UNDERSTANDING CHURCH GROWTH

Abstract

One of the greatest privileges of my life has been to associate closely with Donald A. McGavran. After sixteen years as a missionary to Bolivia, I ac cepted his call in 1971 to join him on the faculty of the Fuller Theologi cal Seminary School of World Mission in Pasadena, California. For ten years, until his retirement in 1981, we worked together teaching church growth, supervising graduate theses and dissertations in the field, train ing missionaries and pastors, and consulting with churches and mission agencies. I was honored in 1984 to be invited to become the first incum bent of the Donald A. McGavran Chair of Church Growth. Understanding Church Growth is one of those classics which has be come the indispensable foundational text for an academic field. No one can claim to be a serious student of church growth who has not read and absorbed the content of Understanding Church Growth. I was one of the first to be introduced to the content of this book, in classroom lectures in the late 1960s while it was yet being written. The first edition was pub lished in 1970, and the revised edition was expanded and updated by McGavran in 1980. In this 1990 edition the language has been modern ized, the flow of ideas somewhat streamlined, the content also reduced, mostly by eliminating redundancies, ideas and illustrations updated, and a bit of new material such as the chapter on divine healing introduced. But through it all, Donald McGavran is the one who speaks.