This is my last contribution to “Our Question Box” column. Having accepted a retirement appointment from the Highland Hills Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids to serve as Director of their new Pastoral Care Center, all my spare time in the next several months will he used in preparing for this new work. I am grateful for the interest that has been shown in this column and for the privilege of serving under the competent and dedicated editorship of the Reverend John Vander Ploeg.

Question: And now to a question that has been in my files for quite some time and that comes from a reader, an office-bearer in onc of our Christian Reformed Churches, who prefers not to be identified as to the locality of his residence. He writes: “I am disturbed over ‘programs’ being introduced into our congregation, and also other congregations, where the effort seems to be concentrated pretty much on numerical church growth. It strikes me that we have reached a point in our history where the only thing that seems to count is promotional activity at the expense of quality church life and membership. I realize that a church must reach out. Indeed, if it stops reaching out, it may pass out. But what disturbs me is that so little attention is being given to the church reaching up, or, to change the figure, striking its roots deeper into the Word of God. I am afraid that the Christian Reformed Church is going ‘program crazy’ with a proliferation of projects, methodologies, etc. that remind one of a community business organization or even a political campaign. Will you comment on this?”

Answer: Your letter (of which I am quoting only a part, reminds me of Robert K. Hudnut’s book, Church Growth Is Not the Point (Harper & Row, 1975). Perhaps you have read it. I recommended it to all our readers. The title of the book obviously is an overstatement, for certainly church growth in one important sense is indeed the point. But overstatements sometimes have to be made to drive home a cardinal truth which I think Presbyterian minister Robert Hudnut has accomplished.

Much of church activism today impresses me as being an exercise in which we become enamored with procedure to the neglect of the quality of the products. We are obsessed with stage and performance, an obsession, as Hudnut observes, that easily leads to self–congratulation. Michelangelo, you recall, smashed his last statute because he felt it pointed to him and not to God. It reminds us that the vessel, in Jeremiah‘s familiar story, has no significance apart from the potter.

The average church member in America today each week gives the equivalent of a pack of Life-Savers to getting God‘s Life-Saving Message around the world. The remedy for that deplorable situation is not numerical growth, but spiritual growth! A crowd does not make a real church. The lost dynamic in modern Christianity is the power that comes down from God‘s throne to be channeled through self-effacing believers who know they have significance only as they point beyond themselves to their Lord. My fear is that this is being forgotten in the current preoccupation with church machinery which admittedly can be impressive in its movements, but from which one often has to turn away with the observation that it was all motion. Paradoxical as it may sound, it is a fact that a declining church often is conspicuous for its multiplication of wheels within wheels.

Note: It is a cause for genuine regret that Dr. Greenway is no longer in a position to make his informative and helpful contributions. to Our Question Box. The popularity of this department under his leadership was attested by the fact that more questions were received than could be handled. A hearty thank you to him is very much in order. –JVP.