Point of View July 4, 2025 – Hour 2 : De-Sizing the Church

[00:00:04] Across America, live, this is Point of View. And now, Kirby Anderson. You know, one of the things we've talked about every once in a while is the church growth movement. And in particular, this has been an issue that has certainly had some pros and cons, and there have been all sorts of various comments made about this.

[00:00:33] And I thought it would be good to have you in this one hour hear from an individual that has really looked at this for some time. And it also is encompassed in the book, De-Sizing the Church, How Church Growth Became a Science, Then an Obsession, and What's Next. It is a new book out. It is published by our friends at Moody Publishers. It really gets into great depth into this whole issue of church growth.

[00:01:00] And it is written by Carl Vaders. He serves in church ministry, actually has been really involved in small church ministry for over 40 years. Perhaps you have seen some of his books, The Church Recovery Guide, 100 Days to a Healthier Church, Small Church Essentials. As a matter of fact, he also has a bi-weekly podcast called The Church Lobby, Conversations on Faith and Ministry.

[00:01:26] If you go to our website, you will see that we have a link to carlvaders.com. Scott McKnight says this book is needed more than ever, so I think you would certainly appreciate the conversation. And so, Carl, thank you so very much for joining us today here on Point of View. Thank you, Kirby. It's an honor to be with you. Let's see if we can talk numbers. And you start off by reminding us that we do use numbers. You know, how many social media followers do you have? So many individuals, all the rest.

[00:01:55] And, you know, I travel around. I've been in a number of churches over the years and speak in others. And I've been in some churches where numbers really matter. And the pastor wants to know how many were in the service last week, how much came in, in terms of tithing and actual contributions. But I know other churches where the pastor couldn't even tell you what the church budget is, wouldn't even know who some of the big givers in the church are. So there is wide variation in terms of numbers.

[00:02:24] But unfortunately, numbers, though sometimes helpful in putting together a budget, can be our downfall. And that's been part of what has come from the church growth movement. Yeah, very true. What you've just described is actually some unhealthy extremes on either end of things. It's not that numbers don't matter. It's that numbers have to be used in the right way. And I think of those two extremes you described, of the pastor who's obsessed with numbers or the pastor who can't even tell you what the budget is,

[00:02:51] I think you're going to have far more pastors on the obsessed with numbers end of things. I don't know that I've ever met a pastor who isn't concerned with numbers, who isn't aware of the church budget. But I've met a whole lot who seem to live their entire lives obsessed with getting the numbers up. And, in fact, who end up getting into some very difficult and even unbiblical situations because the drive for numbers becomes so dominant in their thought process.

[00:03:17] I might just mention, too, that not only are we going to be talking about church growth, but you have a whole section. And, of course, you have that on your website as well about why Christian celebrity culture guarantees moral failure. And, of course, you have many examples of that as well. But part of this is idolatry, you say. And I think it is that when all of a sudden – and this is maybe more a North American phenomenon. Bigger is better. More numbers is better.

[00:03:46] Success is determined by numbers. You can go to places in Africa where they are actually measuring it in terms of whether or not you are still involved in some kind of demonic activity or the occult or whether you are growing and raising a family, whether you are true to your family. And so, in some respects, we have a real problem in this North American culture with numbers and with our, if you will, maybe ideological success definitions, right?

[00:04:17] Yeah, that's very true. That's part of what I discovered in doing the research for desizing the church. I've worked with small churches for – well, I've been in small church ministry for my entire ministry life over 40 years. But for the last 11 or so years, I've been writing and speaking to small church pastors about how small churches have a great role to play in the body of Christ and trying to find small church-specific resources for them.

[00:04:42] But a couple of years ago, I started asking myself, why is this a thing that we're constantly having to push back against? Stop worrying about getting the numbers up. Where did this obsession with numbers come from? Because nothing comes from nowhere. It's not a natural human state necessarily that bigger is better. So it had to come from somewhere. So I did the research. I did a deep dive, first of all, into church growth history, and that actually led to a deep dive into American history.

[00:05:10] And it turns out that our obsession with numbers in the church, I think the primary culprit, is some unintended consequences to some of America's best ideas. Yes. And I appreciate that because that's how you start out one of your chapters. This great idea can have unintended consequences. But you begin with a quote from Francis Chan. Will your church grow? He says, well, that's actually the wrong questions to ask because Jesus never used those things as metrics.

