Ian Paul writes that “the best long-term strategy for church growth” .. is child birth. Now, as John Stevens has said when commenting on the article, yes, encouraging people to get married and have children is a good thing to be doing and very counter cultural. However, it is not by any stretch, a strategy for church growth.
Paul cites three examples and suggests they all have this one thing on common, Islam, the early church and conservative Christianity. It is perhaps true for the first that those identified as adherents of Islam are increasing because of higher fertility. Whether or not that tells us much about the commitment to Islam by those younger generations is another matter. When it comes to early Christianity and conservative church growth, I find the arguments less convincing. That’s partly because it seems to rely on some assumptions and partly because we aren’t party to the data. There is also the risk of eisegesis with data as much as with texts. Social Scientists can read what they want to into the data just as preachers can read what they want to into Scripture.
Crucially though, it doesn’t address the big theological question, the elephant in the room. What is church growth and more basic than that, what is a Christian. You see, Christians are not simply people who self-identify as such because of cultural identity or family. Further, Christians are not those who might identify to a greater or lesser extent with the rituals of the religion. Christians are those who have living faith in God through Christ. This means that the only true church growth strategy is the one which aims to see more and more people putting their trust in Jesus.
Now, as I said, having children is a good thing and that’s one of the things that I am uncomfortable with when it comes to this kind of article. There is a good in and of itself and that leads to a good and godly desire to see your children have faith in Jesus. That is true of adoption as well. But whether it is through childbirth or adoption, I don’t think that we want to see our children co-opted into someone’s numbers of games. We don’t have children so that x or y church or churches collectively will have more people linked to them compared to liberal churches or other religions. Nor do we share the good news with them for that end.
Another concern that I have with this kind of focus is that it fits far too closely with one of the deficiencies I have observed about theological training. My own training was top notch, with rigorous Biblical studies, high quality doctrine and plenty of practical input on leadership and pastoral care. However, I have reflected many times since then that essentially, we were trained for maintenance. We were being prepared for a world in which we would see the odd person come in through Christianity Explored or Alpha but basically we were expecting most people to come to faith and into church life by being brought up in Christian families.
So, whilst all of the dangers and risks that Ian acknowledges in his article are very real and whilst they are not insurmountable, the biggest problem is that this is not a Gospel strategy and is not strategy for church growth at all.
Faithroots 