The Origins of the Church Growth Movement

Church Growth Movement founder Donald McGavran lived an extraordinary life. His career, stretching across most of the twentieth century, profoundly shaped American missionary practices and American churches.Footnote ⁹ Along the way, McGavran charted a course from the liberal Protestantism of his early years to an evangelicalism more suited to his crusading spirit. Born in India in 1897, he was the son and grandson of missionaries to that country. He set foot in the United States for the first time in 1910. He remained in the United States into young adulthood, receiving his undergraduate education at Butler College in Indianapolis. While at Butler, he came under the influence of the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM), an influential missionary coalition that recruited college students for the foreign mission field.Footnote ¹⁰ Inspired by the SVM, McGavran decided to become a missionary.Footnote ¹¹

McGavran's outlook at this time was broadly ecumenical rather than fundamentalist. He was a member of the Disciples of Christ, a Protestant denomination focused more on Christian unity than on litigating the so-called fundamentalist versus modernist battles of the era.Footnote ¹² Before returning to India as a missionary in his own right in 1923, McGavran earned a bachelor of divinity degree at Yale Divinity School. He then took advantage of a furlough between 1930 and 1932 to complete coursework for his Ph.D. in religious education at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University.Footnote ¹³ Trained in the power centers of liberal Protestantism, McGavran would later say that, in his younger years, he had “counted myself one of the enlightened.”Footnote ¹⁴ In his early years in India, he was comfortable in the fold of liberal Protestant missions. McGavran and his missionary partners declared the good news of Jesus Christ, established schools to educate the poor, and built hospitals to care for the sick. Hard experience, however, upset his youthful self-satisfaction, and he began to wonder to what end all his efforts were pointing.

By the mid-1930s, McGavran became increasingly concerned about the stagnant condition of the missionary-founded churches. Why were they not growing? In search of answers, he began to shed the liberal theology he had learned at Yale and Union. The most formative intellectual influence driving McGavran's shift was a Methodist missionary to India, J. Waskom Pickett. In 1933, Pickett published Christian Mass Movements in India, a study that anticipated much of McGavran's later thought. Pickett and McGavran had come of age in the era of the “white man's burden.” European imperialism meant not only soldiers, railroads, and resource extraction; it also meant European and American missionaries seeking to save, educate, and uplift populations imagined as uncivilized.Footnote ¹⁵ Pickett challenged some of these paternalistic assumptions and emphasized the importance of contextualizing Christianity in indigenous cultures. He criticized the individualism of western missionaries and called for a more evidence-based approach to missions. It was not enough for missionaries to be well-intentioned. They also had to assess whether their missionary methods were working. Pickett insisted that, if western missionaries discarded their paternalism and individualistic assumptions, whole populations could turn to Christianity without disrupting indigenous social bonds and cultural autonomy.Footnote ¹⁶

McGavran was enthralled. His own experiences seemed to confirm Pickett's ideas. The people of central India were not becoming Christians. Churches were not growing. Why not? “We have rendered lip-service to Evangelism,” McGavran wrote, “but have been too busy to practice it.”Footnote ¹⁷ Part of the problem, in his view, was that the good works the mission stations were doing were separating Indian Christians from their communities.Footnote ¹⁸ Children attending missionary schools might become good Christians, but in the process they were also becoming like their teachers. As a result, they were cut off from their culture. After McGavran wrote a glowing review of Pickett's book, the two men worked together in 1936 to prepare a “Mass Movement Survey” of church growth in central India. McGavran believed the report demonstrated that there was an unprecedented opportunity for “rapid growth along castewise lines.”Footnote ¹⁹ After McGavran's self-described awakening, he worked as a missionary in India for nearly two more decades and tried, by trial and error, to implement his new ideas about evangelism. He also studied other mission agencies in India to understand why some churches were growing and some were not. He came to believe there was nothing more important than the questions of how people become Christian and how churches grow. All human beings faced an eternal destiny, he knew, and only the good news of Jesus Christ's death and resurrection could save them. It was incumbent upon missionaries to use the best possible methods to bring the greatest numbers of people into the Christian fold.

In spring 1954, McGavran toured several states in East and Central Africa in a bid to gain a more global perspective on church growth. As he prepared for the journey, he was finalizing the manuscript of a book he hoped would shatter the complacency of western missions. He had submitted it to the publisher and was anxiously waiting to hear if it was accepted. He worried that he would be forced to shorten the book, but he didn't know how he “could cut out so much pure gold.” He sent his manuscript off to Pickett for advice, declaring, “There is no one in India whose judgement I value more highly.” In April, he set out for Africa. His travel notebooks and letters reveal a keen observer, a man eager to soak up all the information and experiences he could. As he journeyed by boat from Karachi to Kenya he enthused, “The adventure has really begun.” Traveling “by ship, plane, train, car, foot, lorry, truck,” McGavran made his way through Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and Congo. In Uganda he took in a Sunday service at Kampala Cathedral. “I was the only white man present,” he noted. While traveling, McGavran commented on food and fashion, politics and geography, and, of course, the past and prospects of Christian missions in the countries he visited.Footnote ²⁰

He arrived in Nairobi amid the Mau Mau revolt. The British colonial government had declared a state of emergency in October 1952 and embarked on a brutal counterinsurgency campaign.Footnote ²¹ McGavran described a European settler community “built up in a land which they consider is their own.” He thought immigrant Indians “stir up the Africans to create trouble and to run the Europeans out” by promoting dubious promises of solidarity among people of color. Meanwhile, “The Europeans hang desperately on to the idea that they are going to rule Kenya.” They promised a fair deal to Africans and Indians, but “the Europeans themselves will decide what is a fair deal. And the Africans (the tiny educated minority) boil and bristle at this taking of their best lands by the Europeans—and their best jobs by the Asians—and plan to throw them both out!! What a mess,” he concluded.Footnote ²² If McGavran's assumption that Indians were stirring Africans up betrayed his paternalism, his recognition of legitimate African grievances about land expropriation made him more insightful than many British and American observers. In Britain and the United States, “Mau Mau” usually signified atavistic and senseless violence.Footnote ²³ McGavran's view was more nuanced than those of Europeans invested in colonial projects as such. He could afford to take a more detached perspective about declining European power because what really mattered to him was “the state of the church and its growth.” The political context could affect the church, but it was no match for “the power of God and men dedicated to his service.”Footnote ²⁴