[00:05:39] But let's, since you've done such a deep dive, go to the church growth movement, Donald McGavern, and just some of the things that probably would be familiar to some of our listeners, but maybe we need to put on the table so everybody is working from the same assumption. And can you give us kind of a brief history of the church growth movement? Sure, Ken. It'll be as brief as I can make it, but just so your listeners know,

[00:06:05] it will be fairly lengthy because there's a lot in this, but it's very engaging as well. So Donald McGavern was a minister, a missionary in India for his entire time of ministry, and we're talking from the 1940s, 50s, 60s. And during that season, especially during the end of his season in India, he started hearing about entire villages in India where everybody in the village had come to faith in Christ all at once. Yes.

[00:06:34] And at first he dismissed that and thought, well, that's just crazy talk. There's no way that's the case. But he was serious enough about this that he actually went to these villages to see what had actually happened, and he discovered, yes, there are villages where every single person in this village has become a true believer in Christ and is being discipled. And so he thought, there's something going on here, and I want to study this because maybe there are principles undergirding this that we can learn from because we want to see Christ's church grow.

[00:07:03] So he studied several villages, and then after he retired as a missionary, he spent several months in Africa going to several African countries where similar things were happening in different African villages. He then came home and took all of this research and put it together in his first book called The Bridges of God, which came out in the early 1960s. And this book is considered universally understood by any church growth leader you talk to as the first church growth book ever.

[00:07:32] In fact, it was the first place where the term church growth ever appeared in print. Right. And a whole lot of the basic thought processes and kind of questions we ask about church growth started in that book from Donald McGaffron. So his book and his name are almost forgotten today, but that's where it began. Let me jump in real quickly. So we have to take a break, and I want to go from there because one of his early students was Peter Wagner. We want to talk about that.

[00:07:59] We want to also go from there to not only The Bridges of God to understanding church growth and this whole idea, because once you understand the history, you can see that it was well-intended, and it really came from great observation. But at the same time, it took some detours that, of course, we are still living with today. And so I think it's very important that you understand that part of it. It is part of the Desizing the Church book. It is published by our good friends at Moody.

[00:08:29] Carl Vaders is with us. And if you would like to know more about him, we have a link to his website. You will find all sorts of information there. You can subscribe to his newsletter. I even get more information about this book and some of the videos. So let's continue our conversation with Carl right after these important messages.

[00:08:58] This is Viewpoints with Kirby Anderson. Today is the 4th of July, and I thought I would take a moment to talk about the origin of the ideas in the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson said that many of the ideas in the Declaration came from John Locke. Jefferson also gives credit to the writer Algernon Sidney, who in turn cites most prominently Aristotle, Plato, Roman Republican writers, and the Old Testament.

[00:09:22] Legal scholar Gary Amos argues that Locke's two treatises of government is simply Samuel Rutherford's Lex Rex in a popularized form. Amos says in his book Defending the Declaration that the law of nature is God's general revelation of law in creation, which God also supernaturally writes on the hearts of men. This foundation helps explain the tempered nature of the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence was a bold document, but not a radical one. The colonists did not break with England for light and transient causes.

[00:09:52] They were mindful that Romans 13 says that we should be in subjection to the governing authorities which are established by God. Yet when they suffered from a long train of abuses and usurpations, they argued that it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute a new government. Jefferson also drew from George Mason's Declaration of Rights, published June 6, 1776. The first paragraph states that all men are born equally free and independent and have certain inherent natural rights,

[00:10:20] among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety. The Declaration of Independence is more than 200 years old. It was a monumental document at the time. Even today its words ring with truth and inspire new generations. I'm Kirby Anderson, and that's my point of view.

