The Big Sort

by Bill Bishop

  An economic/social/political chain reaction was taking place. Over three decades, people separated by education, income, race, and way of life. The best-educated abandoned old manufacturing cities such as Cleveland—and rural communities such as Harlan—and moved to new high-tech cities. Regions such as southern West Virginia and northern Virginia diverged according to income. Blacks favored some cities (Atlanta, Houston, Dallas), while whites preferred others (Phoenix, Las Vegas, Austin). Finally, people segregated by the way they wanted to live. Young college graduates moved to a select group of urban "entertainment machines," such as Chicago and San Francisco, willing to pay a premium for the lifestyle found there; others thought of a city as someplace best to flee. Prospects for prosperity deviated wildly, as innovations sprang from some cities but not others.

  And all of this migration created political imbalances that grew more pronounced by the year.

  Part III

  THE WAY WE LIVE TODAY

  7. RELIGION

  The Missionary and the Megachurch

  The Homogeneous Unit Principle

  AMERICAN CHURCHES TODAY are more culturally and politically segregated than our neighborhoods. This happened partially because we prefer to worship in like-minded congregations. But churches also grew more homogeneous because ministers took what was learned nearly a century ago by Christian missionaries trying to overcome the caste system and language barriers in India and applied those lessons to the new American villages appearing on the subdivided plains outside the central cities—neighborhoods where the castes consisted of taste, culture, lifestyle, and, in the end, political belief.

  The strategy was as simple as like attracts like. The new and crowded megachurches were built on the most fundamental of human needs: finding safety within the tribe. The method worked so well that now these techniques for creating group cohesion through like-mindedness are employed in most churches. And the same power of building communities with "people like us" is used in subdivision development, advertising, college dormitories, volunteer groups, and political campaigns. It's the way we live today. In the welter of choices provided by our postmaterialist culture, people are choosing the comfort of agreement. When new technologies give people fresh ways to meet and form communities, they seek out people like themselves. By early 2007, the social communities found on MySpace and Facebook looked dated to software developers. The trouble with these massive social networks, according to a New York Times report, was that "big Web sites attract masses of people who have dissimilar interests and, ultimately, little in common." By 2007, it seems, gathering people who had little in common was an endeavor that was transparently foolish. The New York Times touted new sites that would quickly and easily move people into like-minded online groups. One of the first to use this strategy was aptly named Tribe.net.1

  Rick Warren, the author of The Purpose-Driven Life and pastor of the 22,000-strong (and rising) Saddleback Church, recounted that he came to understand how to create what became the megachurch when he was a student missionary in Japan in 1974. He found an old copy of HIS, a Christian magazine, and discovered an article with the provocative title "Why Is This Man Dangerous?" There was a photograph of an elderly gentleman "with a goatee and sparkly eyes." His name was Donald McGavran, a missionary with what the mainline denominations considered revolutionary ideas about how and why churches grow. "As I sat there and read the article on Donald McGavran," Warren wrote, "I had no idea that it would dramatically impact the direction of my ministry."2

  Rick Warren's generation of ministers snatched McGavran from obscurity. Two decades earlier, McGavran had concluded that his life's work had been passed over. In 1955, McGavran believed that he had learned why churches grow, and he wrote a book that laid out a new vision of missionary work and evangelism. That book, The Bridges of God, was a flop. It gained little notice in the missionary community and was shunned by mainline church leaders in the United States. If anything, those leaders considered McGavran a "dangerous man." In 1959, when McGavran and his wife were traveling through the Eola Hills just west of Salem, Oregon, he later recalled, "I said to my wife, ... 'Mary, let's settle down here. Nobody's been listening to what I've been saying. My life is ended. There's nothing more that I can do."'3

  McGavran was the son and grandson of missionaries. His grandparents had sailed around Africa to reach their missions in India. Born in Damoh, India, in 1897, he was "saved" fourteen years later at a church meeting in Oklahoma. He went to school in the States, joined the military during World War I, and decided to take up the family trade when he returned from the war. He finished school, married, and moved back to India. He spent most of his life as a workingman's missionary. He founded churches and managed a leper colony. He scaled the Himalayas and stanched a cholera epidemic. In his travels about India, he shot an attacking tiger and battled a wild boar. Having trudged and pedaled along footpaths between villages for nearly three decades, McGavran thought the most useful degree a rural missionary could hope to obtain would be a DC, a doctor of cycling.

  The Yale- and Columbia-educated missionary gradually worked his way up the church hierarchy, and as he did, he became increasingly appalled at the stunning ineffectiveness of his calling. While secretary-treasurer of the India mission of the United Christian Missionary Society, McGavran reviewed the books one year to find that his organization had spent $125,000 but had added only fifty-two members to the church rolls.4 The plain futility of his church's efforts led McGavran to rethink how missionaries went about their work. The strategy at the time was built around the central "mission station." White Christians would establish a foreign mission that simulated Western ways of life. Missionaries would construct schools, hospitals, orphanages, and leprosy homes, all in Western style and affect. The mission station became a Christian colony, a transplanted white world from which missionaries would set off for surrounding villages.

