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White Evangelicals as a “People”: The Church Growth Movement from India to the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 March 2020

Jesse Curtis
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Abstract

This article begins with a simple question: How did white evangelicals respond to the civil rights movement? Traditional answers are overwhelmingly political. As the story goes, white evangelicals became Republicans. In contrast, this article finds racial meaning in the places white evangelicals, themselves, insisted were most important: their churches. The task of evangelization did not stop for a racial revolution. What white evangelicals did with race as they tried to grow their churches is the subject of this article. Using the archives of the leading evangelical church growth theorists, this article traces the emergence and transformation of the Church Growth Movement (CGM). It shows how evangelistic strategies created in caste-conscious India in the 1930s came to be deployed in American metropolitan areas decades later. After first resisting efforts to bring these missionary approaches to the United States, CGM founder Donald McGavran embraced their use in the wake of the civil rights movement. During the 1970s, the CGM defined white Americans as “a people” akin to castes or tribes in the Global South. Drawing on the revival of white ethnic identities in American culture, church growth leaders imagined whiteness as pluralism rather than hierarchy. Embracing a culture of consumption, they sought to sell an appealing brand of evangelicalism to the white American middle class. The CGM story illuminates the transnational movement of people and ideas in evangelicalism, the often-creative tension between evangelical practices and American culture, and the ways in which racism inflected white evangelicals’ most basic theological commitments.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 30 , Issue 1 , Winter 2020 , pp. 108 - 146
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 by The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture

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References

Notes

1 McGavran, Donald, Understanding Church Growth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 198Google Scholar; C. Peter Wagner, “What Makes Churches Grow?” Eternity, June 1974, 56; Perkins, John, With Justice for All: A Strategy for Community Development (Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 1982), 107–8Google Scholar. On the theological stakes of the 1963 Birmingham Campaign, see Bass, S. Jonathan, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Martin Luther King Jr., Eight White Religious Leaders, and the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Rieder, Jonathan, Gospel of Freedom: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from Birmingham Jail and the Struggle that Changed a Nation (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013)Google Scholar. On church kneel-ins, see Haynes, Stephen R., The Last Segregated Hour: The Memphis Kneel-Ins and the Campaign for Southern Church Desegregation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dupont, Carolyn Renée, Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945–1975 (New York: New York University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Frances FitzGerald's recent popular history of evangelicalism is symptomatic of this trend. It devotes hundreds of pages in the second half of the book to a small cadre of elite white evangelical political activists, leaving the internal worlds of evangelical communities largely unexplored. See FitzGerald, Frances, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017), 291–623Google Scholar. See also Balmer, Randall, Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical's Lament (New York: Basic Books, 2006)Google Scholar; and Marsh, Charles, Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel from Political Captivity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

3 On white evangelicals, civil rights, and the rise of the Christian Right, see Williams, Daniel K., God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dochuk, Daren, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010)Google Scholar; Stephens, Randall J., “‘It Has to Come from the Hearts of the People’: Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, Race, and the 1964 Civil Rights Act,” Journal of American Studies 50, no. 3 (August 2015): 559–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For scholars who have tried to take evangelical theology and institutions seriously beyond their influence on partisan politics, see Marsh, Charles, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Emerson, Michael O. and Smith, Christian, Divided By Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Dailey, Jane, “Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred after Brown,” Journal of American History 91, no. 1 (June 2004): 119–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Evans, Curtis J., “White Evangelical Responses to the Civil Rights Movement,” Harvard Theological Review 102, no. 2 (April 2009): 245–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Blum, Edward J. and Harvey, Paul, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012)Google Scholar; and Mulder, Mark, Shades of White Flight: Evangelical Congregations and Urban Departure (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