[00:10:47] Go deeper on topics like you just heard by visiting pointofview.net. That's pointofview.net. You're listening to Point of View, your listener-supported source for truth. The book is Desizing the Church. Carl Vader is with us. How Church Growth Became a Science, Then an Obsession, and What's Next? And again, we left Donald McGravern with a book, The Bridges of God,

[00:11:15] but then he had a second book called Understanding Church Growth. That came out in 1970, and that really kind of launched the whole church growth movement, didn't it? It really did. His two books, The Bridges of God and Understanding Church Growth, are absolutely essential works to understand how we started thinking differently about church growth. And it was out of those that he was invited to go to Fuller Seminary in Pasadena to begin the Church Growth Institute,

[00:11:45] which, again, is also considered a landmark place for the church growth movement. But what's really weird is for the first seven years that he taught the Church Growth Institute at Fuller Seminary, he did not allow American pastors to attend. Isn't that something? Yeah. It's really strange. Now, obviously, he can't just say no American pastors allowed. So what he did was he put up three restrictions. He said you can only be in the class if you have mastered a second language other than English,

[00:12:13] if you have been in ministry on a foreign field, and third, if you can express an expertise about an indigenous people group that's not your own. And that, of course, excludes 99.9% of American pastors. And in wondering why he did that, I actually had a conversation with several conversations, really, with Gary McIntosh, who is McAvrin's biographer.

[00:12:38] And in talking with McIntosh, he said, yeah, the reason Donald McAvrin didn't want American pastors in is because he knew that the American setting was very different from the African and Indian settings that he had done this study in. And his concern was that American pastors would take these principles, which were intended to help increase Christians as a percentage of the population,

[00:13:01] and that we would turn those principles into how do we make a bigger church, or what I like to call we want to have a big church contest. Right. And he thought, that's not the point. Bigger churches aren't the point. Bringing people to Christ is the point. Increasing the percentage of Christians in a community is the point. If the best way to do that is to have a whole bunch of small churches, then let's have a whole bunch of small churches. If the best way to do that is to have one big church, then let's have one big church.

[00:13:27] But the idea of individual churches getting bigger was not even close to his central thing. But once we did get a hold of that, basically for seven years he taught it without Americans, and then he, and as you mentioned earlier, C. Peter Wagner, one of his first students, in 1972 they taught the first ever class that included American pastors. There were only about 20 people in the class, but that is the spark point for the entire church growth movement, that class in 1972.

[00:13:55] And as it turns out, while the church growth movement did a lot of great things in America, we also did the things that McGavern feared, and that is we made it all about individual churches getting bigger. Yes. Well, and you refer to this as kind of a made-in-America phenomenon. And if you think about this, what preceded him, let's just give a little bit of church history, because you do so in a chapter or two. We had the first great awakening. We had the second great awakening.

[00:14:23] We've had other kind of awakenings and revivals. So once you had this kind of gasoline putting on the revival fires, you have a forest fire. You have a conflagration, don't you? Yeah, you do. And the question becomes, of course, where did it – why is it that America was the place that this bigger is better came from? And as I mentioned earlier, it's actually an unintended consequence of some of our best ideas.

[00:14:52] And by America's best ideas, I mean like the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights to the Constitution, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly. These are America's best ideas. They are just – it is hard for us to understand today how revolutionary they were in their time. But here's kind of what happens with that.

[00:15:15] In fact, the people who wrote those great words, those revolutionary world-changing words, mostly came from Northern Europe. And in Northern Europe, they had church – they had state churches. Yeah, state churches. Part of what they were rebelling against was we don't want to be in the state church. We don't want the state to tell us how to worship. We want to be in a place where we can worship the way we want to, believe what we want to. And so they founded this document.

[00:15:40] But what we don't understand, it's really hard for us to believe today in America, is when they came from – the European countries they came from, if there is a state church, then the state actually collected the tithes for the church through the tax base. So if you were in a church that was approved of by the state, the pastor and the church received a check monthly from the government to pay the pastor's salary and to keep the upkeep of the building.

[00:16:08] Now, when you come to America, there's no state church, which is good, but that also means the state ain't paying your bills. So what you have to do now is in order to get more money, the pastors who can draw a bigger crowd can get more money, can build a bigger church, and the entrepreneurial pastor is born. And again, you talk about that. Nathan Hatch talks about that and all the rest because, again, bigger becomes better because bigger means you have a bigger budget.

[00:16:38] And so you are – again, I'm glad we don't have state churches, but it then created sort of an entrepreneurial mindset among church leaders, pastors, and others. And then it began to take off. So what then happened is that you then have a series of what you call streams that kind of come together.

[00:16:59] And you sort of illustrated some of those, but it would be probably good to talk about how those streams came together and how that gave us the world that we find ourselves in today. Yeah. So what we've just described are the McGavern stream and the American stream. The American stream preexisted, the McGavern stream, by several hundred years. And McGavern, as an American missionary, you know, missionary from America to other countries, he was aware of these streams.

