CHAPTER 53

The Bridges of God

Donald A. McGavran

Donald A. McGavran was born in India of missionary parents and later returned as a third-generation missionary in 1923, serving as a director of religious education and translating the Gospels in the Chhattisgarhi dialect of Hindi. He founded the School of World Mission at Fuller Theological Seminary and was formerly dean emeritus. McGavran was the author of several influential books, including The Bridges of God, how Churches Grow, and Understanding Church Growth.

From The Bridges of God by Donald A. McGavran. Published by World Dominion Press, UK, 1955. Rev. ed. 1981. Public domain.

Donald McGavran’s seminal book, The Bridges of God, appeared in 1954. It quickly became influential among missionaries highlighting an important insight rooted in mission history and practice: Throughout history God has used family and kinship ties within people groups as “bridges.” These “bridges” can facilitate the communication of the gospel, sometimes resulting in what he called “people movements” to Christ, or “Christward movements.” This is contrasted with the “Mission Station Approach,” dominant in missionary strategy of the nineteenth century, whereby individual converts were gathered into “colonies” or compounds isolated from the social mainstream.

McGavran encouraged readers to consider two rather unconventional ideas for that time, ideas that would require mission workers to shift their focus. First, workers should not seek primarily to bring individuals into Christian faith. Instead, they should envision the possibility of many from an entire people following Christ together in groups or as families. Second, mission workers should expect and support the formation of new indigenous churches that would multiply and grow rapidly.

Present-day readers will notice some older vocabulary that was commonly used in the colonial era and still in use when McGavran wrote. The social norms for vocabulary usage might feel awkward for modern readers, but ought to be read graciously and not make us discount the ideas presented here. The ideas are still needed and still contemporary, even if the expression of them sometimes is not.

The Crucial Question in Christian Missions

Much study has been devoted to world evangelization. We know the answers to many questions about the propagation of the gospel. But what is perhaps the most important question of all still awaits an answer. That question is: How do peoples become disciples of Christ?

This article asks how clans, tribes, castes—in short, how peoples—become disciples of Christ. Every nation is made up of various strata of society. In many nations each stratum is clearly separated from every other. The individuals in each stratum intermarry chiefly, if not solely, with each other. Their intimate life is therefore limited to their own society, that is, to their own people. They may work with others, they may buy from and sell to the individuals of other societies, but their intimate life is wrapped up with the individuals of their own people. Individuals of another stratum, possibly close neighbors, may become Christians or Communists without the first stratum being much concerned. But when individuals of their own kind start becoming disciples, that touches their very lives. How do chain reactions in these strata of society begin? How do peoples become disciples of Christ?

Here is a question to which not speculation but knowledge must urgently be applied. The question is how, in a manner true to the Bible, can a people movement be established in some class, caste, tribe, or other segment of society which will, over a period of years, so bring groups of its related families to Christian faith that the whole people is brought to faith in a few decades? It is of the utmost importance that the church should understand how peoples, and not merely individuals, become disciples of Christ.

The Unfamiliar in People Movements

Individualistic Westerners cannot without special effort grasp how peoples become disciples of Christ. The missionary movement is largely staffed by persons from the West or by national believers trained in their ideas. While evangelization has been carried on with correct enough views on how individuals have become Christian, there have been hazy or even erroneous views on how peoples become disciples of Christ.

Western Individualism Obscures Group Processes

In the West, becoming a follower of Christ is an extremely individualistic process. With the disruption of clan and family life that followed the Industrial Revolution, Westerners became accustomed to doing what appealed to them as individuals. As larger family groupings were broken up through migration, the movement of rural folk to the cities, and repeated shifts of homes, people came to act for themselves without consulting their neighbors or families. A habit of independent decision was established. Indeed, the theological presupposition was not merely that salvation depended on an individual act of faith in Christ (which is unquestioned), but also that this act was somehow of a higher order if it were done against family opinion (which is dubious).