  As an institutional feat, the missions were marvels of will and faith. But McGavran realized that they didn't save many souls. The stations stood isolated from the people they were built to save. "Separated by colour, standard of living, prestige, literacy, mode of travel, place of residence, and many other factors, the missionary was, indeed, isolated from those to whom he brought the message of salvation," McGavran concluded. How could missionaries save people when they didn't eat the same food as the men and women they were trying to convert? Meanwhile, the costs and effort of providing medicine, teachers, doctors, and orphanages dominated the missionary board's concerns. Inevitably, McGavran wrote, "the mission station becomes an end in itself, instead of a means to the discipling of peoples."5

  McGavran could see that the old system, created in a century of white colonization, had run its course. Rising nationalism in former colonies had changed the relationship between people and the church. "The temper of these days in the East is not that of humbly sitting at the feet of missionary tutors," McGavran noted.6 As countries built their own hospitals and schools, what good, exactly, were the mission stations providing? The missionaries had come to India, Africa, and Asia to save souls, to bring people to Christ. They found themselves panhandling among U.S. congregations to maintain the physical infrastructure of outdated and unwanted colonial outposts. McGavran set out to find the evangelism that converted the most people. He wasn't looking for who ran the most efficient hospital or who sent the most students to universities—the old concerns of Public Protestantism. Instead, he wanted to discover the person who was saving the greatest number of souls, who was fulfilling the Private Protestant goal of bringing the most lost sheep to Christ. That search led him to Bishop J. Waskom Pickett.

  Pickett had been a Methodist missionary in India since 1910, and unlike many of his colleagues, he filled his churches. He had written a book in the early 1930s titled Christian Mass Movements in India that explored which missionary churches had been successful. Pickett found in his research that the soul-saving church benefited most from a "mass movement" of people. Converts didn't
come to the church one by one, he discovered. They came in groups. And those groups were socially and culturally coherent. They were tribes, castes, or villages. Yet the practice of missionaries at the time was exactly contrary to the strategy. Rather than stimulating mass movements into the church, missionaries took individual Christian converts from their villages and sequestered them within the central mission. Separated from their people, few of the new converts prospered. Pickett wrote, "They became too dependent—socially, economically, and religiously—upon the missionaries, and learned to think of themselves as a people apart, not only from the groups to which they had belonged but from the whole body of their fellow Indians."7

  Learning from Ditt

  Pickett told the story of Ditt, a member of the untouchable caste of Chuhras in the Punjab. Ditt was a "dark, lame, little man," a leatherworker by trade. In the 1870s, Ditt converted to Christianity at the central mission, and, against the advice of the missionaries, he returned to his tribe intending to spread what he had learned. Three months later, Ditt reappeared at the mission with his wife and daughter and two neighbors. They had walked thirty miles to the mission to be baptized—and after they had received the rites, they immediately walked back to their village. Six months later, Ditt brought four others from his village. He had instructed his converts in the rudiments of the Christian faith, and they, too, were baptized. Ditt traded hides for his living, and this work took him to other Chuhra villages, where he also preached the Christian Gospel. Eleven years after Ditt left the mission, there were five hundred Christian Chuhras. By 1900, more than half of the Chuhras were Christians. By 1915, only a few hundred Chuhras weren't baptized members of the church.8

  The story of Ditt and the lessons learned in his own missionary work led Pickett to insights about how knowledge of goods, technologies, and religions traveled through society. What Pickett observed in the strict castes of India was that when Christianity spread in "mass movements," it circulated within a tight-knit group, a discrete social network. Ditt didn't convert Indians willy-nilly. He moved within the society where he was known and had credibility. Since Ditt evangelized only among the Chuhras, he avoided the barriers of caste, tribe, and language. He didn't start a movement of all Indians to Christianity; rather, he started a movement of a particular social group. Ditt converted the Chuhras.9 McGavran described Pickett's work as an "epochal book," and he spent parts of a year learning from the Methodist missionary. When people later praised McGavran as the father of what would become known as the "church growth movement" in the United States, he invariably said, "I lit my candle at Bishop Pickett's fire."10

  "The individual does not think of himself as a self-sufficient unit, but as a part of the group," McGavran wrote in The Bridges of God. "His business deals, his children's marriages, his personal problems, or the difficulties he has with his wife are properly settled by group thinking. Peoples become Christian as this group-mind is brought into a life-giving relationship to Jesus as Lord." Missionaries needed to build bridges between the culture of the village and Christianity. The bridges were anthropological—language, culture, music, even the food offered at a service. Ditt was successful because he knew what to cook. He was a Chuhra. People would come to Christ, McGavran wrote, when they saw that "the messenger of the Christian religion is one of my own family, my own people, one of us."11

