The Big Sort

by Bill Bishop

  Sunday school classes also are divided by age, sex, and, most important, attitude. Twentysomethings at Second Baptist have the MTV-sounding "Real World" class. There's also the Greatest Generation-sounding "Boot Camp," "Basic Training" for the over-fifty set, and "Fresh Start" for single parents. The list of classes reads like a satellite radio channel guide. Parishioners are encouraged to shop for the group most like themselves. "If I go to the upper-forties group and it seems like they are fuddy-duddies because I'm in my younger forties, I may want to go to a younger group," the Reverend Gary Moore told me. "You just kind of go in and see the content of who's in there and if you like those folks or not ... By and large, people tend to herd up according to people they identify with."

  Nine out of ten megachurches establish a cell structure of small groups.18 Malcolm Gladwell, writing for The New Yorker, described Warren's Saddleback Church as "the cellular church."19 Gladwell attributed Saddleback's success to the "stickiness" of small groups. Cells have a tendency to bind people together within a larger institution. But church "shepherd groups" weren't a 1970s innovation devised in the American suburbs. They came from a Korean minister named David Yonggi Cho. Pastor Cho created the largest church in the history of Christianity in Seoul. His Yoido Full Gospel Church (a Pentecostal congregation) grew to more than 8,000 members in the 1960s. As Pastor Cho tried to care for such a massive flock, he was hospitalized for exhaustion. To save himself and his church, he began the cell system. He trained mostly women (men were reluctant to make home visits to organize the cells) to link groups of ten to sixteen parishioners to the larger church. The cells met weekly and still do. They minister to the day-to-day needs of cell members and recruit converts to the church. The Yoido Full Gospel Church now has more than 800,000 members, a congregation knit together by tens of thousands of cell groups. Pastor Cho believes that the cell groups are the primary reason his church has grown so large. The idea of the cell group, he has said, was a revelation from God. For American ministers, the "cellular church" was certainly a revelation from Pastor Cho.20

  Attendance at mainline Protestant churches began to fall in 1965, reversing a two-hundred-year record of growth. At the same time, however, Evangelical denominations and independent churches started to pick up members. By the early 1970s, church leaders and scholars noticed two distinct trends: (i) people were leaving mainline Protestantism—Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians—and (2) people were joining Evangelical and conservative churches that were often independent of any denomination. A debate ensued about why conservative churches were growing while the sanctuaries at mainline denominations were emptying. Some argued that the 1960s counterculture led baby boomers out of their parents' churches. Others said that churches would naturally decline as society became richer—the old secularization argument that as societies grow more educated, people become less likely to be formally religious. Dean Kelley, author of Why Conservative Churches Are Growing, argued that mainline denominations had gotten flabby. They no longer provided much leadership or discipline. Liberal churches were declining, wrote Kelley, because they had lost, or abandoned, their ancient purpose "to respond to the basic human search for meaning."21 The old American denominations had loosened their grip—a relaxation long in coming, perhaps. Wednesday and Sunday evening services had been thinning out over the past several decades. The churches had become less strict. Before World War I, Presbyterians had rules against worldly amusements and immodest dress. Those strictures had faded, as had all the customs and laws that limited activity on the Sabbath.

  The mistake made by the mainline denominations, said the conservatives, was that they had placed their concerns for society—civil rights, the environment, women's rights, the Vietnam War—ahead of saving souls. Mainline church leaders in the 1960s had preached that the "purpose of church is mission." Evangelicals were saying that the purpose of church was to fulfill the Great Commission.