[00:17:25] So McGavern put words to it and McGavern put principles behind it. And McGavern gave a base of study and understanding, and he was even a student of sociology and anthropology. So he gave some clarification and some language to all of this. But the preexisting American stream was so much bigger, so much stronger, and so much more in our lives every day.

[00:17:54] This is the water we're swimming in. We are fish swimming in the American stream, and we don't recognize some of the characteristics of the water that we're swimming in because fish just don't know what water is, and that's what we are. McGavern comes in. He's got these new ideas about the overwhelming American stream comes in. So some of the key differences were, for instance, McGavern is studying how God builds churches and how God does things.

[00:18:24] But the American stream that preexisted from folks like Charles Finney, who was probably the first one to do this, and folks like Moody and so on. And, you know, here we are on Moody Radio on Moody is my publisher. But they, in addition to being men of God who believed in God and who absolutely were moved upon by God to do great things, they also came along and kind of codified it and said, well, but here's also how to draw a crowd.

[00:18:52] And so they really came along with not just how to it, but here's how I did it. Now you duplicate that. And so if you look around at most church growth books or church growth conferences, it's really not, hey, here are some basic principles we can learn from. It's let's put the guy on stage who's pastoring the biggest church in the room. Let's have that pastor tell us how they did it in their church, and now let's see if we can duplicate it in our church.

[00:19:20] But it doesn't work that way because God always insists on doing things differently in different places with different people. The underlying principles stay the same, and that's what McGavern wanted to discover. Well, we need to take a break, but I thought when we come back we might talk about how do we get megachurches because megachurches historically did not necessarily exist.

[00:19:44] And, of course, you have a quote from how megachurch was won the heart of America. And some of those are in the Catholic tradition. Some of those are in the Pentecostal tradition. Some of those are in what we would today call the evangelical tradition. So there were a few, but very, very few. Now there are many more. So I do want to talk about that just briefly when we come back from the break.

[00:20:09] But then I'll really get to the meat of your book, and that is the consequences of our Scythe's obsession and why the Christian celebrity culture guarantees moral failure, in which you have some ways to resist that by lowering the platform, sharing the platform, leave the platform, remove the platform. You have a lot of that material on your website as well.

[00:20:34] And then when the church growth movement went sideways, a very significant issue as well. And then we'll come back and talk about the size and scale and influence. And really one of the most important issues, of course, is integrity. It's all part of this book, Desizing the Church, How Church Growth Became a Science and an Obsession, and What's Next. Carl Vader's with us. And if you would like during the break to go to his website, it's carlvaders.com.

[00:21:01] You don't even have to know how to spell his name because it is right there on our website at pointofview.net. If you'd like to get a copy of the book, I would imagine you probably would find it in your local bookstore. But if not, we have a way in which you can get it in paperback or Kindle. Of course, you can go to his website and find out more as well. Let's take a break as we continue looking at this whole idea of church growth, and in particular, the church growth movement. We'll be back right after this.

[00:21:30] At Point of View, we believe there is power in prayer, and that is why we have relaunched our Pray for America campaign, a series of weekly emails to unite Americans in prayer for our nation. Imagine if hundreds of thousands of Americans started praying intentionally together on a weekly basis.

[00:21:54] You can help make that a reality by subscribing to our Pray for America emails. Just go to pointofview.net and click on the Pray for America banner that's right there on the homepage. Each week, you'll receive a brief news update, a specific prayer guide, and a free resource to equip you in further action. We encourage you to not only pray with us each week,

[00:22:22] but to share these prayers and the resources with others in your life. Join the movement today. Visit pointofview.net and click on the banner Pray for America right there at the top. That's pointofview.net. Let's pray together for God to make a difference in our land. Point of View will continue after this.

[00:22:51] You are listening to Point of View. The opinions expressed on Point of View do not necessarily reflect the views of the management or staff of this station. And now, here again, is Kirby Anderson. Continue your conversation today as we talk about desizing the church. Carvator's with us.

[00:23:17] And, Carvator, just a minute, we might talk about the fact that megachurches are not a uniquely American phenomenon. There are certainly some other examples of that in South Korea and places like that. But you do remind us that because of the suburbs and because of just the kind of American entrepreneurialism, we ended up getting a lot more megachurches here in the United States, didn't we? Yeah, that's very true.