  Good works wouldn't bring people to Christ, McGavran told his fellow missionaries. Hospitals, schools, and orphanages didn't save people's souls, despite the teachings of the Social Gospel. Missionaries needed to get out of the central stations and "work the villages," McGavran wrote. They needed to speak the same language, eat the same food, and sleep in the same kinds of beds as those they were trying to convert. They needed to understand local marriage customs in South America, and they had to know the seventy-five words used to describe human relationships in China. "The Christian missionary who believes that in Jesus Christ God has revealed a way of life rewarding for all men, also uses anthropology for directed change," McGavran wrote in 1970.12

  His visits with Bishop Pickett and his study of successful church movements around the world led McGavran to conclude that a church grows when it is based within a "homogeneous unit." People live in groups, and they develop group solidarity and awareness, a "people consciousness," as "members think of themselves as a separate tribe, caste or class." McGavran believed that any church—any religion—that asked people to abandon their tribe, caste, or class would fail. "It is foolish to add racial and linguistic barriers to the essential religious and moral hurdles which converts must surmount," McGavran wrote. "Men do not join churches where services are conducted in a language they do not understand, or where members have a noticeably higher degree of education, wear better clothes, and are obviously of a different sort." In speech after speech all over the world, McGavran promoted his "homogeneous unit principle" of church growth and soul saving. He told generations of pastors, "Men like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic, or class barriers."13

  McGavran's message landed in the United States smack-dab in the middle of Public Protestantism's dominance. When McGavran's first book, The Bridges of God, appeared in the mid-1950s, America was undergoing a revival of interest in mainline religious denominations. The generation back from the war was a group of inveterate joiners, and they flocked, in Ozzie and Harriet boxed sets, to the mainline denominations. Church membership and church attendance reached all-time highs. Donations to churches filled offertory plates.14 Mainline denominations didn't need an elderly man who had spent the past three decades saving lepers and shooting tigers to tell them how to attract people to church. They were filling the pews doing things the same old way. All the mainline churches needed in 1955 were architects and carpenters to build new sanctuaries.

  McGavran's ideas weren't really rejected or reviled; that would come later. They were ignored. McGavran couldn't find a publisher in the United States for The Bridges of God.15 When he moved back to the States, he opened the Institute for Church Growth at the out-of-the-way Northwest Christian College, an unaccredited school in Eugene, Oregon. He held small classes for missionaries—very small: the "institute" consisted of McGavran and two or three students sitting around a table. McGavran was ready to shutter his institute when he received a call from the president of Fuller Theological Seminary.16 The Evangelical school in southern California wanted him to move his operation to Pasadena. It was the spring of 1965—ten years after publication of The Bridges of God and ground zero for the shifts that would alter American political and religious life.

  The Great Commission

  There is nothing remotely reminiscent of colonial India at the Second Baptist Church in Houston. American churches the size of Second Baptist—40,000 members and growing—have a Starbucks quality. The furniture may be arranged differently place to place, but the pieces are all the same. The big-church prototype isn't the heavenly aspiration of Chartres or the Zen contemplation of the Rothko Chapel. Its model is the cruise ship. Second Baptist—"Exciting Second," the church's phone operators answer—has a fitness center, a school, pool tables, football and soccer fields, daycare, a stadium-style worship hall, and a food court (offering chicken with sun-dried tomatoes and Asiago cheese, when I was there, to be served in the adjacent "Walking on Water" room). There is a well-appointed bookstore where one can buy a biography of Charles Colson, Karen Hughes, or Clay Aiken.

  And there's parking. Goodness knows, they have parking. (The one time Rick Warren's Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, paused in its growth was a period in the late 1990s when traffic around the 118-acre campus began to clot. Saddleback spent $4.5 million on a mini—highway project, and the people returned.)17 For a time, Second Baptist named sections of its parking lot after locations in the Holy Land. (Second Baptist's pastors picked up this idea at a seminar that the Walt Disney Company held for churches.) A driver just needed to remember whether he or she parked in Bethlehem or Gethsemane. It was purifyi
ng for Jesus to wander forty days and nights in the desert, but in the planned-by-the-minute world of the megachurch, you don't want stragglers from the nine o'clock service blocking pilgrims arriving at eleven.

  Second Baptist was "founded by 171 Christians" in 1927, according to a plaque on the church grounds, and had only two hundred or three hundred members when Dr. H. Edwin Young arrived in 1978. Young targeted an audience in the growing middle-class suburbs west of Houston. He sped up the service, added music, and, as the church grew, began to attach members of his larger church to smaller groups. The danger of a church this big is that people will have no personal relationships tying them to the larger group. How can a person be "found" in a crowd that would fill an NBA stadium? The solution adopted by large churches is a system of cells, or, at Second Baptist, "shepherd groups." ("Cells" sounds a bit Maoist.) Every organization at Second Baptist—from Sunday school class to choir—is divided again (and again), so that each person is a member of a group of no more than ten. For example, there are some five hundred people in the Second Baptist choir. The altos form one group within the choir, but within the altos there are a dozen shepherd groups of altos.