agrarian and local ways is the poet and farmer Wendell Berry who lives and writes in Kentucky. In perhaps his most compelling book, The Unsettling of America, Berry contrasts industrialism and agrarianism in ways that are remarkably’though largely unknowingly’apt for highlighting the differences between church growth expertise and the ministry of word and sacrament:
I conceive a strip-miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of the farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The exploiter's goal is money, profit; the nurturer's goal is health’his land's health, his own, his family's, his community's, his country's. Whereas the exploiter asks of a piece of land only how much and how quickly it can be made to produce, the nurturer asks a question that is much more complex and difficult: What is its carrying capacity?’¦The exploiter wishes to earn as much as possible by as little work as possible; the nurturer expects, certainly, to have a decent living from his work, but his characteristic wish is to work as well as possible. The competence of the exploiter is in organization; that of the nurturer is in order’human order, that is, that accommodates itself both to the other order and to mystery. The exploiter typically serves an institution or organization; the nurturer serves land, household, community, place. The exploiter thinks in terms of numbers, quantities, "hard facts"; the nurturer in terms of character, condition, quality, kind. (5)
Not only does Berry bring into bolder relief the differences between marketing models and covenantal patterns of church growth, but he also underscores the fundamental discrepancy between a minister who works according to the logic of church growth and the pastors who tend God's flock.
Eugene H. Peterson says that every time Berry "writes 'farm' I substitute 'parish' or 'congregation.' It works every time." Which means that comparing church-growth experts to industrialists is not any more farfetched than comparing a pastor's duties to those of a farmer. The kind of growth that church-growthers look for has everything to do with numbers and solvency. But the pastor's orientation looks upon the needs of his flock no matter how large, sees those needs from the perspective of spiritual and physical health, and looks for growth that is qualitative and lasting. Instead of looking for ways to attract outsiders, the pastor knows that his primary responsibility is to feed his own flock and ensure their growth in grace. This explains why so many church-growth experts sound more like professional managers than men of the cloth. And that may also explain why Peterson says of Berry that he has learned "more usable pastoral theology" from him than from any of "his academic professors."