There tended to be little recognition of the social organism which is a people or of the desirability of preserving the culture and community life—indeed, of enhancing them—through the process of conversion. The social factor in the conversion of peoples passed unnoticed because peoples were not identified as separate entities, but rather as aggregates of individuals whose conversion was achieved one by one.

However, a people group is not an aggregate of individuals. In a true people, intermarriage and the intimate details of social intercourse take place within the society. A true people group is a social organism which, by virtue of the fact that its members intermarry very largely within its own confines, becomes a separate people in their minds. The human family, except in the individualistic West, is largely made up of such castes, clans, and peoples.

What to Do and What Not to Do

To reach a whole people group, the first thing not to do is snatch individuals out of it into a different society. People groups come to Christ when a Christward movement occurs within that society. Bishop J. Waskom Pickett, in his important study Christ’s Way to India’s Heart, says:

The process of extracting individuals from their setting in Hindu or Muslim communities does not build a church. On the contrary it rouses antagonism against Christianity and builds barriers against the spread of the gospel. Moreover, that process has produced many unfortunate and not a few tragic results in the lives of those most deeply concerned. It has deprived the converts of the values represented by their families and friends and made them dependent for social support to the good life and restraint on evil impulses upon men and women, their colleagues in the Christian faith, with whom they have found it difficult to develop fellowship and a complete sense of community. It has sacrificed much of the convert’s evangelistic potentialities by separating him from his People. It has produced anemic churches that know no true leadership and are held together chiefly by common dependence on the mission or the missionary.

Obviously, the reaching of a people group requires reborn men and women. A mere change of name accomplishes nothing. While the new believer must remain within their people, they must also experience the new birth. “Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, not on earthly things” (Col 3:1–2). The power of any People Movement to Christ depends in great measure on the number of truly converted persons in it. We wish to make this quite clear. The reaching of peoples is not assisted by slighting or forgetting real personal conversion. There is no substitute for justification by faith in Jesus Christ or for the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Thus, a Christward movement within a people can be defeated either by extracting the new believers from their society (i.e., by allowing them to be squeezed out by their unbelieving relatives) or by the unbelievers so dominating the believers that their new life in Christ is not apparent. An incipient Christward movement can be destroyed by either danger.

The Group Mind and Group Decision

To understand the psychology of the innumerable subsocieties which make up non-Christian countries, it is essential that the leaders of the churches and missions strive to see life from the point of view of a people to whom individual action is treachery. Among those who think corporately, only a rebel would strike out alone without consultation and without companions. An individual does not think of themselves as a self-sufficient unit but as part of the group. Their business affairs, their children’s marriages, their personal problems, or the difficulties they have with their spouse are properly settled by group thinking. Peoples become disciples as this group-mind is brought into a life-giving relationship to Jesus as Lord.

It is important to note that the group decision is not the sum of separate individual decisions. The leader makes sure that their followers will follow. The followers make sure that they are not ahead of each other. Husbands sound out wives. Children consult their elders. As the group considers following Christ, tension mounts and excitement rises. Indeed, a prolonged informal vote-taking is underway. A change of faith involves a community change. Only as its members move together does change become healthy and constructive.

Groups are usually fissured internally. This has a definite bearing on group decision. If in some town or village there are seventy-six families of a given people, they may be split into several subgroups. Often such divisions are formed by rivalries between prominent men. They may be geographical or economic. Group thinking usually occurs at its best within these subgroups. A subgroup will often come to decision before the whole. Indeed, a subgroup often furnishes enough social life for it to act alone.

Peoples become disciples of Christ as a wave of decision for Christ sweeps through the group mind, involving many individual decisions but being far more than merely their sum. This may be called a chain reaction. Each decision sets off others and the sum total powerfully affects every individual. When conditions are right, not merely each sub-group but the entire group concerned decides together.

Terms Defined

We call this process a “People Movement.” “People” is a more universal word than “tribe,” “caste,” or “clan.” It is more exact than “group.” It fits everywhere. Therefore, in this article we shall speak of People Movements to Christ.