[00:23:44] The megachurch, like you say, is not exclusively American, but it is particularly American. And as you said, even some of my study in American history, fascinatingly, had to do with the rise of the suburbs. So in the 1960s, when the interstates came in, it allowed people who used to have to live and work inside the city to be able to buy a home outside the city with lots of land, and then generally dad would commute into the city and back out again. And so you had the explosion of the suburbs.

[00:24:12] And in the suburbs, you had all kinds of space. And so now you had large schools and large parks and large malls. And when the churches moved out, they kind of followed that pattern and made larger churches as well and kind of even made them look and feel like the typical suburban shopping malls. So today, when you think about a megachurch, what pops into most people's mind is a large campus in a very wealthy suburb just outside of a large city.

[00:24:42] And that's the picture we have because that's about where 80% of megachurches are. But in 1969, there were only 16 churches in the entire country that were at 2,000 or more, which is what a megachurch is. Today, there's over 1,800 of them. So there has been a huge explosion of the big church over the last 40 or 50 years. This is not a bad thing, but it's something that we need to come to terms with, what kind of consequences are behind that. Well, we're going to spend the rest of the time talking about consequences.

[00:25:11] One of those is the celebrity culture. You got a quote from Beth Moore. Humans were not fashioned by God for celebrity. We can't take it. I'm telling you, it's too much. And again, if you get prominence in media, prominence with best-selling books, prominence as a pastor, I've oftentimes said that both the strength and weakness, the positive and the negative of being a talk show host, as I get to interview so many of these great people,

[00:25:40] and some of them are just genuinely nice people to be around, and a lot of them are really believing their press clippings. And we've created a celebrity culture, haven't we? We really have. I want to be careful in the phrasing of this. The title of the chapter is Inevitable, Why the Christian Celebrity Culture Guarantees Moral Failure. I am not saying that becoming a Christian celebrity means you have or will fail morally.

[00:26:06] There are, as you have met, many well-known Christians that we would call celebrities who are maintaining their faith, who are maintaining their integrity, who have a high moral standard, and who are wonderful and delightful to be around. But the celebrity culture guarantees that there will be moral failing because that celebrity culture attracts narcissists. It attracts, put a spotlight on the stage, it attracts people who want to be in that spotlight.

[00:26:33] So if the culture itself, that whole vibe around it, you're going to have narcissists attracted to that. You're going to have egotists attracted to that. And sometimes from the seat, it's hard to distinguish between the person who's in the spotlight because their content is good and that God has just simply given them a larger audience and those who are in the spotlight because they just simply want the spotlight to be upon them. But we need to be able to come up with ways to distinguish between those two.

[00:27:02] And I might just mention that you talk about this in the book, but also if you go to carlvaders.com, you've got a section on to resist the relentless pull towards celebrity, I suggest four steps. And one of those, of course, is to lower the platform, another to share the platform, another is to leave the platform, and another is to remove the platform entirely. Can you kind of go through that real quickly before I get into the next consequence?

[00:27:27] Because this is an important issue, and I'm hoping that you will get to speak maybe at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention, Christian Booksellers Convention, some places like that, because this is a message that needs to be heard, and you need to be able to give it. Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, let's walk through the four of them. First of all, we need to lower the platform. When I speak, I speak to small church groups, and so I typically speak to a group of 70 every once in a while.

[00:27:56] It'll be a group of, you know, a couple hundred or so. But recently I had the chance to speak to a very large conference of 7,000 pastors. And I was on a stage that was literally taller than the roof of the building of the church that I pastor. And the people in the front row were twice as far away from me as the back row is in the church that I'm serving. Isn't that funny?

[00:28:21] And so I'm standing up there, and I'm thinking, just the physical placement of this, and the fact that it's being live streamed, there is something about the height of that and about the spotlight of that that can be very, very dangerous. And what I also noticed was when I left, when I go to a typical conference again, I usually talk to small church pastors. And if I go to a conference of 100 or 200 pastors, and often a dozen or so, I walk in and I don't know anybody.