McGavran concluded his African trip more confident than ever that the ideas born in India were applicable throughout the Global South. Whether in caste-conscious India or amid the independence conflicts of colonial Africa, people needed to hear the gospel in a way that resonated in their culture and preserved their sense of belonging in their social group. He published his book, The Bridges of God, the following year. It was a sharp rebuke of traditional western missionary practices. At the core of the book was the question of how people became Christians. Like Pickett, he argued that western missionaries were too often blinkered by their individualistic assumptions. Human beings’ social bonds and sense of peoplehood were crucial assets in the quest to evangelize the world. These forces were the “bridges” God wished to use to bring vast “People Movements” into his kingdom.Footnote ²⁵ McGavran believed that, rather than orienting missionary activity around a paternalistic mission station that plucked a few individual converts out of indigenous society now and then, the task of missionaries was to invite whole groups to encounter Christ en masse without giving up their culture and group identity. In places such as India, the invitation to become Christian should not compel people to relinquish their caste identities. Rather than understanding caste as an obstacle to the formation of Christian churches, missionaries had to start seeing castes as pathways for God's work. Christianity could spread farther and faster along caste lines than across them.

In 1955, McGavran had no thought of applying these ideas to the United States. In fact, he explicitly contrasted the “homogeneous” and “individualistic” populations of the “West” with the “castes, clans, and peoples” of the rest of the world. McGavran noted that the “intense battle against race prejudice” in the United States caused many missionaries to reject ideas of racial difference and racial consciousness. “But to ignore the significance of race hinders Christianization,” he wrote. “It makes an enemy of race consciousness, instead of an ally. It does no good to say that tribal peoples ought not to have race prejudice. They do have it and are proud of it. It can be understood and should be made an aid to Christianization.”Footnote ²⁶ With his focus set on foreign missions, McGavran believed that these evangelistic strategies were not relevant to the “modern” societies of Western Europe and the United States.Footnote ²⁷ As American elites declared opportunity for all as a national creed and imagined a consensus in American life on everything from labor and capital to religion and patriotism, it was easy for McGavran to assume the United States had moved beyond the intense communal bonds and prejudices of so-called premodern peoples.Footnote ²⁸

The Yale historian of Christianity Kenneth Scott Latourette called The Bridges of God “one of the most important books on missionary methods that have appeared in many years.” Another reviewer called it “revolutionary.”Footnote ²⁹ The Christian and Missionary Alliance, an evangelical denomination, made it required reading for all its new missionaries.Footnote ³⁰ Amid favorable reviews, some active missionaries offered critiques of McGavran's ideas. A missionary to Burma faulted McGavran for failing to pay sufficient attention to the workings of political power. “Isn't it significant,” he asked, “that almost all the ‘People Movements’ have been among minority ethnic groups that have to some extent been dissatisfied with their lot?” One reviewer, B. L. Hinchman, accused McGavran of compromising the gospel by accommodating social divisions and hierarchies—especially caste in India—for the sake of producing converts.Footnote ³¹ When, over a decade later, McGavran's ideas became popular among white evangelicals in the United States, these criticisms would loom large.

Some of the ideas that would make the CGM so alluring and controversial in the decades to come could already be seen in the drafting stage of The Bridges of God. An early version of the manuscript had an illustration showing how much money missionaries could expect to spend for each convert gained in different parts of India. This was the “cost per Christian.”Footnote ³² Evangelicals knew they could not serve God and mammon, but McGavran was sure mammon could be used to serve God. The naked pragmatism of his approach made some Christians queasy. During the manuscript stage of McGavran's second book, one reviewer worried that his language almost made it seem as though he would “make the business of Church-growth a real business-enterprise, to be treated as Ford or Pontiac.” He warned McGavran that he might be too caught up in “the modern trend of American business-thinking.” Another commenter wrote that McGavran seemed to advocate “growth for growth's sake.”Footnote ³³

McGavran, in typical fashion, was buoyed by the enthusiastic reviews and undeterred by the criticisms. By the time The Bridges of God was published, he was nearing sixty years of age, but he was ready to launch a second career. He embarked on a world tour, studying church growth in Latin America and East Asia. For a few years, McGavran became something of an itinerant evangelist for his church-growth theories, with teaching stints at several American colleges and seminaries. During this late-1950s interregnum, between McGavran's missionary career in India and his later prominence as the founder of the CGM, he gave his most sustained attention to the problem of racism in the United States.

McGavran's Theology of Race

The United States to which McGavran returned in the 1950s was a society infused with religion. As the country mobilized for the Cold War, pastors and politicians defined America as a Christian nation in opposition to atheistic communism. Politicians competed to display their religious patriotism, adding “under God” to the pledge of allegiance and making “In God We Trust” an official national motto. Billy Graham skillfully mixed American nationalism and evangelical revivalism in his crusades, becoming a national celebrity. Movies such as The Ten Commandments and Ben Hur were epic blockbusters, reminding Americans that they stood on God's side in an eternal struggle between freedom and tyranny. Church membership soared. By the end of the decade, more Americans than ever before claimed a religious affiliation.Footnote ³⁴

The geography of American Christianity was changing, too, as metropolitan areas experienced rapid demographic and economic transformations. Discrimination and agricultural mechanization in the South pushed millions of African Americans to try their fortunes in northern cities, moving the center of gravity of black Protestantism from the rural South to the urban North.Footnote ³⁵ The Great Migration changed the landscape of African-American religion and presented a challenge to the segregated white churches of northern cities. White evangelical churches actively contributed to the dislocations of white flight, exacerbating an era of disinvestment from center cities.Footnote ³⁶ In the early twentieth century, the fundamentalist movement had thrived in cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston.Footnote ³⁷ Now their white evangelical descendants were leaving the city. What was the responsibility of local churches in a moment of such rapid and divisive racial change? McGavran wrestled with this question during a six-month sojourn in Indianapolis in 1958.