RETURN TO LESSON 7: Eras of Protestant Mission History

The Characteristic Pattern of the Great Century

Kenneth Scott Latourette has given the name “the Great Century” to the time between 1800 and 1914. He says, “When consideration is given to the difficulties which faced it, in the nineteenth century, Christianity made amazing progress all around the world. It came to the end of the period on a rapidly ascending curve. Its influence on culture was out of all proportion to its numerical strength. It had an outstanding role as a pioneer in new types of education, in movements of the relief and prevention of human suffering and in disseminating ideas.”

How did evangelization proceed during the Great Century? This is a most important question because most of our present thinking is colored by the missionary effort of that century. The Great Century created a new method to meet a new situation. Both situation and method are worthy of our closest study.

The New Situation Described: The Gulf of Separation

Missions were carried on from the ruling, wealthy, literate, modern countries which were experiencing all the benefits of political and religious freedom, expanding production, and universal education. By the nineteenth century, the West had progressed while the East had stood still so that there was a great gap between them. Western missionaries went to poor, illiterate, medieval, and agricultural countries. While it is true that missionaries tried to identify themselves with the people, they were never able to rid themselves of the inevitable separateness which the great progress of their homelands had imposed upon them.

This gulf became very clear in the living arrangements which European and American missionaries found necessary. Their standard of living at home was much higher than that of the average citizen on the mission fields. Servants were cheap and saved much domestic labor. The people of the land generally walked, but the missionaries were accustomed to a conveyance and so they used one. The color of their skin also set them apart. They were White, members of the ruling people. The Western style of cooking agreed with them, whereas the Eastern style did not; so in matters of food there also came to be a great gulf between them and the people of the land.

There were practically no bridges across this gulf. There was nothing even remotely similar to the Jewish bridge over which the good news spread into the gentile world. Staggering numbers of people lived on the fertile plains of Asia, but not one of them had any Christian relatives! Even in the port cities there were none. The normal flow of the gospel simply could not take place. Separated by color, standard of living, prestige, literacy, mode of travel, place of residence, and many other factors, the missionaries were, indeed, isolated from those to whom they brought the message of salvation.

The missionaries did learn the languages of the country and learned them well. They served the people with love, taught their children, visited in their homes, went with them through famines and epidemics, ate with them, bought from them, and sold to them, and, more than any other group of White people in the tropics, were at one with them. Thus, it will be said, this emphasis on the separateness of the missionary is exaggerated. To the student of the growth and spread of religions, however, it is apparent that these casual contacts described above were just that—casual contacts. They were not the living contacts, the contacts of tribe and clan and blood, which enable non-Christians to say, as they hear a Christian speak: “This messenger is one of my own family, my own people, one of us.” Casual contacts may win a few individuals to a new faith, but unless these individuals are able to start a living movement within their own society, it does not start at all.

The separateness we describe seemed likely to last a long time. It existed in an unchanging world, where the dominance of the West and the dependence of the East seemed to be permanent. Missionaries thought, “There will be centuries before us, and in a four-hundred-year relationship like that of Rome to her dependent peoples, we shall gradually bring these peoples also into the Christian faith.”

When the churches and their missionaries are not integrated into society, how do they go about sharing the gospel to all peoples?

The New Method Evolved: The Initial Mission Station Approach

Missionaries facing the gulf of separation built mission stations and gathered colonies of Christians. They acquired a piece of land, often with great difficulty. They built residences suitable for White people, and then they added churches, schools, quarters in which to house helpers, hospitals, leprosy homes, orphanages, and printing establishments. The mission station was usually at some center of communication. Extensive tours were made from it into the surrounding countryside. It was home to the missionary staff, and all the activities of the mission took place around the station. Here the missionaries gathered converts. It was exceedingly difficult for those hearing the good news for the first time to follow Jesus. They knew nothing of Christianity except that it was the religion of the White men. Those who did become Christians were usually forced out of their own homes and came to live at the mission colony, where they were usually employed. Orphans were sheltered. Slaves were bought and freed. Women were rescued. Healed patients became Christian and usually came to live at the mission station.