4 This is starting to change with the publication of Melani McCalister's new book, The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018)Google Scholar. Although McAlister gives serious attention to the CGM, she conflates its influence with that of Billy Graham–style mass evangelism. This interpretation obscures important differences between Graham and the CGM, most notably in their approaches to race and their strategies of evangelization. Other historians have generally ignored not only the transnational influence of the CGM but also the movement in its entirety. Major recent works on twentieth-century evangelicalism ignore or barely mention the CGM. See, for example, Sutton, Matthew Avery, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miller, Steven P., The Age of Evangelicalism: America's Born-Again Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and FitzGerald, The Evangelicals. An exception is Molly Worthen's study of the battle between reason and revelation in evangelicalism. Worthen frames the CGM as an example of evangelicals’ conflicted epistemologies. With respect to race, she argues that it gave evangelical leaders “a framework for coaxing their followers out of old prejudices” but “may have slowed the pace of integration.” This seems an overly generous reading of the CGM's record on race. See Worthen, Molly, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in Evangelicalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 137, 140Google Scholar.

5 See, for example, Willis, Alan Scot, All According to God's Plan: Southern Baptist Missions and Race, 1945–1970 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

6 On American elites and the influence of the Cold War on the civil rights struggle, see Dudziak, Mary, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Borstelmann, Thomas, The Cold War and the Color Line—American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Plummer, Brenda Gale, ed., Window on Freedom: Race, Civil Rights, and Foreign Affairs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 For representative contemporary examples, see Lindsell, Harold, Missionary Principles and Practice (Westwood, NJ: Revell, 1955)Google Scholar; and Maston, T. B., The Bible and Race (Nashville, TN: Broadman Press, 1959), 94–95Google Scholar. Maston wrote, “What is said in North Carolina today is known in Nigeria tomorrow!”

8 Hollinger, David A., Protestants Abroad: How Missionaries Tried to Change the World but Changed America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Although Hollinger is mostly focused on liberal Protestants, he does mention McGavran briefly, describing his move “from liberal to conservative missionary theory” as “a striking exception to the general pattern of migration in the opposite direction.” Hollinger, Protestants Abroad, 74.

9 Historian Brian Stanley describes the CGM as “possibly the most influential school of thinking in modern evangelical missiology” and argues that it “has shaped a whole family of approaches to evangelistic strategy, both in the western and non-western worlds. . . . Present-day ‘seeker services’ . . . all evangelistic strategies that pay particular attention to the need to express the gospel in terms of the prevalent cultural assumptions of the hearers can trace their origins to lessons learned outside Europe, usually through the medium of church growth theory.” See Stanley, Brian, The Global Diffusion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Billy Graham and John Stott (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2013), 23Google Scholar.

10 The Student Volunteer Movement traced its origins to an 1886 conference backed by the famous evangelist Dwight Moody. For more on the SVM, see Showalter, Nathan D., The End of a Crusade: The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions and the Great War (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 1997)Google Scholar.

11 Gary L. McIntosh, “The Life and Ministry of Donald A. McGavran: A Short Overview” (paper presentation, American Society for Church Growth Annual Meeting, November 2005, 8–15).

12 As Timothy Gloege has argued, both groups were, in fact, “equally modern.” Gloege, Timothy E. W., Guaranteed Pure: Fundamentalism, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 McIntosh, Gary L., Donald A. McGavran: A Biography of the Twentieth Century's Premier Missiologist (Boca Raton, FL: Church Leader Insights, 2015), 84–87Google Scholar.

14 Donald McGavran, “not sent,” December 14, 1968, CN 178, Box 4, Folder 6, Billy Graham Center Archives (BGCA), Wheaton College, Illinois.

15 As Jay Riley Case has pointed out, however, successful missionaries were often the first to push back against western paternalism and adopt the cultural practices of the groups they were trying to reach. See Case, Jay Riley, An Unpredictable Gospel: American Evangelicals and World Christianity, 1812–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 McPhee, Art, “Bishop J. Waskom Pickett's Rethinking on 1930s Missions in India,” International Journal of Frontier Missions 19, no. 3 (July-September 2002): 31–38Google Scholar.