  According to the Gospels, Jesus issued the Great Commission after his Crucifixion. After he rose from the dead, he sent word to his disciples to meet him in Galilee. As instructed, the eleven came to a mountain, and Jesus appeared. He told them: "Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you" (Matthew 28:16–20). The Great Commission was the animating force behind Donald McGavran's work—to discover how churches grow. It was—and still is—the primary directive of Evangelicalism. Here is a fundamental difference between Public and Private Protestantism. While liberal denominations profess their faith by trying to make the world a better place, Evangelicals believe that the world would be a better place if more people became Christian disciples. From Donald McGavran's perspective, the church could build hospitals or gather God's lost sheep. The Great Commission told McGavran it was more important to gather the sheep.*

  "Due to the social upheavals of the decade, church leaders who were deeply involved caused their denominations to put a ministry of social concern in a higher priority position than evangelism," wrote C. Peter Wagner, a former missionary and one of McGavran's colleagues at Fuller Theological Seminary. "This produced a wave of dissatisfied customers, so to speak, who deserted their churches in droves."22 (Wagner promoted homogeneous church congregations in his book, brazenly titled Our Kind of People.) The 1960s and 1970s brought a "collapse of the middle" in American church life, according to Martin Marty, then the dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School. The survivors in this religious transformation, according to Marty, "were polarized into right-wing churches" (a term Marty said that he did not use "invidiously") and "secular humanist culture, which could not have cared less what was going on in the subculture of conservative religion." The "middle" that was disappearing consisted of Marty's Public Protestants, the tradition of socially involved, liberal Christianity that extended from Walter Rauschenbusch's outpost in Hell's Kitchen to Eugene Carson Blake's stand on the frontlines of the civil rights movement.23 The middle has kept dwindling to this day. As late as 2004, a longtime student of church membership trends found that "oldline Protestantism only leads the Judeo-Christian tradition in the United States in the physical condition of its buildings."24 Marty wrote of the Evangelical churches, "After about 1968 their inning came."25 And they had a surprise cleanup man in Donald McGavran.

  The Church Growth Movement

  Nobody approached the Great Commission quite like Donald McGavran. Newly arrived at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, he began by displaying graphs and charts, business school—type data on how and why churches grow. Charles Fuller, the school's founder, was cool toward McGavran, whom he considered more a technician than an evangelist. After McGavran finished with his first statistics-chocked presentation at the seminary, Fuller made no comment, only asking the audience to join in a chorus of "Heavenly Sunshine," the confection of a song that always ended his enormously popular radio show, the Old Fashioned Revival Hour.*26

  The emptying pews at the mainline denominations had spurred an interest in theories of church growth in the United States. Unlike the 1950s, McGavran now had an audience—preachers hungry for ways to bring Americans back to church. Students interested in domestic ministry took McGavran's classes, and then working pastors began attending. His message to American preachers was the same advice he gave missionaries in The Bridges of God: culture matters. (The first person McGavran hired at his Fuller church growth institute was an anthropologist.) Ministers everywhere should design their churches for a culturally defined "homogeneous unit," he advised.

  The cultural tribes developing in suburbia were more apparent to others than to McGavran. In The Bridges of God, he wrote, "Western nations are homogeneous and there are few exclusive sub-societies."27 But American ministers consumed by the Great Commission and the ideal of "church growth" soon came to understand that McGavran's stories about evangelizing "peoples" in the Third World could be applied to the United States, particu
larly to the "homogeneous units" that were developing in American society. The ministers who formed the vanguard of what became known as the church growth movement studied the Old Testament and the census. They conducted market research. They took an anthropological interest in their communities, noting the kinds of music people who lived there listened to and the kinds of clothes they wore. They designed their churches to appeal to targeted groups, demographic types. People wouldn't be attracted to a church filled with a diverse membership, these ministers learned from McGavran. But they would come to a church custom-built for people like themselves. The megachurch's ample parking, kicking sound system, and casual dress were the bridges these ministers built to Dockers-clad tribes. McGavran's legacy wasn't a missionary reform. Instead, the bewhiskered gentleman with the sparkling eyes changed how a new generation of American ministers thought about the relationship between the community and the church.