This kind of mission approach took shape out of the individualistic background typical of much of Protestantism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For converts, leaving father and mother invested their decisions with a particular validity. To gather a compound full of Christians out of a non-Christian population seemed a good way to proceed. Frequently it was also the only possible way. The universal suspicion and often the violent hostility with which Christianity was regarded would have forced into the gathered colony pattern even those who consciously sought integration.

This, then, was the pattern which was characteristic of most beginnings in the Great Century. We call it the exploratory mission station approach, but from the point of view of the resulting churches, it was the artificial new colony approach.

The Road Branches according to Response

This beginning was adopted by practically all missions. Whether missions continued with the gathered church approach or adopted the People Movement approach depended on the response given to the gospel message by the population and on the missionaries’ understanding of that response.

Where the number of conversions remained small decade after decade, the mission remained the dominant partner and the mission station approach continued and was strengthened. The gathered colony furnished Christian workers so the mission could expand mission healing, mission teaching and mission preaching. Where the number of conversions mounted steadily with every passing decade, the church became the dominant partner and the mission started using the People Movement approach. Scores of thousands became Christians.

These two ways of carrying on mission work are distinct and different. People Movements will be described in the next section. The remainder of this section will describe the way in which the exploratory phase gradually turned into the permanent mission station approach or gathered colony approach.

Small response was not expected by the early missionaries. The exploratory mission station approach was not launched as an accommodation to a hard-hearted and irresponsive population. It was regarded as a first stage after which great ingathering would occur. Even after the Basel Mission had lost eight of its first ten missionaries in nine years, the heroic Andreas Riis wrote back from the Gold Coast in Africa, “Let us press on. All Africa must be won for Christ. Though a thousand missionaries die, send more.” The exploratory gathered colony approach was adopted with the expectation that the Christian faith would sweep non-Christian lands, bringing them untold blessings.

A factor in the small response, whose importance cannot be overestimated, is that conversions were mainly out of the people group. Many converts felt that they were joining an entirely foreign way of living—proclaimed by foreigners, led by foreigners, and ruled by foreigners. Many converts came to the faith alone. A vicious circle was established: the few becoming Christian one by one set such a pattern that it was difficult for a Christward movement to be started. The person not only became a Christian, but they were generally perceived to have “joined another people.”

The Initial Approach Becomes Permanent: Terms Defined

Where meager response continued, gathered colony missions gradually accommodated themselves to carrying on mission work among populations which would not obey the call of God. The mission found plenty of good work to do. It never admitted, even to itself, that it had really given up hope of a great ingathering of souls, but that is what had actually happened.

The Churches Born of the Mission Station Approach

The first aim of missions is the establishment of churches. As we start to examine the results of the Mission Station approach, we turn to an inspection of the kind of churches which mission stations have fathered. These we shall call Mission Station churches or gathered colony churches.

They have some favorable characteristics. They are composed of greatly transformed and well-educated individuals. The membership is literate. They come to church with hymn books. They can read their Bibles. Overall, the Mission Station churches are made up of people who are soundly Christian. The membership is proud of being Christian and feels that it has gained tremendously by belonging to the Christian fellowship. There are, of course, many nominal Christians and some whose conduct brings shame on the church, but even these are likely to send their children to Sunday school and church!

They are organized into strong congregations. They have good permanent church buildings, qualified pastors and ministers, and regular church services. In some churches the giving is exemplary and there are many tithers. All told, the impression is that of small, tight, well-knit communities, buttressed by intermarriage and considering themselves to be a part of world Christianity.