17 Donald McGavran to “Dear Friends,” September 6, 1936, CN 178, Box 25, Folder 10, BGCA.

18 Donald McGavran, “Mission Committees and Church Growth,” CN 178, Box 25, Folder 9, BGCA.

19 “The Crisis Immediately Confronting Churches and Mission in Mid-India,” CN 178, Box 25, Folder 9, BGCA. See also, Donald McGavran, “Dear Herb,” December 11, 1973, CN 178, Box 4, Folder 9, BGCA. In this letter, McGavran describes the mid-1930s as a particularly formative period in the evolution of his thought. See also Pickett, J. Waskom, “Donald A. McGavran: Missionary, Scholar, Ecumenist, Evangelist,” in God, Man and Church Growth, ed. Tippett, A. R. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1973), 1–9Google Scholar.

20 Donald McGavran to “Dearest Mither and Gay,” February 3, 1954, CN 178, Box 1, Folder 27, BGCA; Donald McGavran to J. Waskom Pickett, March 13, 1954, CN 178, Box 1, Folder 27, BGCA; Donald McGavran to “Dearest Family in India,” April 10, 1954, CN 178, Box 1, Folder 27, BGCA; Donald McGavran to “Dear Family,” May 12, 1954, CN 178, Box 1, Folder 27, BGCA; Donald McGavran to “Grace and Mother,” April 27, 1954, CN 178, Box 1, Folder 27, BGCA.

21 For an overview of the Mau Mau revolt focused on British methods and atrocities, see Elkins, Caroline, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt, 2005)Google Scholar. Other scholars describe the Mau Mau conflict as a Kikuyu civil war more than an anticolonial struggle. See Branch, Daniel, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

22 Donald McGavran to Win and Pat, April 18, 1954, CN 178, Box 1, Folder 27, BGCA.

23 On British propaganda and perceptions of Mau Mau, see Lonsdale, John, “Mau Maus of the Mind: Making Mau Mau and Remaking Kenya,” Journal of African History 31, no. 3 (November 1990): 398CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carruthers, Susan L., Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter-Insurgency, 1944–1960 (New York: Leicester University Press, 1995), 128–93Google Scholar; and Osborne, Myles, “‘The Rooting Out of Mau Mau from the Minds of the Kikuyu is a Formidable Task’: Propaganda and the Mau Mau War,” Journal of African History 56, no. 1 (March 2015): 77–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the political uses American conservatives made of Mau Mau, see Curtis, Jesse, “‘Will the Jungle Take Over?’ National Review and the Defense of Western Civilization in the Era of Civil Rights and African Decolonization,” Journal of American Studies 53, no. 4 (November 2019): 997-1023CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Donald McGavran to Win and Pat, April 18, 1954, CN 178, Box 1, Folder 27, BGCA.

25 McGavran, Donald, The Bridges of God: A Study in the Strategy of Missions (London: World Dominion Press, 1955; repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2005)Google Scholar.

26 McGavran, The Bridges of God, 10.

27 One of McGavran's students later argued that the CGM could be usefully understood within the framework of modernization theory. See Read, William R., “Church Growth as Modernization,” in God, Man and Church Growth, ed. Tippett, A. R. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1973), 188–98Google Scholar.

28 On the imagined midcentury consensus, see Wall, Wendy L., Inventing the “American Way”: The Politics of Consensus from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an influential contemporary account of the “American Way of Life” as a unifying national force, see Herberg, Will, Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (New York: Doubleday, 1955)Google Scholar.

29 Latourette quoted in J. P. Kretzmann, review of Bridges of God, by McGavran, Donald, Concordia Theological Monthly 28 (April 1957): 306Google Scholar; Vicedom, Georg F., “Revolution in Missionary Methods: The Bridges of God,” International Review of Mission, Issue 179 (July 1956): 331–33Google Scholar.