[00:28:49] But by the end of the day, I walk out and I actually know some people because we've had time for conversation and Q&A and back and forth, and we've shared contact information. I walked into that conference not knowing anybody of those 7,000, and I walked out not knowing one of those 7,000 people because the platform created a distance that we need to be careful about. So lowering the platform means getting closer to the people and not purposely distancing yourself. Secondly, we should share the platform.

[00:29:19] I think one of the great trends that's happening right now is the teaching team, and also when I see worship teams, they're often sharing the lead. It used to be that a worship team had only one lead singer, and now you can have three songs and have three different lead singers for that. So you can have a teaching team at a church where you don't know which pastor is going to preach on Sunday, and it doesn't matter because you're committed to Christ and his church and not necessarily to the person on the platform. So sharing the platform is helpful.

[00:29:48] Thirdly, we need to leave the platform regularly. There's a reason why my podcast is called The Church Lobby, because you can tell more about the health of the church by walking through the lobby than by what comes from the platform. And in this next generation or so, this generation is going to care more about connecting to the pastor and to the other church leaders in the lobby than by the excellence of what's coming from the stage.

[00:30:13] In my generation, the boomers, we were impressed by the stentorian voice from the platform. Today that feels phony, and the person standing with you and taking time to look you in the eye in the lobby, that's what matters. So pastors, we've got to leave the platform more often. And then finally, some platforms have got to be removed entirely. We have all heard story after sad story of pastors who have fallen, who have failed,

[00:30:39] many of them because they were pursuing numbers so much that they compromised in order to get there. And then after they've gotten to a point of hopefully recovery, it seems that they want to rush back to those platforms again. And there are times and there are places where some platforms should never be re-erected because the damage has just been too deep. That's amazing. So some really important issues to address in terms of celebrity.

[00:31:04] But just before we take a break, there are some places where you think the church growth movement got it right and then some other places where it went sideways. I do. I am actually a – I am still a fan of the church growth movement. I think it's been around long enough that now we have enough distance to be able to make some assessment and see some of the unintended negative consequences. And so that's what I try to do in my book. But I do believe the church growth movement got several things right.

[00:31:30] The church growth movement had a great emphasis on the importance of the local church, and that's huge. Church growth movement and mega church pastors in particularly are some of the most generous people that I've ever known. There's nobody out there who comes up with a church growth idea or a church leadership concept and trademarks it. They immediately put it out as quickly and as cheaply as possible on a free podcast or in a book or at a conference. There is a great generosity and a great sharing of that.

[00:31:58] And the whole church planting movement to a large degree really became to the forefront because of the church growth movement. So that and many, many other things are very, very great positives about the church growth movement for which I'm really appreciative. So, again, those are just a couple of issues. When we come back, we'll talk a little bit more about what to do with this whole idea of a big, small divide.

[00:32:22] And really, again, how to start, as you said, desizing, because it seems to me that integrity and competence are really important. So we'll talk about some other issues related to that. But if you find yourself saying, well, I've piqued my interest. You've whet my appetite. I'd like to know a little bit more. Let me just mention that this book is published by Moody Publishing.

[00:32:46] It has about 230 pages, some great content, a lot of which has come out of the years of experience that Carl Vaders has been involved in ministry. We do have a link to his website. As you go there, you'll find a number of great resources, a whole section on helping small churches thrive. So whether you're in a church that is very large or very small, I think you're going to find some great resources there. If you'd like to have him come and speak to your group, there's a context section.

[00:33:15] There's information about his other books and resources, of which there are quite a few that I mention. And then you can go to the speaking and see kind of his menu of speaking and topics and conference material. And so if you'd like to contact him, again, it's very simple. It is carlvaders.com. And if you would like to know more, it's on our website at pointofview.net. We'll be right back.

[00:34:20] Thank you. The Journal describes an NCO as the campus version of a restraining order. Schools that issue NCOs say they are non-disciplinary. Conduct administrators describe requests for NCOs by a student who said her roommate allegedly stole her bagels, by participants in a group project gone awry, and by students involved in a social media skirmish.

[00:34:43] David Karp, professor of sociology at University of San Diego, with a specialty in restorative justice and conflict resolution, says colleges hand out no-contact orders like candy. He told the Journal, we generally know that students are increasingly fragile and conflict-averse. He and others in his field maintain that even school administrators who are reluctant to issue NCOs often cave in the face of pressure from helicopter parents.