On the debit side, these mission station churches lack the qualities needed for growth and multiplication. They are, in truth, gathered churches made up of individual converts. The individual converts and rescued persons have usually been disowned by their non-Christian relatives and they feel superior to their unconverted relatives. This is particularly true when they come from the oppressed classes. The second generation of Christians is even farther removed from their non-Christian relatives than the first. In the third generation, the gathered church members generally know none of their non-Christian relatives at all. A new people has been established which intermarries only within itself and thinks of itself as a separate community.

Salute and Farewell

So ran the characteristic pattern of the Great Century, but a new age is upon us. A new pattern has arrived, which, while new, is as old as the church itself. It is a God-designed pattern by which not ones but thousands acknowledge Christ as Lord and grow into full maturity as people after people, clan after clan, tribe after tribe and community after community are claimed for and nurtured in biblical faith.

God-Given People Movements

While the typical pattern of past missionary activity was that of the mission station approach, occasionally People Movements to Christ have resulted. These were not generally sought by missionaries—though in Oceania, Indonesia, and Africa there have been some exceptions. The movements were the outcome of the mysterious movement of the Spirit of God. They have provided over 90 percent of the growth of the newer churches throughout the world. The great bulk of the membership and of the congregations of the younger churches consists of converts and the descendants of converts won in People Movements.

Some People Movements Described

Adoniram Judson went to Burma as a missionary to the cultured Buddhist Burmese. But he took under his wing a rough character, by the name of Ko Tha Byu, a Karen. The Karens were among the backward tribes of Burma. They were animistic peasants and were considered by the Burmese to be stupid, inferior people. “You can teach a buffalo, but not a Karen” was the common verdict. Judson spent six months trying to teach this former criminal, now his servant, the meaning of the redemptive death of our Lord Jesus Christ. He made such little progress that he was inclined to take the common verdict as true. However, he persisted, and a few months later Ko Tha Byu became a convinced, if not a highly illuminated, Christian.

As Judson toured Burma, speaking to the Burmese of that land, Ko Tha Byu spoke to the humble Karen in each vicinity. The Karens started becoming Christian. Here a band of ten families, there one or two, and yonder a jungle settlement of five families accepted the lordship of Christ. We do not have the data to prove that those who came were interrelated, but it is highly probable that connected families were coming in. A chain reaction was occurring. We can reasonably assume that among his close relatives alone, to say nothing of cousins and second cousins, Ko Tha Byu had a host of excellent living contacts. The early converts doubtless came from among these and their relatives.

Judson, translating the Bible into Burmese, was concerned with more important matters than a Christian movement among a backward tribe. For years he considered the Karen converts a side issue. However, the next generation of missionaries included some who were veritable Pauls, expanding the movement as far along the paths and across the rice paddies as possible. Today there is a mighty Christian Movement among the Karens and their related tribes in Burma, numbering hundreds and thousands of souls. The Karen Christians are good Christians. Discipled through a People Movement and now in the process of perfecting, they are not under the delusion that a nominal Christianity is worth anything to God. The thousands of churches scattered across the country contain a normal proportion of earnest Spirit-filled Christians.

We stress this because it is a mistake to assume that People Movement Christians, merely because they have come to the Christian faith as whole families, must inevitably be nominal Christians. Such an assumption is usually based on prejudice, not fact. All churches face the problem of how to avoid creating nominal Christians. Nothing in People Movements inherently produces nominal Christians. Up in the northern part of what is now Pakistan lived a lowly people called Churas. They were the agricultural laborers in a mixed Muslim and Hindu civilization. They formed about 7 percent of the total population and were Untouchables. They were oppressed. They skinned dead cattle, cured the skins, collected the bones, and sold them. They had been largely overlooked by the missionaries preaching Christ to the respectable members of the Hindu and Muslim communities and organizing their few hardwon converts into mission station churches. Then a man named Ditt from among the Churas turned to Christ and continued to live among his people, despite their attempts at ostracism, and gradually brought his relatives to the Christian faith.

