The Bridges of God: A Study in the Strategy of Missions by Donald McGavran
Donald McGavran in his opening chapter asks, what he considers The Crucial Question in Christian Missions, “How do Peoples become Christian” (1)? This is a very different question than churches in the West, even still, are asking. Churches in the West are concerned with the how individuals become Christians. The modus operandi revolves around reaching the individual for Christ. The West today reflects more the mission fields of China and Japan than the West reflects the Christendom of its history. More frequently people in the West are not so much rejecting the good news of Jesus, but completely ignorant of it.
2. The Unfamiliar in People Movements
The nation state is a modern construction. So according to McGavran, when one reads the word “nation” in the Bible it is not referring to a nation state, but rather a people group, or maybe in contemporary contextual language a certain group of people. In the context of the West, society has tribes, but these tribes in the postmodern era are more likely to be formed around affinity than race or ethnicity. So in the same way that McGavran is exploring “People Movements” in the non-West, the Church in the West must move from individualistic conversion to the conversion of entire people groups. An interesting development that is happening in Missions among Muslims is the emergence of Messianic-Muslims, Messiah following Muslims much like Messianic-Jews. The question that McGavran prompts me to ask is how do we create Messianic-Hip Hopers, Messianic- Goths, Messianic-Punk, Messianic-(insert cultural tribe here)?
3. Peoples and the New Testament Church
McGavran in this chapter attacks the assumption that Paul chose to go to unreached places. McGavran subverts this perspective of Paul’s mission by reading his own assumptions about people movements into Paul and the other New Testament missionaries’ travels. McGavran suggests that the motive for traveling where they did was the result of going to visit family and kinsmen in these locations, aunts and uncles that were ready to hear the gospel. McGavran’s theory takes just as much speculation as the one he is trying to overturn.
4. Down Through the Centuries
At the heart of McGavran’s theory of tribal conversions is the homogenous unit principle. All though McGavran is right in asserting that the West’s focus on individual conversion is detrimental, his focus on the notion of need for the homogeneity of the tribal group converting to remain intact after conversion is at odds with the call for oneness and unity in Christ. How does the Church move away from the individualism that has been injected by the West but also at the same time redefine tribalism through Christ rather than ethnic groups?
5. The Characteristic Pattern of the Great Century
McGavran suggests that the era of mission stations is coming to an end. Applying this insight into, what is rapidly becoming, the post Christendom West, one must assert that the era of brick and mortar churches is also coming to an end. The Church in the West must begin to move out of the safety of their buildings and away from the anchor of million dollar mortgages that inhibit the mission of many churches. McGavran seems keen on embracing socially constructed boundaries such as caste and race in order to more pragmatically spread the gospel. This I believe is not in line with boundary breaking teachings of the New Testament. The gospel is not about being pragmatically spread, but rather authentically incarnated.
6. The God-Driven People Movements
McGavran has a theory, that people are converted in groups, that colors all data that he has analyzed. McGavran’s theory is probable, but I think that he tries to make the data fit his claims. By McGavran’s own admission there was no evidence that familial connection existed between the servant of Adoniram Judson and the people of the Karen tribe who converted, but yet McGavran insists that it is reasonable that there was.
A question this people movement theory raises is, can such a principle be utilized in a highly individualized society, such as the West? McGavran’s insistence on familial connections makes the usefulness of his theory very limited in Western society. The needs of an industrialized society do not facilitate the kind of familial bonds needed for a people movement to arise, but nonetheless it is plausible to utilize McGavran’s concepts of tribal conversion within the new social constructions that exist in the West.
7. Gathered Colony Strategy in the Light of People Movements
McGavran’s assertion that the spread of the gospel and the Church must become indigenous within its local context rather than an impeding fortress is a concept that must be considered by the local churches in the West. What does the Church look like in the indigenous population of your community? The Church needs to incarnate in the indigenous community, rather than members of the indigenous community becoming extractions from context into the walls of the church.
8. Co-operating with Growing Churches is To-day-s Strategy
I am not comfortable with McGavran’s use of conversion as a means of strategic positioning in the fight to out maneuver and win out against, what he juxtaposes as, competing religions to Christianity. McGavran talks about how Christianity must be strategic in converting people groups if Christianity is to win the animists over the Buddhists, Hindus, Communists, and Muslims. This is very disquieting especially in light of the historical implications that McGavran places on strategic conversion, which our geopolitical in their nature than spiritual. This seems to be tantamount to the Greeks’ Hellenization of a defeated populous in order to assure loyalty to the Grecian empire.
9. Important Aspects of this Dynamic Strategy
Three thoughts, first, McGavran’s vocabulary of people movements has been translated into the church growth movement in the West. Second, the military language McGavran uses turns Christianity into a hostile takeover, which is typical of Christendom imperialism. Third, although much of the application of communism in the world has been totalitarian and rooted in Atheism, the kernel of collective responsibility found at the heart of communism makes it a useful vehicle to be explored, rather than a competing ideology, as McGavran suggests in this chapter.
10. Financial Aspects
McGavran raises a very true point; financial allocation must be reimagined. The current strategy of church planting in the West, replicating buildings and finally programmed shows, is not fiscally sustainable. Just as the financial aspects of the mission station according to McGavran are not fiscally sustainable.
11. Research in Growth
McGavran in this chapter makes a great point; the success of the mission must be measurable and progressive. What marks success in missions? Do growing numbers mean that the mission is successful? Numbers are important as they do mark out vitality, but they cannot be the end game of the mission. McGavran stated earlier in the book that if only one person is converted it is still a successful mission, but he seems to undermine that statement by defining success as quantifiable growth.
12. Marching with God to the Heart of the Nations
Is God on a march into the heart of the nations or is God busy roaming the fringes of society pulling those cast away by society from the gutters of Calcutta through the hands of a tiny nun? The language of Christian triumphalism that resounds throughout this book and closes this book is hard to reconcile with the claims of the Jesus. McGavran closes by saying that the avenue that God is found on is “ever-widening,” while Jesus claims that the road is narrow and hard to find. Just a closing thought.
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