[00:35:07] Perhaps the rise in the use of these no-contact orders and students' tendency to seek them for everyday disagreements shouldn't surprise us. Gen Zers, who live much of life online, are used to using digital tools to block unwanted communications online. They often have a hard time handling conflict when it involves interacting face-to-face with peers. The Journal article points to online behaviors that enable kids from an early age to shut out people they dislike or disapprove of. Colleges have allowed the concept of student safety to be watered down.

[00:35:38] Students and their parents are asking for protections, like NCOs, that erect bubbles around kids. Perhaps instead of issuing no-contact orders, schools should teach their students how to get along. For Point of View, I'm Penna Dexter. You're listening to Point of View, your listener-supported source for truth. Back for a few more minutes again as we talk about the book, Decising the Church. Carl Vader's with us, and you have a whole section on how to start decising.

[00:36:07] And one of those issues, you say, is integrity. It's the new competence. And then you also talk about the very significant need for discipleship. And it does seem to me that when you talk about some of the things that need to be changed in the church, maybe we need to go back to the manual called the Bible. Yeah, there's an idea.

[00:36:31] Yeah, those two chapters are where the book makes the all-important turn from describing the problem and where it came from to let's take a look at some potential solutions. And it's very easy to want to get technical and say, well, if we do this method better or that method better. But I really push back against that because you're not going to find anybody out there who says they're deconstructing their faith or calls themselves an ex-evangelical or whatever the terminology may be. You won't find anybody out there who says, you know what?

[00:36:59] But I left the church because of technical problems. Yeah. I didn't like the drums. I didn't like the meat. Exactly. I didn't like the skinny jeans of the pastor, whatever it was. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so we're working on all these technical issues, and we ought to get our technical stuff right. I've got no problem with getting it right. But we're not going to fix the problems of the American church through better techniques and better management because that's not what got us here.

[00:37:29] What got us here is a lack of integrity, and we're only going to fix it by getting our integrity back again. So the first chapter where that term makes, as you said, is called Integrity is the New Competence. For 40 years now in the church growth movement, we've been teaching better technique, better methods, better systems. And I'm all for the best techniques and methods and systems we can find. But during that time where we have really become very, very good at some things,

[00:37:58] we have also seen a decline in the percentage of Christians in America and in simply the moral and ethical state of America and, let's face it, of many in the American church as well. So we have got – if we spent 40 years on technical, let's spend the 40 years getting our integrity back in shape again. Because techniques change. And even if we have a great revival, revivals cool down.

[00:38:27] But integrity is what will last in the long run. And that's what people are looking to us for. They are asking, are you going to be people of your word? And when we're not, we lose them. And when we are, that's the only way we have a chance to keep them. You also talk about discipleship. And lots of times at a conference, people will say, well, how do I fix Sunday school? And you go back and ask them, well, what's Sunday school for? And that is, okay, the best way to help people love Jesus and know the Bible.

[00:38:55] So it does seem to me that, you know, discipleship, I have a concept. Let's talk to people. Let's minister to people. Let's use biblical principles to disciple them in the word and to help them grow as Christians. Yeah, I actually had the nerve to entitle that chapter, Discipleship Fixes Everything. I know. And I really paused and thought, is it really? And as I thought it through, I thought, you know what?

[00:39:21] I cannot come up with a single problem that a church could have that discipleship doesn't fix. Think about it. If you're in church, think about it. What lack of volunteers, discipleship fixes that. Lack of finances, discipleship fixes that. Conflict, immorality, immaturity, discipleship fixes it, fixes it, fixes it. And as I look through all the list of the problems of church, discipleship is the fix, which makes sense because that's the thing Jesus told us to do.

[00:39:49] Jesus said, I will build my church. And then he looked at us and said, you go make disciples. And I've got this kind of comical conversation that goes on in my head where Jesus says that to us and we look at him and go, got it. We'll go build your church. And Jesus has to go, no, no, no, no. I will build my church. You go make disciples. And we go, oh, okay, I get it. We'll go build a church. No, no. I know. Jesus called us to make disciples.

[00:40:17] And when we do that, all of the other problems become less because discipleship is the fix for all of those things. Well, as I put in the book, there's one thing that discipleship won't fix, and that is discipleship will not fix the size of your church for two reasons. One, because the size of your church is not a problem to fix. And two, because there will be times, not often, most of the time our integrity and our growth go hand in hand.