The missionaries were at first dubious about admitting these lowest of the low to their Christian communities, lest the upper castes and the Muslims take offense and come to think of the Christian enterprise as an “untouchable” affair. But those who became Christians were pastored and taught and organized into churches. Because the converts came as groups without social dislocation, the efforts of the pastors and the missionaries could be given largely to teaching and preaching. Attention did not have to be diverted to providing jobs and wives, houses and land for individual converts. The Mission to whom God had entrusted this Movement was made up of devout men and women who gave themselves to the task. The outcome at the end of about eighty years was that all of the Churas in that section of India had become Christians.

The Churches Born of People Movements

The most obvious result of Christward movements is a tremendous host of Christian churches. Let us consider the unexpectedly large number of People Movements. The islands of the Pacific have been largely reached by People Movements. India has its extensive list of movements from the Malas and Madigas, the Nagas and Garas, the Mahars and Bhils, and many others. Indonesia and Burma total well over a score of People Movements. Africa has numerous tribes in which the churches are growing in tribe-wise fashion. Two new People Movements were reported in 1980: one in Mindanao and one in Mexico. Our list might be made much larger. Each of these hundreds of People Movements is multiplying Christian congregations as it grows.

These scores of thousands of congregations have many features in common. The pastors of the churches are usually men with about seven years of schooling plus some seminary training. The church buildings are often temporary adobe or wattle buildings, though there are many well-built churches among the older congregations. In older, larger People Movements today, national ministers head the movement, while missionaries work as assistants directed by the church council. Many members of the churches are illiterate. But in the People Movement churches, the bulk of the Christian population has available to it only such educational advantages as the average non-Christian shares.

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In some African countries, the school picture is totally different. Government does its education through missions. In such lands the children of the People Movements have excellent educational opportunities and the membership of the churches is growing up largely literate.

People Movement Churches are remarkably stable. There are reversions, especially in the early days, but on the whole, once a people has become followers of Christ, it stays faithful to Jesus even in the face of vigorous persecution. In addition to the faith of each individual and the courage which comes from worldwide fellowship, the very bonds of relationship and social cohesion keep weak individuals from denying the faith.

Unvalued Pearls

One of the curious facts about People Movements is that they were seldom sought or desired. Pickett recorded in his book, Christian Mass Movements in India, that most People Movements were actually resisted by the leaders of the church and mission where they started. These leaders often had grave doubts whether it was right to take in groups of individuals, many of whom seemed to have little ascertainable personal faith. Nevertheless, despite a certain degree of repression, movements did occur. One wonders what would have happened had missions from the beginning of the “Great Century” been actively searching and praying for the coming of people movements by the various peoples making up the population of the world.

Those People Movements which did occur were seldom really understood. The way of corporate decision was obscured by the Western preference for individual decision. The processes of perfecting the churches were confused with the process by which a people turns from idols to serve the living God. Even where there has been great growth, as in parts of Africa, faulty understanding of People Movements has resulted in much less than maximum growth and has caused needless damage to tribal life.

Christward movements of peoples are the supreme goal of missionary effort. Many who read this will not agree with this and indeed, it has never been generally accepted. Yet we not only affirm it, but go further and claim that the vast stirrings of the Spirit which occur in People Movements are God-given. We dare not think of People Movements to Christ as merely social phenomena. True, we can account for some of the contributing factors which have brought them about. However, so many aspects are beyond anything we can ask or think, and so many evidences of divine power are displayed, that we must confess that People Movements are gifts of God.

It is time to recognize that when revival really begins in China, Japan, Africa, the Muslim world, and India, it will probably appear in the form of People Movements to Christ. This is the way in which Evangelical Christianity spread in Roman Catholic Europe at the time of the Reformation. It is the best way for it to spread in any land.

RETURN TO LESSON 7: Eras of Protestant Mission History

Five Great Advantages

People Movements have five considerable advantages:

1. First, they have provided the Christian movement with permanent churches rooted in the soil of hundreds of thousands of villages. For their continued economic life they are quite independent of Western missions. They are accustomed (unfortunately too accustomed) to a low degree of education. Yet their devotion has frequently been tested in the fires of persecution and found to be pure gold. They are here to stay. They are permanent comrades on the pilgrim way.

