Reserch and Ministry
Sam and Samantha Saddleback don't live in an apartment.
The following is from a Wikipedia article about a very influential book in the field of church growth. Can you name this book?
Published in 1995, “the book was a bestseller a few weeks after its publication. [it] has been translated into over 30 languages… It is listed in 100 Christian Books That Changed the Century … in 1996 and 1997, the book was the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA) Christian Book Award Winner for the US. In 2002, the ECPA awarded it the Gold Medallion Award. … In a May 2005 survey of American pastors and ministers conducted by George Barna, it was voted as the second book most influential on their lives and ministries…”[1]
If you guessed The Purpose Driven Church, by Rick Warren, you would be correct. In this book, Warren tells the story of how he planted Saddleback Church, and as stated above, it became one of the most influential books among pastors at that time. I started seminary one year after its publication, in 1996, and by then it had become a required textbook for my Church Evangelism class.
In chapter nine, Who Is Your Target?, Warren teaches his readers how to define the target audience of their church growth efforts geographically, demographically, culturally, and spiritually. Then he encourages pastors to personalize their target audience. He states, “I encourage you to create a composite profile of the typical unchurched person your church wants to reach. Combining the characteristics of residents in your area into a single, mythical person will make it easier for members of your church to understand who your target is. If you’ve done a good job at collecting information, your members should recognize this mythical person as their next-door neighbor.”[2]
He then goes on to introduce Saddleback Sam, and his wife Samantha. Here is the picture on page 170.
So, back to the question: Why is apartment ministry so neglected in both the scholarly realm and the popular Christian ministry literature?
Because I, and thousands of young pastors like me, drew a mythical composite of my target audience for the outreach efforts for our church, and since they didn’t live in an apartment, we didn’t focus much of our efforts on reaching them.
And since we weren’t trying to reach them, we didn’t write about how to reach them. Instead, we studied what we hoped would help our churches grow, and we flocked to Saddleback and Willow Creek and other fast growing mega-churches. And we studied and we wrote, and by the time Warren published his book, he could say “over one hundred doctoral theses have been written on the growth of Saddleback Church.”[3]
Please understand, I am not faulting Rick Warren or the church growth movement, I think I am trying to point out an element of American culture that glorifies the fast and the furious, the quantifiable growth, and attempts to reproduce models of effective output. I am trying to wrestle with the facts, and the figures, and the possibility that we, as American Christian leaders and pastors, could perhaps use a little adjustments to how we set our focus and priorities when it comes to ministry.
[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Purpose_Driven_Church accessed on August 6, 2024.
[2] Warren (1995), 169.
[3] Warren (1995), 21.