[00:40:45] Most of the time discipleship and numerical growth go hand in hand. But there will come occasional times where church leaders have to make the choice. I can either choose for discipleship and possibly lose people, or I can choose for numerical growth and water down the discipleship. And we need to pre-decide. We will always be on the side of discipleship over numbers, and we will always be on the side of integrity over numbers. And if we can't make that decision easily, then we are in a dangerous place.

[00:41:15] For sure. Well, just as we wind down, of course, there was this article years ago in Christianity Today talking about the evangelical industrial complex, which is, of course, borrowing from Dwight Eisenhower's military industrial complex. Keith Green referred to it as Jesus Junk. And there's just a need to rethink a lot of things about the church. And that's why I really wanted people to know about the book. But, Carl, for just a minute, let's talk about your website, because it seems to me that people,

[00:41:45] if they would like to know more about this book, or if they'd like to subscribe to your newsletter, or if they would like to maybe even be able to hear your podcast on the church lobby, or maybe invite you to come and speak, there's a lot of resources there. So can you kind of go through those real quickly? Thank you. Yes, it's carlvaders.com. And I've been getting a couple notices while we've been chatting that a couple folks have found it to be down. So we're getting some glitches, but keep it up. Now, carlvaders.com is the website.

[00:42:13] The ministry is called Helping Small Churches Thrive. So at least once a week, I write an article that I put up there. It's typically small church resources, although recently it's really on desizing the church and some of these bigger issues. I also have guest articles by small church pastors and people who are in the small church space to help ministry like that. But that's also the home for my podcast called The Church Lobby, where we interview a church leader every second week,

[00:42:39] and we talk about some of the things that really apply, and again, particularly and specifically we are very interested in helping the small church because small churches are 90% of the churches in the world, and they serve half of the Christians in the world, and they are typically vastly under-resourced. Most of the resources we get come from a big church context, and I'm grateful for them, but most of them only work in a big church context.

[00:43:03] So we want to find and create resources that help small churches, which, again, are 90% of the churches in the world, and they serve half the Christians in the world. Wow. So, again, some great resources at carlvaders.com. This book is written in such a way that I would certainly encourage people to go through it individually, but you do have in an appendix a church health assessment tool. So this could be something, it seems to me, that the church could go through collectively,

[00:43:33] maybe pastors could go through it with their elder board or their deacons or something of that nature, and so you really have it put together in a way to maybe start some conversation and get some people thinking a little bit more about whether or not they're accepting maybe the wrong church model to really be all that it's supposed to be as the body of Christ. So that's really kind of how you put the book together, isn't it?

[00:43:58] It is, and there's also another survey in there, 10 questions based on do I need to de-size, where pastors can go, have I been caught in this, and you can actually answer 10 questions, and if you answer them honestly, you'll discover either you don't need to de-size or you've got some issues that you may not have been aware of. I don't want to prejudge. I want people to be able to take the assessments themselves and get a good understanding of where they and their church are right now so they know what issues to work on.

[00:44:26] So again, if you're a pastor, go to Chapter 14, and that has those questions, of course, for everyone, some of the questions at the end. So Carl, I appreciate you putting the book together. Thank you in your busy life for giving us an hour today here on Point of View. Thank you. It's been great to be with you. Again, de-sizing is, of course, choosing to evaluate the health and vitality of your congregation, maybe your denomination, maybe even a movement or a parachurch organization. So I would encourage you to find out more about this.

[00:44:56] He has been in small church ministry for 40 years, brings a lot of wisdom to the conversation. De-sizing the church, Carvators, and you've been listening to Point of View. It almost seems like we live in a different world from many people in positions of authority. They say men can be women and women men. People are prosecuted differently or not at all, depending on their politics.

[00:45:24] Criminals are more valued and rewarded than law-abiding citizens. It's so overwhelming, so demoralizing. You feel like giving up, but we can't. We shouldn't. We must not. As Winston Churchill said to Britain in the darkest days of World War II, never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.

[00:45:52] And that's what we say to you today. This is not a time to give in, but to step up and join Point of View in providing clarity in the chaos. We can't do it alone, but together, with God's help, we will overcome the darkness. Invest in biblical clarity today at pointofview.net or call 1-800-347-5151.

[00:46:18] Pointofview.net and 800-347-5151. Point of View will continue after this.