Archive: Who’s Ready to be Reached?

Evangelism Expert George Hunter describes 13 kinds of people ripe for the Gospel

Christians must be liberated from entrenched myths that have long frustrated the effectiveness of evangelism. One myth is that one takes a “magic” approach to reach people. Many Christians assume, like our primitive pre-Christian ancestors, that supernatural victories are achieved through “incantations;” that is, that learning, saying and doing the right things right will trigger victory in the spiritual realm. By such a pre-Christian script, Christians try one “magical formula” after another. Or they vow to do nothing at all until denominational headquarters produce the perfect “stretch sock” to fit every situation! In fact, no magic exists in these matters. In part because methods do not evangelize. Rather, faithful compassionate people evangelize, empowered by the Spirit, using whatever methods or words are most natural or useful in a given situation.

Evangelizing people depends much more on God’s grace and on fluctuations in human responsiveness than on our precise theology and eloquence. Indeed churches grow as they learn how to identify and reach receptive people whom God’s prevenient grace has prepared to meet Him. In every season, the Lord of the harvest is bringing a “harvest” into being and is calling His Church to lift up its eyes, and see where the· fields “are white for harvest.” We now have from Church Growth research a body of valuable indicators for spotting receptive people—an immense aid to outreach in a mass society.

Using common sense, we may observe that some people are more receptive to the Gospel than others, and that a given person is more receptive now than last year.

The good news is that in every season some people and groups are receptive. They have been prepared for harvest by the Lord of the harvest, and the Church’s greatest apostolic opportunity in any season is to identify and reach those people while they are open. Today, the power of Jesus’ name is spreading in many lands because missionary leaders and national leaders, schooled in Church Growth principles, have identified societies and population groups “white for harvest.”

“Indicators” are the observable conditions or phenomena that frequently precede or accompany the increased responsiveness of people and the growth of the church. From several decades of research and reflection, it is possible to generate an unmanageably long list. However, by combining some and thinking generically, we can delineate an even dozen, plus one. We do not use indicators in order to supplant a spiritual matter with secular technology, but rather as lenses to help us spot where the Spirit is preparing people and calling us to join Him.

1. Unchurched people who are linked by kinship or friendship networks, to the church’s active, credible Christians are more receptive than others. Undiscipled people tend to become potentially receptive, even emotionally involved, when someone they know becomes a genuine Christian. Typically, the church grows when it spreads to the friends, relatives, neighbors, and co-workers of its members—especially to its new members and converts. Churches grow when they periodically survey their members and identify all the ministry area’s undiscipled people who are linked to believers.

2. People are more receptive to outreach from new groups and classes than from long established groups and classes. Furthermore, a first generation church can attract some people that an older congregation cannot. We are sure of at least two reasons: (a) Some people like to “get in on the ground floor.” They are more interested in pursuing an agenda they helped create than an agenda someone else created that “I do not own.” (b) New groups and churches do not experience, as much as older groups and churches, the conflict between the “pioneers” and the “homesteaders,” with the homesteaders feeling outside the fellowship of those who “remember back when.”

3. Churches grow as they identify people with needs that the church can minister to, either by (a) extending ministries already in place or (b) building new ministries. To illustrate how ministries can be extended: In the years that Dr. Charles Allen pastored Grace Methodist Church in Atlanta, Georgia (1948-60), he extended the church’s ministry to unchurched persons engaged to be married, removing all church policies (such as fees) that might be interpreted as “we don’t really want you.” In those 12 years, Allen married 1,113 couples. Every couple was visited in the week following the wedding, and 327 couples joined Grace Church from that one ministry. Allen’s rationale for wedding-related outreach is deceptively simple: “You have an attachment to where you got married!”

4. Sometimes, a more indigenous ministry will reveal a people to be receptive. The principle of indigenous ministry explains more than might be apparent. It explains why John Wesley found England’s working people receptive, the very people the parish churches had found resistant. It explains what happened in a blue collar neighborhood where a Presbyterian church experienced so much membership decline and lack of response that the building was sold. An Assemblies of God congregation bought the building and within a year it was full and facing building plans. Interviews with the Assembly’s new members (from the neighborhood) revealed that the new pastor and congregation “understood us,” “fit the neighborhood,” “spoke our language,” and “sang songs we like,” whereas the former church, at least in their perceptions, had not.