When McGavran had last lived in Indianapolis, while attending Butler College, the city boasted integrated schools and the largest black population of any northern city. From the 1920s, however, city leaders began to enact Jim Crow–style segregation as the African-American population grew.Footnote ³⁸ By the 1950s, segregation of housing, schools, churches, and employment networks was standard practice in the city. After arriving early in 1958, McGavran planted himself at Second Christian Church, a black congregation. He was surprised to find that he was the only white member of the church and promptly drafted an audacious plan for a member exchange program among white and black churches in the city. Mature believers in each of the respective churches would be chosen to temporarily attend a church of another race, thereby enhancing understanding and brotherhood and breaking down the walls of segregation. McGavran convinced the leadership of Second Christian Church to support his idea and sent a letter to dozens of churches in the city. He received a thoroughly discouraging response. White churches were not impressed with an outsider who presumed to know how to fix their churches during a six-month visit. Nor were they charmed by McGavran's blunt criticisms. He called the very notion of “coloured” and “white” churches a “satanic condition.” Although his outrage at racial division was palpable, his efforts in Indianapolis bore little fruit.Footnote ³⁹

The following year, he took up residence in Des Moines, Iowa, where he was a visiting professor at Drake Divinity School. Again, the indefatigable missionary pestered the local congregations to promote church integration, and, again, he was rebuffed. It seemed that white Christians in northern cities had little appetite for the kind of brotherhood McGavran espoused. Although Des Moines had a much smaller black population than Indianapolis, white supremacists in the city nonetheless sought to intimidate those who challenged segregation. After a white pastor sold his house to an African American, a cross was burned on the pastor's front lawn. As McGavran sat down to write the following day, he was in no mood to make excuses for his fellow white Christians. He was “certain that among the cross-burners were members of white churches.” He was equally convinced that these Christians had never experienced genuine fellowship with African Americans as fellow believers in Christ. They had not shared meals or sat in the same pew or sung the same songs together. They had not encountered each other on grounds of spiritual equality. As a result, they vented their racial opinions “immorally, and ludicrously.” While paying lip-service to brotherhood, they had never actually experienced it. Instead, they indulged in “sub-Christian stereotypes.”Footnote ⁴⁰

McGavran paired his outrage at white Christians with a paternalistic mindset toward black Christians. He wrote that white Christians in Des Moines “have no first-hand knowledge of the strong bearing the burdens of the weak, or of the culturally advanced joyfully fellowshipping with the culturally retarded and being accepted by them. Of this part of the cross they have no comprehension.” Most Christians were familiar with the Apostle Paul's instruction to bear the burdens of the weak, but McGavran's deployment of this idea in the context of the racial controversies in Des Moines made strength and weakness not just spiritual characteristics but also racial ones. McGavran seemed to indicate that white Christians could retain their assumptions of cultural superiority even as they embraced spiritual union with black believers. The work of Christ on the cross brought all human beings together and opened up the possibility of brotherhood that transcended race. Yet, white people, as such, were “strong” and “advanced” and would enact brotherhood through their willingness to bear with the “weak” believers of color.Footnote ⁴¹

Despite—or because of—his missionary experiences, McGavran seemed to approach African Americans with an attitude at once accepting and colonialist. With this posture, he tapped into a long American tradition of paternalism both racial and theological. Many Americans imagined white Christianity as a masculine and rational agent of uplift for black Christianity, imagined as feminine and emotional. In the nineteenth century, sympathetic observers often portrayed African Americans as naturally religious, the better to emphasize their dignity in the face suffering. By the early twentieth century, the flipside of this assumed religiosity came to the fore. African-American religion supposedly revealed the primitivism and emotionalism intrinsic to blackness.Footnote ⁴² Whiteness carried connotations of theological maturity and biblical literacy while blackness implied irrational spiritual exuberance. William J. Petersen, executive editor of Eternity, perfectly captured this sensibility in 1963. While urging white evangelicals to break down “race barriers,” he offered an instructive history lesson for his readers. The “American Negro” had been “set adrift spiritually by the American white” after the Civil War. The result was a century of isolation. Black churches lacked “the counsel and economic aid” of white churches. Bringing the story up to the present, Peterson spun a woeful tale of black religious damage: “They are still struggling without ways or means, the illegitimate offspring of the marriage of a slave culture and the Christian church. Their father is dead and their mother has disowned them.”Footnote ⁴³ With such rhetoric Peterson put a spiritual twist on the motif of black impairment then popular among historians and social scientists, who argued that slavery and Jim Crow had wounded the black psyche and deformed black culture.Footnote ⁴⁴ Many white evangelicals found it easier to perceive African-American Christians as subjects of pity and missionary charity—the children of a white “mother”—than as equal partners in a common faith.

In 1961, McGavran drew on his experiences in Indianapolis and Des Moines to produce an article manuscript titled “End Segregation in the Churches Now.” He shopped it around to Christian magazines, including the evangelical Christianity Today and the more liberal Christian Century, before another evangelical periodical, the Christian Herald, agreed to publish it. The core of the article was a restatement of his member exchange program. Despite its failure in Indianapolis and Des Moines, McGavran apparently thought the idea still had merit. The article provided a fascinating window into McGavran's thought in a moment of transition. In his missiology, he was still focused on places such as India and Latin America. When he turned his attention to the United States, he saw in the system of segregation a social injustice and a theological scandal. He did not immediately draw a connection to the evangelistic ideas he advocated for the Global South, although the dots were there for connecting. If caste-based movements for Christ were useful in the caste-conscious society of India, why not race-based movements for Christ in a country as race-obsessed as the United States? After the theological and cultural earthquakes of the 1960s, this question would impress itself on McGavran and his followers. These unimagined changes, however, lay in the future. For now, McGavran offered an optimistic faith in the power of Christian fellowship to break down racial barriers. Through his member exchange program, Christians could become conscious of their unity in Christ. In doing so, they would paint a picture of the destiny of humanity. “It would please the Lord Jesus Christ to see men from every tribe and kindred and tongue and people worshipping Him together in America, today,” McGavran wrote. He borrowed this language from the seventh chapter of John's Revelation, the apocalyptic conclusion to the Christian scriptures. In other words, McGavran wanted American Christians—through their interracial worship—to present to the world nothing less than a foretaste of the end of time.Footnote ⁴⁵

Growing the Movement

In 1961, McGavran took up a new position at Northwest Christian College in Eugene, Oregon, as the founder and director of the Institute of Church Growth. He set up shop at a desk in the library and called his one-man operation an “Institute.” The small size of the operation, however, belied the growing scale of McGavran's influence. His board of advisors included the president of the University of Oregon and the state's governor, Mark Hatfield.Footnote ⁴⁶ During the 1960s, he forged close ties with two of the largest evangelical missionary agencies responsible for well over half of the total number of Protestant missionaries sent from the United States. Annual church growth seminars at Winona Lake, Indiana, in partnership with the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association, brought together dozens of missionaries and mission agency executives each year. Growing numbers of evangelical seminaries were using McGavran's books in their curriculums, and some denominations made his work required reading for new missionaries.Footnote ⁴⁷ Eerdmans, the major evangelical publishing house, launched a church growth book series. In 1964, McGavran's Institute received a grant from the Lilly Endowment to promote the study of church growth in Latin America.Footnote ⁴⁸ McGavran also founded the Church Growth Bulletin, a new monthly periodical initially delivered free to thousands of key missions leaders and missionaries around the world. Although McGavran's work was primarily associated with the evangelical wing of American Protestantism, in the early 1960s he still hoped to influence a broad cross-section of Protestants, both evangelical and mainline. He had some temporary success. In the summer of 1963, the World Council of Church's Department of Missionary Studies held a consultation on “The Growth of the Church” and asked McGavran to lead some of the sessions. The consultation produced a statement that advocated church growth and evangelism in terms remarkably similar to McGavran's and explicitly praised McGavran's “pioneering work” at the Institute of Church Growth.Footnote ⁴⁹ This was the high-water mark of McGavran's influence in liberal Protestantism. By the end of the 1960s, as the World Council of Churches emphasized social action over evangelism, McGavran would write off liberal Protestants and focus all his energies on the evangelical movement.