30 Donald McGavran to Dr. J. Allen Ranck, March 29, 1958, Reviews and Critiques: 1955–1972, CN 178, Box 31, Folder 2, BGCA.

31 Bridges of God reviewed by Rev. A. J. Eastman, Missionary in Burma, Reviews and Critiques: 1955–1972, CN 178, Box 31, Folder 2, BGCA; Bridges of God reviewed by Rev. B. L. Hinchman, Missionary in Japan, Reviews and Critiques: 1955–1972, CN 178, Box 31, Folder 2, BGCA.

32 General comments on “How Peoples Become Christian,” Reviews and Critiques; 1955–1972, CN 178, Box 31, Folder 2, BGCA. In his effort to quantify the cost of conversion, McGavran echoed the early twentieth-century American fundamentalist Mel Trotter, who calculated that his organization could convert one sinner for every $1.60 it spent. See Abrams, Douglas Carl, Selling the Old-Time Religion: American Fundamentalists and Mass Culture, 1920–1940 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 21Google Scholar.

33 Dr. Kraemer's Comments on “The Church in the Ripening World, ICG,” Reviews and Critiques: 1955–1972, CN 178, Box 31, Folder 2, BGCA; James K. Matthews to Donald McGavran, March 19, 1957, Reviews and Critiques: 1955–1972, CN 178, Box 31, Folder 2, BGCA.

34 Kruse, Kevin, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 35–164Google Scholar; Hudnut-Beumler, James, Looking for God in the Suburbs: The Religion of the American Dream and Its Critics, 1945–1965 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 29–84Google Scholar.

35 Sernett, Milton C., Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Best, Wallace D., Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915–1952 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

36 Mulder, Shades of White Flight, 2015; Dochuk, Darren, “‘Praying for a Wicked City’: Congregation, Community, and the Suburbanization of Fundamentalism,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 13. No. 2 (Summer 2003): 167–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Watt, David Harrington, “Fundamentalists of the 1920s and 1930s,” in Fundamentalism: Perspectives on a Contested History, ed. Wood, Simon A. and Watt, David Harrington (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014), 18–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bendroth, Margaret Lamberts, Fundamentalists in the City: Conflict and Division in Boston's Churches, 1885–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Pierce, Richard B., Polite Protest: The Political Economy of Race in Indianapolis, 1920–1970 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 1–8Google Scholar; Bell, Janet Cheatham, The Time and Place that Gave Me Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

39 Donald McGavran, “A Profitable Next Step in Integration,” CN 178, Box 5, Folder 55; Donald McGavran to Ray McCready, January 30, 1977, CN 178, Box 5, Folder 55, BGCA.

40 Donald McGavran, “Defeating Segregation within the Congregations,” 1958, CN 178, Box 5, Folder 55, BGCA.

41 McGavran, “Defeating Segregation.”

42 Evans, Curtis J., The Burden of Black Religion (New York: Oxford University Press), 2008Google Scholar; Weisenfeld, Judith, Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

43 William J. Petersen, “Evangelicals and the Race Barriers,” Eternity, September 1963, 12–16, 48.

44 Scott, Daryl Michael, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 Donald McGavran, “End Segregation in the Churches Now,” CN 178, Box 47, Folder 8, BGCA.

46 “The Institute of Church Growth” promotional pamphlet, CN 178, Box 27, Folder 3, BGCA.

47 Donald McGavran to Kenneth Johnston, April 28, 1965, CN 178, Box 27, Folder 10, BGCA.

48 “Foundation Grant,” NCC Bulletin, January 1965, 2, CN 178, Box 28, Folder 2, BGCA.

49 “The Growth of the Church”; “Consultation on Church Growth,” CN 178, Box 28, Folder 1, BGCA.