5. Populations in which any religion is growing should be perceived as open and searching for something. Roy Shearer suggests this indication may be the only reasonably perfect one. Obviously, “wherever we see a growing non-Christian religion, we can be sure the people in that place are potential receptors of the Gospel.”[1] We observe this indicator not only in the growth of a traditional religion, like Islam, but also in the growth of ideologies, quasi-religions, and cults—such as communism, nationalism, or People’s Temple. In every case, the religion is engaging people’s felt needs, but Christians need not assume the religion is meeting their deep needs.

6. People among whom any religion has experienced decline tend to be receptive. For instance, with the partial eclipse of Shintoism in Japan and of Confucianism throughout much of Asia, many peoples have experienced a religious vacuum that will, sooner or later, be filled with something. As many people in China, Russia, and their satellites become disillusioned with the utopian promises of Marxism, those peoples will constitute receptive mission fields. In many nations and peoples the inherited folk religions are being jeopardized by the forces of technology, urbanization, and secularization, and their people are open to an alternative faith.

As a variant of the same principle, individuals who have recently lost faith in anything—a religion, a philosophy, a lover, a drug, a pipe dream, an utopian promise or in themselves—tend to look for something new upon which to build their lives.

7. A people experiencing major culture change tend to be very receptive. Culture change takes a number of forms, such as decline of traditional values, or changes in marriage and family patterns or values, or changes in kinship structures or patterns. A range of changes in a society’s political system, from being conquered to being liberated, from oppression imposed to oppression removed, from revolution to nationalism, have all contributed to the receptivity of a people. Major economic changes, such as unemployment, underemployment, runaway inflation, mergers, acquisitions, crop failures and plant closings have all shaken people’s false securities and opened them to the Gospel.

8. Various forms of population mobility induce receptivity. For instance, new settlements are strategic centers for planting new congregations. Peter Wagner reports that “areas of rapid urbanization almost invariably contain large segments of population receptive to the Gospel. “[2] Donald McGavran reminds us that: “Every American pastor is well aware of the fact that new suburbs in which there are no churches whatever are an excellent field in which to plant congregations. And new arrivals in any community yield a much higher proportion of new Christians than old inhabitants. Newcomers are looking for community and are open to new decisions; but they must be purposely evangelized.

“Travel sometimes turns people responsive. Soldiers in World War II who had seen the world came back to resistant tribal areas of Africa and sparked movements to the Christian faith,”[2] McGavran observes.

9. In most seasons, in most nations, “the masses” are more responsive than “the classes.” Much evangelism has presupposed the opposite, that if you first win the people with education, wealth, culture, and influence, then Christianity will trickle down to the masses. But this approach has aborted thousands of possibilities for the spread of the Gospel. Wesley saw that the faith must necessarily spread first from those people with no power, so that others might perceive it to be the power of God. Bishop J. Waskom Pickett’s extensive research and experience in India convinced him that, “There is strong reason to believe that the surest way of multiplying conversions of higher-caste Hindus is to increase the scale on which the transforming, enriching and uplifting grace of Christ is demonstrated in the depressed classes. And one certain way to arrest the movement to the higher castes to Christ is to turn away from the poor and the despised.”

10. People who are “like” the people already active in a church, particularly its newer members, will be more receptive than the surrounding population as a whole. Some churches systematically classify—in terms like age, culture, education, vocation, and class—the people they have received. They interview their new members to discover what was happening in their lives that made them receptive, the needs they felt at the time, the ministries, groups, experiences, and the truths that seemed to help, and so forth. Then they find many people like them and make those same ministries, groups, experiences, and truths available to them.