In 1965, McGavran moved to the influential Fuller Theological Seminary in California, an institution closely associated with efforts to renew an evangelical intellectual tradition and gain mainstream respectability.Footnote ⁵⁰ He was invited to serve as the founding dean of the new School of World Mission, with a mandate to hire a faculty. There was competition in the world of evangelical seminaries to land a big fish like McGavran. A comment one missions executive made to another as McGavran sought a new home for his institute might just as well have summed up the restless energy of McGavran's entire career. “Actually,” Clyde Taylor wrote to Norman Cummings, “you and I know that we do not have any real control over Dr. McGavran.”Footnote ⁵¹ The move to Fuller meant that McGavran had more resources at his command and could dramatically expand the scale of his church growth operations. He was perched in an important role at one of the most powerful evangelical institutions in the country. He did not intend to let the opportunity go to waste.

The CGM that was poised to go mainstream was now an identifiable body of thought, still closely associated with McGavran in particular but embraced by a growing cross-section of American evangelicals active in foreign missions. It was a movement that might seem paradoxical at a glance.Footnote ⁵² It put a great deal of hope in both quantification and the working of the Holy Spirit. It criticized individualistic missions strategies but insisted that the goal of missions was the salvation of individuals’ souls. It paid attention to the latest scholarship in the fields of anthropology and sociology but did so in service of an evangelical conversion agenda. Yet, in all these ways, the movement was not as unprecedented or paradoxical as it may have appeared to some observers. Evangelicals had always been eager capitalizers on the latest trends, and the CGM was no different. Indeed, the movement bore a striking resemblance to what Timothy Gloege has called the “corporate evangelical framework” and “consumer” religion pioneered decades earlier by figures such as Henry Crowell and James Gray.Footnote ⁵³ Despite being embedded in this tradition, McGavran came to believe he was launching nothing less than a new academic discipline. He told his students he was teaching them the “science of church growth.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The factors that caused some churches to grow and others to stagnate could be measured. Best practices could be standardized and reproduced, leading to more converts. Mysterious supernatural processes revealed through divine revelation in the scriptures could be advanced through scientific and sociological principles. This melding of spirit and strategy, of piety and pragmatism, did not make the CGM an outlier in evangelicalism. On the contrary, this Christian modernism was characteristically evangelical and was key to the movement's success.Footnote ⁵⁵

By the time McGavran moved to Fuller, the civil rights movement was reaching its apex. Whatever blind spots might have been reflected in his cross-racial member exchange scheme, McGavran was far ahead of most of his fellow white evangelicals in his enthusiasm for the civil rights movement. He personally wrote to Martin Luther King with financial contributions to King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, prayer, and assurance of Christian solidarity across the color line. Besides sending supportive letters to Dr. King, he sent scathing letters to King's opponents. After white mob violence against school integration in Grenada, Mississippi, in September 1966, McGavran wrote to the town's mayor. The white residents of Grenada were bringing “shame and disgrace” on the South. “You have no chance to win,” he declared. “God Himself wars against you. Turn from your evil ways while there is yet time.”Footnote ⁵⁶ These letters marked McGavran as an unusual white evangelical leader and revealed his crusading spirit.Footnote ⁵⁷ Once he took up a cause as his own, there were very few shades of gray in his mind. His strong support for the civil rights movement showed the ongoing influence of his early grounding in liberal Protestantism and of his decades of missions work that had brought him face to face with the oppression of marginalized groups around the world. These complexities defy attempts to paint him as a reactionary conservative or a closet segregationist. Indeed, he was much more progressive on questions of race than most white evangelicals of his time and far more comfortable with cultural diversity than most white Americans—but nothing mattered more to McGavran than converting people to Christianity. He was always ready to pick up any tool to accomplish that end. New developments in liberal Protestantism's approach to global missions and profound changes in American culture and politics were about to turn McGavran in a more conservative direction and open the door for the CGM to come home to the United States.

Bringing the Movement to the United States

When McGavran finally soured on the kind of liberal social activism the civil rights movement represented, it was not primarily because of events at home—the rise of black power, urban riots, protests against the Vietnam War—although these did affect him.Footnote ⁵⁸ Much more concerning to McGavran were the changes in American missionary activity abroad. The fourth assembly of the World Council of Churches held in Uppsala, Sweden, in 1968 was the decisive turning point. He believed the liberal churches were “quietly scuttling” the historic mission of the church, which was evangelization.Footnote ⁵⁹ Liberal Protestants were still using the language of Christianity, but now “salvation” meant political and social liberation, and “mission” meant doing good works.Footnote ⁶⁰ McGavran would write of 1968 as the moment the scales fell from his eyes and he realized how dire the cause of world evangelization had become. He had long had his differences with liberal Protestants, but he had not realized just how far they had moved from a traditional evangelistic missionary enterprise. McGavran had always insisted that Christians ought to do good works and care about injustice. It was precisely on that basis that he supported Dr. King's desegregation campaigns. Uppsala, however, left him shaken and fearing the spread of a form of Christianity emptied of its supernatural evangelistic heart. He described the “capture” of the World Council of Churches “by men who are not in the least interested in discipling the nations.” After Uppsala, McGavran would more or less give up on reaching mainline Protestants. He was determined not to “water down” his church growth message to try to appeal to Protestants who did not even agree on what the church's mission was.Footnote ⁶¹ Henceforth, McGavran would become an advocate of evangelism at almost any cost.