  Members of the "disappearing middle" objected to McGavran's tactics. To some, the goal of the church was diversity (a Public Protestant virtue), not growth (Private Protestantism as defined by the Great Commission). "The church is called by Christ to be a transformer of culture," wrote Robert Evans, a theologian at the Hartford Seminary Foundation. "I can find no emphasis in the New Testament on a self-conscious strategy for growth." Jesus' kingdom was a feast, and those "at the table would be Samaritans and Jerusalemites, Pharisees and slaves, harlots and the holy," Evans continued, taking dead aim at McGavran. "It is, if I understood the image correctly, the greatest breaking down of homogeneous units we will ever know."28 The World Council of Churches issued a warning against ministers finding safety in "the power of their race, class or nation."29 The magazine Rick Warren picked up in 1974 warned that McGavran could be "dangerous." These were words from the listing ship of liberal Christianity, however, and the warning was lost in the waves of ministers clamoring for their churches to grow.

  Filling Churches with "People Like Us"

  Rick Warren's account of how he founded Saddleback Church is a set piece of megachurch lore.30 Warren wrote that in the summer of 1979, he "practically lived in university libraries doing research on the United States census data." Concentrating on four counties in California, he eventually "discovered" that the Saddleback region of Orange County was the fastest-growing end of the nation's fastest-growing county. "This fact grabbed me by the throat and made my heart start racing," Warren wrote. He would plant his church in the Saddleback Valley—and he would start it using the church growth techniques pioneered by Donald McGavran.

  Warren and his wife moved to Orange County in December 1979. He studied maps and realized that the county "already had many strong, Bible-believing churches." (This was, after all, the home of Robert Schül-lers massive Crystal Cathedral and had been a conservative Evangelical refuge for more than a generation.) Warren spent his first twelve weeks going door-to-door, listening. His seat-of-the-pants market survey helped the young minister, as he described the process, "build a bridge to the unchurched." This was McGavran's metaphor, of course, taken straight from his 1955 book. Warren was out to bring the "peoples" of the Saddleback Valley into the faith. To do that, the young minister needed to break down the cultural barriers between this group and his church.

  Warren practiced what he called "targeted evangelism." Based on his research into what sorts of people were moving to this booming area, he composed a composite portrait of the "unchurched" person he expected to attract to his church. And he named him: Saddleback Sam. Saddleback Sam was in his thirties or forties. He was college educated, married (to Saddleback Samantha, naturally), liked contemporary music, preferred casual dress, and had little free time. The picture of Saddleback Sam in Warren's book is of a white guy on a cell phone wearing a middle-age-baggy pair of pleated pants. Having identified his tribesman, Warren went to work breaking down the barriers between his church and Sam. He made the services shorter and tighter. He invested in the best sound system and musicians. He built the best daycare center and made sure there was plenty of parking. Warren didn't wear a suit or a turned-around collar. Formal dress made Saddleback Sam antsy. So Warren filled his closet with a collection of floral shirts.

  Warren doesn't claim that any of what he did at Saddleback was new. All of these techniques—including the use of small groups—were there for anyone to see in the church growth literature. What was new, however, was the application of techniques used to overcome cultural barriers in the Third World to the new world of American suburbia. Like those on the political right who discovered the new politics bubbling up in places like Kanawha County, West Virginia, Warren didn't start a movement. Nobody tricked millions of people into attending churches like Saddleback and Second Baptist in Houston. The genius of Rick Warren and Edwin Young was in understanding the people filling the new neighborhoods being created by the Big Sort and in designing a church just for them.

  "A Choice of a Way of Life"

  A few months before the 2004 election, I asked Martin Marty what was distinctive about church life today, forty years after the "collapse of the middle." In Marty's view, the hugely successful church growth movement had undermined the church's older purpose—that of building community. Churches were once built around a geographic community, Marty said. Now they are constructed around similar lifestyles. "A huge element in retention of loyalty and acquisition of new church members can be summarized in a very simple phrase: a choice of a way of life," Marty said. "The great tragedy of it all is that. I've always argued that what society needs are town meeting places where people with very different commitments can meet and interact. Churches have been that. If you're a Methodist and you move to Des Moines, Iowa, and you get to the nearest Methodist church, thirty or forty years ago you would have an open encounter. People who were pro-Bush or pro-Kerry would talk. Fertilization would go on. Now it simply doesn't happen."