2. They have the advantage of being naturally indigenous. In the mission station approach, the convert is brought in as an individual to a pattern dominated by the foreigner. The foreigner has set the pace and the style, but such denationalization is a very minor affair in true People Movements. In them the new disciples seldom see a missionary. They are immersed in their own cultures. Their style of clothing, of eating and of speaking continues almost unchanged. Local tunes are often used in their worship. Thus, an indigenous quality, highly sought and rarely found by leaders of the mission station approach churches, is obtained without effort by the People Movement churches.

3. With them “the spontaneous expansion of the church” is natural. The phrase “spontaneous expansion” sums up the valuable contribution to missionary thinking made by Roland Allen. It requires that new believers be formed into churches which from the beginning are fully equipped with all spiritual authority to multiply themselves. Foreign missionaries might be helpful as advisers or assistants but should never be necessary to the completeness of the church or to its power of unlimited expansion.

Spontaneous expansion involves a full trust in the Holy Spirit and a recognition that the ecclesiastical traditions of the older churches are not necessarily useful to the younger churches. Advocates of spontaneous expansion point out that foreign-led movements will in the end become sterile and arouse opposition against those who have supported them. Therefore, the method called the mission station approach will never bring us within measurable distance of the evangelization of the world.

In People Movement churches, on the contrary, spontaneous expansion is natural. Both the desire to win their “own fold” and the opportunity to bear witness in unaffected intimate conversation are present to a high degree. There is abundant contact through which conviction can transmit itself. Thus, we come to the most marked advantage of these movements.

4. These movements have enormous possibilities for growth. That these possibilities are sometimes ignored and unrecognized, does not diminish either the truth or the importance of this fact. The group movements are fringed with exterior growing points among their own peoples. As Paul discovered, the Palestinian movement had growing points in many places outside that country. Just so, every Christward movement has many possibilities of growth on its fringes.

People Movements also have internal growing points—that is, the unconverted pockets left by any such sweeping movement. Here the leaders of new churches must be alert to see to it that strategic doorways are entered while they are open. Doorways remain open for about one generation. Then they close to the ready flow of the gospel. Until the discipling of the entire people, there will be both internal and external growing points. Both will yield large returns if cultivated.

The possibilities for growth in People Movements are not by any means confined to starting new movements. Leaders of People Movement churches find that after the church has attained power and size, the normal process of growth (including the baptism of individual seekers on the fringes of the congregations) often produces quieter, regular in-gatherings year after year than was the case during the period of the greatest exuberance of the movement. One might conclude that once a People Movement church has gained a hundred thousand converts and has become indigenous to the land and forms a noticeable proportion of the population, it is likely to keep on growing. A moderate amount of missionary assistance at places where the churches feel their need produces results far beyond that which those accustomed to the mission station tradition would consider possible.

5. The fifth advantage is that these movements provide a sound pattern for becoming disciples of Christ. Being a Christian is seen not to mean change in a standard of living made possible by foreign funds, but rather change in inner character made possible by the power of God. In well-nurtured People Movement churches, it is seen to mean regular worship of God, regular hearing of the Bible, giving to the church, discipline of the congregation, spiritual care exercised by a pastor, habits of prayer and personal devotion, and the eradication of unbiblical types of behavior. There are no impressive institutions to divert attention from the central fact that they are following Christ. Christians become “people with churches who worship God” rather than “people with hospitals who know medicine,” or “people with schools who get good jobs.” The health of the Christian movement requires that the normal pattern be well known, not merely to the non-Christian peoples, but to the leaders of church and mission and to the rank and file of members. The People Movement supplies the pattern which can be indefinitely reproduced. It is the pattern which with minor variations has obtained peoples for Christ throughout history.

RETURN TO LESSON 13: Organic Multiplication of Churches