McGavran echoed the conservative turn in American politics after 1968, but, for him, the root of the shift was the theological battle between evangelism and social justice. As he critiqued liberal Protestants, he more forcefully insisted on the absolute priority of evangelism over social concern. “Where Christ is enthroned in the heart,” he declared, “social amelioration follows.”Footnote ⁶² The man who had so enthusiastically supported the campaigns of Martin Luther King in 1965 was harder to recognize after 1968. This crucial turning point, rooted in international missiology rather than domestic politics, paved the way for McGavran to fully support the use of his church growth ideas in the United States. If, in 1958, segregated churches were a “satanic condition” that undercut the authenticity of the gospel, by the early 1970s, Protestantism's emphasis on social justice seemed ready to drown out entirely the message of the gospel. McGavran increasingly began to frame evangelism and social justice not as complementary but as starkly dichotomous. The implications were stark. If evangelism and social justice were at odds, then attacking racism as McGavran had in Indianapolis and Des Moines in the 1950s might harm church growth. Maybe racial loyalties in the United States could, instead, be used to make evangelism more effective.

For the CGM to become a major force in American churches, it was not enough for McGavran and other evangelicals to be concerned about the missiology of liberal Protestants. Their view of American society had to change. The cultural and political convulsions of the civil rights movement provided ample material for this change. By the time of Dr. King's death in spring 1968, the imagined 1950s America of consensus and conformity seemed nowhere to be found. The rise of black power and black nationalism seemed to call the liberal integrationist ideal into question. Suddenly, roots seemed to be all the rage. If black was beautiful, then so was every kind of white you could imagine, from Tevye the dairyman to Rocky Balboa.Footnote ⁶³ As early as 1963, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer had declared that the great American melting pot was an old-fashioned idea. As the 1970s dawned, a new era of cultural pluralism seemed to be at hand. In 1971, Michael Novak described the “unmeltable ethnics” who were not WASPs and did not want to be. This so-called ethnic revival made the United States look a lot more like the rest of the world than McGavran had imagined just a decade earlier. Perhaps Americans’ enthusiasm for ethnic consciousness and origin stories indicated that a deep-seated sense of peoplehood remained operative even in the United States.

In 1967, Wade Coggins, of the Evangelical Foreign Missions Association, noted, “Up to now, church growth research and training have been aimed toward the missionary front. What about pastors in the U.S.? Should they not be equally interested and equally in need of this philosophy and emphasis?”Footnote ⁶⁴ M. Wendell Belew, of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) Home Mission Board, was asking the same question. Belew attended a McGavran-organized church growth symposium in 1964. He found the principles electrifying but was “disturbed” that they were not being applied to the United States. From Belew's perspective, much of CGM thought aligned with what Southern Baptists were already doing. In the 1950s, the Home Mission Board had established a Language Missions Division to provide funds and missionaries to establish Southern Baptist churches in immigrant and foreign-language communities. Southern Baptists were well aware of peoples’ felt attachments to their group identity. Belew became a key figure, synthesizing CGM thought and translating it for the nation's largest Protestant denomination. In books such as Churches, and How They Grow and Missions in the Mosaic, he engaged with McGavran's ideas while seeking to approach church growth from a distinctly Southern Baptist perspective. Whereas McGavran increasingly brooked no compromise on his core ideas, Belew adopted a more moderate tone, praising the CGM as a positive force but cautioning that there was more to the life of the church than numerical growth and that the church needed to minister to physical as well as spiritual needs. For his part, McGavran called Belew “one of the great leaders of missions.”Footnote ⁶⁵

In the 1950s, McGavran had described the United States as “homogeneous,” but, in the 1970s, he joined Belew in speaking of American society as a “mosaic” rather than as a melting pot, and he forged connections with Southern Baptists who were trying to reach that mosaic. As early as 1963, he led a church growth seminar focused on growth within the United States. The Language Missions Department of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, a part of the SBC, held a conference focused on Latino church growth. McGavran encouraged the audience of Latino pastors to be unabashedly different from the white Southern Baptists who had helped start their churches. “God has called you Latins to serve the 1,100,000 Latins,” McGavran declared. “God calls you to make your churches much warmer, more friendly, more Latin than the Anglos, more Spanish, more Mexican, more tortilla, sombrero.” He continued, “What about the Anglo Churches and Anglo Christians? Forget about them! . . . Act as if they did not exist. . . . Do not follow Anglo patterns.”Footnote ⁶⁶

By 1978, Southern Baptists claimed over 2,200 congregations of “minority ethnic identity.”Footnote ⁶⁷ In a convention that prided itself on the independence of the local church, Southern Baptist efforts could promote the cultural autonomy of ethnic churches. During the 1970s, McGavran praised Southern Baptists as the most successful practitioners of cross-cultural evangelism. Although many denominations had little success diversifying, Southern Baptists were adding new ethnic congregations at a rapid clip. McGavran's Homogeneous Unit Principle—the idea that people liked to worship with people like themselves and should not have to cross boundaries of race, class, or language in order to become Christians—seemed intuitive to Southern Baptists. Such praise inadvertently highlighted the ambiguity of Southern Baptists’ multiethnic turn. The SBC had long been a quintessential expression of segregationist Christianity and white southern identity. Did the embrace of church growth principles represent a repudiation of that segregationist past or a refinement of it as the era of ethnic revival and multiculturalism dawned?

The SBC was a big tent. While some Southern Baptists invested in ethnic church growth, others busily defended the sacredness of segregation. On the morning of September 15, 1963, just a few months after McGavran told Latino Southern Baptist pastors to “forget about” white Southern Baptists, the Reverend Montague Cook took to his pulpit at Trinity Baptist Church in Moultrie, Georgia, to preach the second of his two-part sermon series explaining why “Racial Segregation is Christian.” The week before, Cook had told his congregation how important it was to remain racially “pure.” As God chose the children of Israel long ago and called them to be separate, so the “white European likewise was tapped by the Almighty to carry on his Purpose” in the development of western civilization. White people were not superior by dint of circumstance or accident. They were a divinely chosen people set apart for a sacred mission. Now, in his second sermon, Cook explained how this stark vision of white supremacy squared with the teachings of Jesus Christ. He told his congregation that Jesus taught “inequality among men” and “discernment in love.” It was possible to love the “negro race” without giving in to modern myths about human equality. The good people of Trinity Baptist Church could rest assured that racial equality violated God's design and was contrary to Christian principles. The “race mixers” were not just naïve; they set themselves in open rebellion against God.Footnote ⁶⁸ The very morning the Reverend Cook preached his sermon, Ku Klux Klan terrorists set off a bomb in the basement of a black church in Birmingham. While the Reverend Cook spoke, unbeknownst to him, the lifeless bodies of four black children lay in the rubble of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. If Cook was on the extreme end of the spectrum of opinion in the SBC, he was nonetheless a Southern Baptist in good standing, with views that many in his denomination shared.