  The two United Methodist churches in central Austin are a twelve-minute drive apart. Tarrytown United Methodist is your rich uncle's church. People at Tarrytown still dress up on Sunday. When the service started the Sunday morning I visited, the music was Handel, and it rumbled out of a gut-shaking pipe organ. Tarrytown counts among its members the Republican governor of Texas, Rick Perry. Tarrytown, it so happens, was also the home of the previous Republican governor of Texas, President George W. Bush. Just a few miles away at Trinity United Methodist, the service kicked off with the congregation singing and swaying to Sting's mystical anthem "Love Is the Seventh Wave." Trinity made a point of welcoming worshipers regardless of "sexual orientation" or "sexual identity." The Sunday I visited, the Reverend Sid Hall was continuing a series of talks on medieval female mystics.

  Not everyone at Tarrytown is a Republican. (A minister there told me that Tarrytown was the church home of a few Jesse Jackson supporters.) Nor are all the members of Trinity Democrats. But it's hard to imagine Rick Perry or George W. Bush going to Trinity, a church that identifies itself in its literature as being of the "cultural left," a church that promotes "social and ecological justice." And there is about a zero chance that any member of Trinity would trade Sting for Handel or talks about mystical Christianity for the straight-pew formality and by-the-book liturgy at Tarrytown. These are two different "peoples" in the McGavran sense, and both are quite homogeneous.

  Trinity is an older church, closer to the center of town than to Austin's procreating suburbs. When Hall arrived in 1989, the membership was aging, the services were traditional, and few new people were coming in the door. Trinity was a textbook example of the disappearing middle in American religion. Hall told me that he began to "reach out" to the neighborhood. He opened the church for public meetings about the redevelopment of an abandoned airport nearby. He started a parents' night out. Hall attended these evening events, sticking around afterward to talk with the people who wandered in from the neighborhood. He noticed that the people he was meeting didn't look like those in Trinity's pews on Sunday. The neighborhood, just north of the University of Texas
, was changing, and, Hall observed, the new people moving in "tended to be cultural left." Trinity changed "almost by accident," Hall said, because it began to reflect the cultural transformation of the neighborhood. Hall, who describes himself as "left leaning," welcomed the politically liberal folks who were attracted to central Austin. Eventually, some of these folks joined the church. These new members wanted Trinity to openly embrace gays and lesbians. At the time, a "reconciling" movement had begun in the Methodist Church. Some congregations were voting to support "full participation" of gay and lesbian church members—which included marriage. In 1992, Trinity voted to become a "reconciling" church, only the fifty-eighth Methodist church in the country to do so.

  Like does attract like, just as McGavran and his Fuller colleague Peter Wagner said. After Hall changed the political and cultural tenor of Trinity, it began attracting the left-leaning people moving into the neighborhood. Trinity tipped from standard Methodism to something else. Like Rick Warren's Saddleback Church, Trinity now breaks down into smaller groups, but they are geared toward the kind of people who go to that church. There is a "social justice initiative" (the church is filled with activists) and the "Trinity Triangle," for gay and transgendered members. Trinity has even held weeknight courses on the meaning of the tarot. "We have some Wiccans who are part of the congregation, and that works," Hall said. "When I take the Beliefnet.com test, I always come out 'neo-pagan,' so who knows."

  Trinity changed because the old-style church—the delivery of a standardized denominational liturgy to all comers—no longer worked. By 2004, Trinity had only eight members who were with the church when Hall arrived. "The church would be dead if we hadn't redefined ourselves," Hall told me. "It wasn't a lack of caring or anything else. But if we had stayed a kind of general Methodist church, then why would you go? Our parents would have gone [to the closest]...Episcopal or Methodist or Presbyterian [church],...but those of us who came after, we're more discriminating. Denominational labels don't mean that much."