This church growth class will focus on church growth and planting, not as a list of programs to be tried, but as the serious study of the questions:
- Why do some churches grow and others do not?
- Are there reproducible principles which church leaders can or should prayerfully attempt to follow in a variety of congregations?
The course will lean heavily on the foundational work of Donald McGavran, the man many call "the father of the modern Church Growth movement."
Course resources
- Syllabus in Adobe Acrobat PDF format [ click here ]
- Video viewing guides
- PowerPoint presentations
- Donald McGavran biography [ view online] [ open as PowerPoint ]
Definition of "Church Growth" [ view online] [ open as PowerPoint ]
- Church Growth pathology: diseases that inhibit local church development [ view online ] [ download as PowerPoint ]
- Obstacles for church [ view online ] [ download as PowerPoint ]
- Student-prepared PowerPoint presentations of material in George Hunter's To spread the power
- Chapter five: Multiplying recruiting units [ view online ] [ download as PowerPoint ]
- Chapter six: Ministering to people's needs
- Chapter seven:
- Chapter eight:
- Lessons learned from Church growth research [ read article ]
- Five church planting steps [ read article ]
- Why do pastors resign their churches? [ read article ]
- Pie graph: Ages at which most Americans come to Christ [ see graph ]
- Class handout: Identifying receptive people
- Indigenizing ministries: key questions
- Resources for local church study
- What do you see? -- exercise about how people viewing the same data can come to different conclusions
- Group presentation resources
- Institutions: help or hindrance to Church Growth? - a position paper by Malachi Makhubela
- "Does the Colonel have something we don't have?" - thoughts on Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants and church growth
- Exam study guides [ click here ]
Church Growth resources on the Internet
Need to know how to cite internet resources in your research papers? Here's a site with instructions and examples.
"Reaping isn't all there is to evangelism. In fact, reaping isn't even the hard labor. Any farmer knows that. It takes one day to harvest what you've cultivated and nurtured for months. Furthermore, the disciples were going to reap a harvest they hadn't sown. I planted, Paul said, Apollos watered, and God gave the increase. Paul handed off some souls to Apollos. God gave the increase. The soil must be cultivated, the seed planted and nurtured, and then comes the harvest."
-- Joseph Aldrich in Gentle Persuasion, published by Multnomah Press in 1998.
| Writing Standards | Most courses at SNU contain a writing component. I expect students to produce written work that is focused, well developed, organized and relatively free of grammatical, punctuation, and spelling errors. Papers falling short of this standard will not be graded. That work will be returned to the students for further revision and resubmission. See my writing checklist. |
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Howard Culbertson, Southern Nazarene University, 6729 NW 39th, Bethany, OK 73008 | Phone: 405-491-6693 - Fax: 405-491-6658
Copyright © 2000, 2001 - Last Updated: June 25, 2008 | URL: http://home.snu.edu/~hculbert/chgrowth.htm