It was, perhaps, because of intimate acquaintance with people such as Montague Cook that some Southern Baptist leaders found much to be cautious about in CGM thought. Francis Dubose, professor of missions at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, called the Homogeneous Unit Principle downright “Machiavellian,” an approach to evangelization in which “the ends justify the means.” Dubose admitted that the principle did seem to work and allowed that it could be helpful in some cases, especially for minority groups, but “the situation of the majority is fundamentally different,” he insisted. Here, the separation into homogeneous units was built on an ongoing history of “ostracism.” Despite such concerns, some Southern Baptist leaders were wholeheartedly enthusiastic about McGavran's thinking. In Design for Church Growth, Charles Chaney and Ron Lewis encouraged churches to be “absolutely ruthless” in pursuit of numerical growth. Every church growth initiative was to be evaluated by a single pragmatic question: “Does it work?”Footnote ⁶⁹ A 1981 Home Mission Board report put the racialized reality of this question in perspective when it admitted, “the overall church expansion of Southern Baptists is dependent upon trends in white population.”Footnote ⁷⁰

As the nation's largest Protestant group variously adopted, resisted, and repurposed McGavran's ideas for their use, McGavran was eager to see church growth principles applied to the cities from which so many white Protestants were fleeing. His “overriding conviction” about such work was that the populations of America's cities should be treated as distinct peoples. “[I]t is of vital importance,” he wrote to Southern Baptist missions professor Cal Guy, “that black populations, Porto Rican [sic] populations, Portuguese populations, etc., be regarded as special sub-cultures and churches which fit those cultures be planted amongst them—led by their leaders, operated at their level of culture.”Footnote ⁷¹ Here were early indications that McGavran was willing to think of American minority groups in terms similar to “peoples” in the Global South. It is telling that McGavran first thought in these terms about people of color in the United States, not white Americans. Soon enough, his disciples would apply the same logic to the white majority.

The idea that homogeneous churches were effective vectors of Christianization was not new to the American context. White Christians, beginning in the 1880s, had sounded the alarm about the supposed threat of mass immigration and proposed home missions, complete with foreign-language churches for distinct ethnic groups, as a solution. Leading proponents of these home missions efforts often justified the work in explicitly xenophobic and racist terms as a nation-building project.Footnote ⁷² Getting the immigrant masses into churches was a form of quarantine on the way to eventual assimilation and Americanization. McGavran and the leading CGM theorists exhibited no institutional or personal memory of these American antecedents. In contrast to the overt Anglo-Saxon Christian nationalism of earlier American home missions advocates, the CGM described homogeneous churches as a purely evangelistic enterprise. CGM theorists consistently located the origins of their movement overseas and showed remarkable disinterest in questions of American decline or ascendance. For them, homogeneous churches were not instruments of national renewal or assimilation; they were ends in themselves because they understood them to be effective at converting people to Christianity. Whereas an earlier generation of mission churches had been launched in an era in which white supremacy was the avowed ideology of American public life, the CGM gained its ascendancy in a dramatically different context, in the aftermath of a civil rights movement that made integration and diversity the supposed American creed.Footnote ⁷³ Because of this, CGM advocates imagined homogeneous churches not as way stations to assimilation but as healthy expressions of pluralism.

At Fuller Seminary, McGavran began gathering around him a team of followers who would spread his ideas. Among these, no one was more important than C. Peter Wagner. He was a missionary in Bolivia when he first heard the name Donald McGavran. He read The Bridges of God and concluded that “this fellow McGavran is a fanatic.”Footnote ⁷⁴ After all, if McGavran was right, much of the modern missionary enterprise was a waste of time. Wagner gradually came to embrace McGavran's thought, however, and, in 1971, joined him on the faculty at Fuller. McGavran and Wagner established a close working relationship and friendship. Wagner, ever the loyal pupil, jealously guarded McGavran's reputation as the founder of the CGM and defended him against his critics. In his voluminous writings, Wagner interpreted the CGM for an American evangelical audience of pastors, professors, and church planters. As comfortable quoting Moynihan as the Apostle Paul, Wagner combined sociological analysis and spiritual revelation in an effort to make church growth theory the dominant methodology of the evangelical church in the United States.

In the fall of 1972, Wagner and McGavran cotaught a church growth class designed for leaders of American churches. Among the attendees was Win Arn. Inspired by the teaching, Arn promptly quit his job and founded the Institute for American Church Growth. Arn and other self-styled church growth experts taught church planters to conduct demographic analyses of local communities, taking note of factors such as per capita income and racial composition. A new church ought to have a clear idea of the sort of people it was trying to reach. They encouraged established churches to examine their membership records, graph changes over time, and set targets for future growth. Church growth manuals taught pastors how to create mathematical charts and calculate their “Annual Growth Rate (AGR)” and “Decadal Growth Rate (DGR).” These graphs were “as important to a student of church growth as a compass is to a sailor or a stethoscope to a physician,” the manuals lectured.Footnote ⁷⁵ Wagner suggested a “rule of thumb” that membership growth of 25 percent in a decade was “poor,” while 100 percent was “good,” 300 percent was “outstanding,” and 500 percent was “incredible.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Church growth experts taught that, in theory, any church anywhere could grow. In practice, as American cities continued to hemorrhage middle-class residents, locating new churches in growing suburbs was an obvious path to success.

By the middle of the 1970s, when evangelicals used the phrase “Church Growth Movement” with capital letters, they were talking about a specific network of people and institutions. The institutional CGM had its locus at Fuller Seminary and included organizations such as Arn's Institute for American Church Growth and magazines such as Church Growth America and Church Growth Bulletin. From there, the Movement's influence spread to many evangelicals who embraced the ethos of “church growth,” if not the jealous movement-building prickliness of a cadre of Fuller professors. Some denominations, such as the Church of the Nazarene, embraced McGavran's teachings wholesale and aggressively trained their pastors in it, whereas others selectively adopted strategies they found useful.Footnote ⁷⁷ As if the growing influence of their movement was not enough, church growth theorists had a tendency to take credit for success wherever they found it. Although superstar pastor Robert H. Schuller founded his Garden Grove Community Church in 1955 without the influence of McGavran, CGM materials tended to describe Schuller as a man who made them look good, a successful religious entrepreneur who had “intuitively” understood their principles before they were widely known.Footnote ⁷⁸