11. Personal dissatisfaction with themselves and their lives opens many people to a Gospel of grace and a second chance. Roy Shearer has observed that many receptive people are not able to satisfy their life needs and are open to something new that will. Through the ministry of a Lutheran church, a young man who had “tried everything in town to get in touch with my potential” found that his Creator knew him and had a purpose for his life. A teenager struggling with the power of temptation met his resurrected Lord in an Easter service. A twice-estranged couple found the glue for an enduring reconciliation. An immigrant family found “support in our culture shock, and now this whole church is our tribe.”

12. Persons experiencing important life transitions are more receptive than persons in stable periods of life. In every season, many persons are experiencing some major change in their lives or social roles, and this tends to “unfreeze” their lives and makes change possible. The kinds of receptivity-increasing transitions that people experience include adolescence, going to college (or the armed forces), first job, getting married, first child, last child leaving home, menopause, mid-life crisis, retirement, loss of loved one, and other similar experiences. Additional receptivity-inducing transitions that many people experience include birth (or adoption) of a sibling, moving to a new community, getting fired, job advancement, separation, divorce and second marriage. Not all these transitions are necessarily “crises.” Nontraumatic transitions can still induce receptivity.

13. Visitors to a church’s worship service are frequently receptive to that church—at least for a short period of time. Whether church leaders know it or not, visitors use a worship service as a “shopwindow”—to observe and sample the church’s goods to determine how comfortable they are with the church’s people, to detect what the church believes and lives for, to see whether they like it, and to see whether the members notice, welcome, and want them. Effective pastors modify their liturgy to make it possible for visitors to follow and understand, and they schedule times for people to notice and greet each other.

There are reasons to qualify or bend the principle of receptivity, but we neglect its importance to the peril of many responsive people. McGavran reminds us that “Opportunity blazes today, but it may be a brief blaze. Certainly conditions which create the opportunity—as far as human wisdom can discern—are transient conditions. We have today. Let us move forward.”

[1] Roy E. Shearer, “The Psychology of Receptivity and Church Growth,” from A.R. Tippell. ed., God, Man and Church Growth (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1973), pp.162-63.

[2] Donald A. McGavran, Understanding Church Growth, revised edition (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1980), p. 249

 

Life in Death Valley

Good News recently talked with Dr. Hunter in his Asbury Seminary office.

GN: What would you advise local church people to do to try to initiate church growth where they are?

GH: The first thing is to develop an assimilation program. This means churches must ground people in the fellowship, root people in the Scripture, and help them begin in the Christian life. Many of our churches do not reach out to people simply because they don’t know what they’re going to do with them if they do come.

GN: It seems most local churches think that if they are friendly enough to visitors, their church will grow. What’s wrong with that idea?

GH: Two things. There is now research indicating that what people are looking for is not mere friendliness, but something more like genuine caring, if not love. Second. one reason we have a large number of inactive members in our churches today (and here Methodism is not alone) is the friendliness of our people. I’ve interviewed great numbers of inactive members who reported, among other factors, the following: “The people in this church were so friendly when I visited that I felt if I joined this church these people would be my friends. When that didn’t happen, I found myself dropping out.”

GN: So it could be a con to be friendly, in order to lure someone in.

GH: More likely it just communicates something that wasn’t really intended. That raises an honest question: Should I be friendly to someone if I’m not willing to be a friend?

GN: Many of our United Methodist churches are rural. I often hear statements like, “There’s no one around to join our church. Our neighbors are already active in churches.” Does this argument have merit?

GH: First, what they say in those rural churches is true if one still accepts the old parish system, defined as “everybody within walking distance of the church.” There aren’t enough people in some of those parishes to expect great growth (though there are generally more people in those parish-defined areas than the church leaders are aware of). The new situation is what is called the ministry area, where the field of opportunity for virtually every church in America is the reasonable driving distance to the church.

GN: What would be a good distance or driving time?

GH: Fifteen to twenty minutes.

GN: People shake their heads at certain churches and say, “That church is not in the situation where it could ever grow.” But if the right attitudes were adopted growth would be possible?

GH: Yes. Robert Schuller used to say that any church could grow except in Death Valley or at the North Pole. That’s since been amended because there is now a growing church in Death Valley. Wherever there are undiscipled people within driving distance of a church you have an opportunity for growth.