It is not surprising that the movement would want to claim Schuller as its own. His church boasted thousands of members and innovative methodologies. Attendees were welcome to come inside or enjoy the service in the comfort of their cars parked in the “drive-in area.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Schuller's influence radiated outward through his national “Hour of Power” television show and his Institute for Successful Church Leadership. Among Schuller's most famous trainees was Bill Hybels, who went on to found the influential megachurch Willow Creek in suburban Chicago. Schuller's first book, for which Wagner wrote the foreword, was a veritable alphabet soup of self-help and positive thinking pep talk from the very first page. Schuller promised readers “results . . . optimism . . . success . . . [and] higher levels of accomplishment than you ever dreamed of,” all brought to life by “real possibility thinking!” With chapters such as “Seven Principles of Successful Retailing,” “How You Can Sell Your Ideas Successfully,” and “Three Keys to Certain Success,” Schuller invited pastors to jump into the religious marketplace and make their dreams come true. The CGM's positive appraisal of Schuller is a striking indicator of its comfort with the use of sleek marketing and business practices to sell the gospel. In these moments, the Movement looked like nothing so much as an in-your-face invitation to treat religion as another consumer good in the modern capitalist economy.Footnote ⁸⁰ American consumers had high standards and many options on a Sunday morning. Churches needed to sell themselves or they would lose market share.

As Wagner, Arn, and other popularizers of church growth theory extended McGavran's “peoples” approach to the white American middle class, the missiological language of McGavran's earlier work took on a more scientific sound. They talked about “homogeneous units” rather than “peoples.” Though the Homogeneous Unit Principle sounded technical, it was an elastic term that could refer to numerous kinds of group affinities. Win Arn's organization stressed this principle as the axiomatic foundation for church growth. “Almost without exception,” proclaimed Church Growth America, “a common characteristic of healthy, growing churches is a membership composed of basically one kind of people, be it defined culturally, ethnically, economically, educationally, linguistically, occupationally.” Arn warned against a church mismatching a pastor and its congregation. “People want their pastor to be ‘like’ them,” he explained. Those desiring a “successful ministry” ought to make sure the “pastor and church fit the same basic homogeneous unit.”Footnote ⁸¹ Although church growth theorists insisted they opposed segregation and racism, these instructions were all but explicit warnings against the danger of integration and cultural pluralism in a local church. Wagner and Arn made no distinction between, say, a poor immigrant congregation that did not speak English and a wealthy white congregation in a prosperous suburb. Both were equally entitled to homogeneous worship with people like themselves. Both were positive expressions of the diversity of the kingdom of God. In effect, if people like Montague Cook existed, Wagner and Arn did not want to know.

Some church growth literature openly described racial integration as a threat to the health of American churches. C. Peter Wagner's 1976 book, Your Church Can Grow, devoted a chapter to an “autopsy of a dead church.” Zion Evangelical Free Church, a white congregation of several hundred in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago, closed in the summer of 1969. It had appeared healthy just a few years before. What went wrong? Wagner declared that he had examined the “corpse” and had the “diagnosis” in hand. Zion Free Church came to a sorry end because of a terminal case of “ethnikitis.” Church leaders had failed to “understand and apply the homogeneous unit principle” before it was too late. As a result, the church became a “victim” of the changing racial demographics of the Austin neighborhood. As white residents moved out, the church's attendance rapidly dwindled from 350 to 30. In a desperate bid to save itself, Zion partnered with Circle Church, a new multiracial church in the neighborhood. This effort was doomed, Wagner informed his readers, because it involved a mixing of homogeneous units. Trying to merge a young, hip, multicultural church and a staid, traditional, white church produced “symptoms” of disease “almost as inevitably” as a blood transfusion mixing type A and B. A worship leader with sideburns showed up at Zion, causing offense. Some young women from Circle Church arrived in miniskirts, causing an uproar, and “the heaviest donor in the church left as soon as he heard that blacks would be welcome.”Footnote ⁸² Wagner grouped all these phenomena together as examples of cultural incompatibility. The white supremacist, like those who objected to miniskirts and long sideburns, apparently deserved a homogeneous unit congregation. Over twenty years after McGavran wrote that the racial prejudices of “tribal peoples . . . can be understood and should be made an aid to Christianization,” Wagner was directly transferring this pragmatic use of racism to American churches in an age of white flight.

These ideas were controversial. As the CGM burst on the American scene, evangelical opponents quickly emerged. Paul D. Simmons, professor of Christian ethics at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, castigated church growth experts for pursuing evangelism at the expense of social justice. He pointed to Schuller's “Hour of Power” TV show as a characteristic example of how evangelicals had gone wrong. Schuller's show “has all the sweet smells of success but no hint of the scandal of the cross. It seems pure Hollywood rather than the simple but demanding Gospel.” Schuller offered “style but little substance, preaching comfortable Christianity and substituting middle-class morality for disciplined service.” With this, the church growth experts seemed perfectly content, because it brought bodies into the pews. Simmons believed evangelicals ought to demand more of themselves and their potential converts. “We get our credentials not from the Chamber of Commerce,” he archly observed, “but from the Lord of the Cross. We must not produce churches without souls, programs without conscience, love without justice, religious experience without conversion, salvation without a cross.”Footnote ⁸³ For some evangelical critics, the CGM represented nothing less than a perversion of the gospel.

Black evangelicals spoke up, too, including Clarence Hilliard, the copastor of Circle Church, the very one that featured in Wagner's “autopsy” of Zion Evangelical Free Church. Filtering black liberation theology through an evangelical lens, Hilliard critiqued what he saw as the theological shallowness and racial myopia of the white evangelical mainstream in the United States. He argued that blackness was the most potent contemporary symbol Americans had to understand and identify with the life of Christ. “To be black,” James Cone had written, “means that your heart, your soul, your mind, and your body are where the dispossessed are.” Jesus Christ, Hilliard argued, was “theologically black,” and so, too, should be his followers. Hilliard believed in the necessity of an evangelical conversion experience, but he believed church growth experts were cheapening its meaning, turning it into a selfish personal transaction between the individual and God. True conversion involved taking up one's cross and identifying with the sufferings of Christ. “Just as Jesus moved to the bottom of the social order, voluntarily giving up heaven for us, we as his followers are to move to the bottom of the social order—to become niggers with him,” Hilliard wrote.Footnote ⁸⁴

This was not a form of black self-loathing. It was a theological mandate for every Christian in America, regardless of their phenotype. Theological blackness was a choice, not a birthright. It was the responsibility of all Christians to resist “the siren call of the system to move up the social ladder.” This status quo–affirming, success-oriented way of life was the “theological whiteness” Jesus struggled against. One became black by following Jesus. One became white by pursuing success and turning away from the poor. Hilliard believed this was exactly what white evangelicals such as Wagner and McGavran were busily doing. Hilliard's targets were not hard to identify when he described the scene: “Specialists in getting quick, easy decisions for a strange, mystical, theologically white Christ are rapidly increasing,” he wrote. “These persons peddle a Jesus easy to accept, a Jesus who demands very little commitment of energy, money, life.” Other evangelical critics had similar concerns about the CGM, but Hilliard directly connected the idea of evangelical religion as a consumer good to the denigration of racial justice. In a racist society such as the United States, “a Jesus easy to accept”—a Jesus easy to sell—was inevitably a racist Jesus.Footnote ⁸⁵ The idea that a single-minded focus on evangelism could be harmful to African Americans was not new. In the nineteenth century, the antilynching activist Ida B. Wells criticized the famous evangelist Dwight Moody for accommodating white racism in his popular revival meetings. “Our American Christians are too busy saving the souls of white Christians from burning in hellfire to save the lives of black ones from present burning in fires kindled by white Christians,” she wrote.Footnote ⁸⁶ Now, Hillard charged Moody's spiritual descendants with much the same crime.

Hilliard's criticisms added a sharp racial justice component to a broader critique of the CGM as a trendy but vacuous phenomenon more concerned with success than faithfulness. In a satirical take appearing in Eternity in 1976, “Pilgrim and his family” visit the “Chapel of the Winns,” otherwise known as the “First Church of the American Dream.” The church's ample parking lot has its own pastor. The former used-car salesman “groups people together by type of car,” thus creating a sense of “togetherness” even before escalators whisk the visitors up to the enormous sanctuary. The founder and senior pastor of the church, a certain Wyatt W. Winn, is a TV-preaching, globe-trotting salesman for Christ who is rarely present at his own church. The administration of such a large congregation requires the formation of a “Consortium of Church Management,” a body made up of Dr. Winn and his seven sons. It is duly called “the Board of Winners.” As the service begins, Pilgrim and his family are overwhelmed. The music is grand. The Minister of Public Relations manages to make even the church bulletin seem interesting. The Minister of Preaching delivers a polished performance of the sermon, which the Minister of Sermon Research has carefully prepared. Then it is time for the altar call. An enormous orchestra—rotating on a platform “like a giant lazy Susan” so as to give each performer equal time in the spotlight—plays as the aisles of the sanctuary begin to move. Visitors need only step onto the conveyor belts and they are transported down to the front of the church where the Minister of Counseling stands ready to help them. Then the Corps of Communicators ensures that the visitors fill out information cards for computer processing and follow-up contact from the Vigilance Units. Finally, the Minister of Statistics uses the cards “to make projections on future growth trends for the chapel.” By the time the service is over, Pilgrim is feeling ambivalent. He asks an official “welcomer” if a sense of personal human connection is lost amid the bigness and efficiency of a gigantic church. The welcomer assures Pilgrim that each new convert is assigned to a group called a “Winner's Circle,” thus satisfying the need for connection. The welcomer goes on to tell Pilgrim about the exciting new developments at the church, such as the Minister of Aerial Education's fleet of helicopters to pick up visitors and Pastor Winn's plan for a 144,000-seat chapel. The family, somewhat dazed, leave the First Church of the American Dream carrying their copy of Pastor Winn's autobiography, Winning Is the Name of the Game. It was like the welcomer said: “You just can't argue with success.”Footnote ⁸⁷

Many white evangelicals could embrace criticisms like this one without thinking that the problems with the CGM included matters of racial justice. The managerial ethos, the relentless drive for numerical growth, the accommodation of visitors’ comfort—all these made some white evangelicals nervous. Yet, in ways that even many critics of the CGM often did not realize—but Hilliard did—these concerns had racial implications. What did it mean for a church to be successful in a moment in which the white middle-class was willing to sell their houses, start new private schools, and build new churches to maintain their advantages over—and distance from—African Americans? From a pragmatic church growth perspective, locating churches in communities bearing the brunt of the middle-class exodus was a fool's errand. If pastors wanted their churches to grow, the simplest bet was to locate them where populations of middle-class potential donors were growing. Whether white evangelicals admitted it or not, this was a racialized bet.

McGavran believed this was a bet worth making. When he wrote, “Men like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic, or class barriers,” he meant it prescriptively as well as descriptively.Footnote ⁸⁸ Homogeneity was what people wanted, and evangelicals ought to give it to them. It was a fact of human nature that evangelicals could embrace and use for their purposes. This was not to say that racial prejudice aligned with Christian ethics. McGavran believed there was a clear distinction between what he called “discipling” and “perfecting.” In the discipling stage, the new convert heard and accepted the message of Christ's death and resurrection for sins. The “perfecting” stage, in which the new believer gradually learned and embraced Christian ethics, was chronologically and theologically secondary to the first priority of discipling. Insofar as white evangelicals embraced this thinking, it meant that the life-and death-struggles of African Americans against systemic oppression were in the secondary category.

McGavran's pragmatic efforts to defend the priority of evangelism in the 1970s took him into some dark waters. In a forum debating the homogeneous unit principle, he imagined that, “if all the whites in Tennessee were pagan and all the blacks were Christian, and if ‘becoming Christian’ meant joining a black Church and giving up white culture, whites would become Christians very slowly, if at all.” The principle of this unsettling hypothetical scenario was that “All men should be able to become Christians without feeling they are betraying their race.” McGavran drove the point home further, clarifying that he was thinking specifically of white Americans’ investments in their racial identities. “We do not want white men to feel that the only way they can follow Christ is in multi-racial and multi-language congregations.” He warned that “people movements all around the world languish and often die” because mixing homogeneous units created “mongrel” congregations. In contrast, a homogeneous unit church “liberates its own people without raising difficult questions of cross-race dining, marriage and the like.”Footnote ⁸⁹ McGavran's evocative use of the word mongrel aligned with longstanding white supremacist rhetoric about the dangers of racial mixing and interracial marriage.Footnote ⁹⁰ In the white supremacist imagination, these practices spoiled so-called racial purity and invited communist infiltration or a one-world government. In McGavran's imagination, these practices were mortal dangers to church growth. On their face, McGavran's words could give aid and comfort to white nationalists in the United States, but his mind was still back in India. He understood himself to be defending a peoples-based approach to evangelism, not a hateful American political ideology.