50 Marsden, George, Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1988)Google Scholar; D'Elia, John A., A Place at the Table: George Eldon Ladd and the Rehabilitation of Evangelical Scholarship in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

51 Clyde W. Taylor to Norman L. Cummings, March 5, 1965, CN 165, Box 9, Folder 34, BGCA.

52 The definition of “church growth” used at Fuller during the 1980s is instructive: “Church growth is that science which investigates the planting, multiplication, function and health of Christian churches as they relate specifically to the effective implantation of God's commission to ‘make disciples of all nations’ (Matt. 28:19–20). Church growth strives to combine the eternal theological principles of God's Word concerning the expansion of the church with the best insights of contemporary social and behavioral sciences, employing as its initial frame of reference, the foundational work done by Donald McGavran.” C. Peter Wagner to Elmer Towns, October 12, 1981, CN 178, Box 81, Folder 2, BGCA.

53 Gloege, Guaranteed Pure, 1–9.

54 Donald McGavran, “Advanced Church Growth,” Winter 1979, CN 178, Box 31, Folder 3, BGCA.

55 On evangelicals as modernists and adopters of cutting-edge business and marketing strategies, see, in addition to Gloege, , Pietsch, B. M., Dispensational Modernism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Sutton, Matthew Avery, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Cook, Nicole C., Wanamaker's Temple: The Business of Religion in an Iconic Department Store (New York: New York University Press), 2018Google Scholar.

56 Donald McGavran to the Mayor of Grenada, MS, September 22, 1966, CN 178, Box 4, Folder 4, BGCA.

57 He even appears to have been friends with Allan Knight Chalmers, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Allan Knight Chalmers to Donald McGavran, June 17, 1963, CN 178, Box 5, Folder 3, BGCA.

58 By 1970, in the face of rising crime rates and the militant protest tactics of antiwar and leftist groups, McGavran joined the law and order chorus. He wrote, “We are now reaping the bitter fruit of defining civil liberty in ways which permit tiny, well-organized minorities of extremists to tyrannize huge good-natured and bill-paying majorities. This must cease.” Donald McGavran to Mr. Abernathy and Br. Brokaw, March 1, 1970, CN 178, Box 4, Folder 8, BGCA.

59 Donald McGavran, “The Entrepreneur in Modern Missions,” January 5, 1979, CN 178, Box 31, Folder 3, BGCA.

60 Donald McGavran, “Two Theologies of Mission Battle for Control,” Church Herald, November 28, 1975, 10–12.

61 Donald McGavran, “not sent,” December 14, 1968, CN 178, Box 4, Folder 6, BGCA.

62 Donald McGavran, “Two Theologies of Mission Battle for Control,” 10–12.

63 Glazer, Nathan and Moynihan, Daniel Patrick, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Novak, Michael, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics: Politics and Culture in the Seventies (New York: Macmillan, 1971)Google Scholar. I rely here on Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post–Civil Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64 Quoted in Wagner, C. Peter, Your Church Can Grow (Glendale, CA: Regal Books, 1976), 15–16Google Scholar.

65 Donald McGavran to Cal Guy, October 10, 1969, CN 178, Box 4, Folder 7, BGCA.

66 “The Shepherd Role and Soul Winning in Texas,” March 8, 1963, CN 178, Box 32, Folder 3, BGCA.

67 M. Wendell Belew, “Church Growth,” 1978, AR631-10, Box 44, Folder 17, Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives (SBHL), Nashville, Tennessee.

68 Reverend Montague Cook, “Racial Segregation Is Christian,” September 8 and 15, 1963, AR 795-221, Box 59 Folder 10, SBHLA.

69 Dubose quoted in David T. Britt, “Concepts of Church Growth in the Southern Baptist Convention,” Research Division, June 1980, AR631-10, Box 46, Folder, 18, SBHLA. Major Southern Baptist church growth books of the era include Dubose, Francis M., How Churches Grow in an Urban World (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Chaney, Charles L. and Lewis, Ron S., Design for Church Growth (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Hogue, C. Bill, I Want My Church to Grow (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

70 Orrin D. Morris, “Comparison of Racial Ethnic Change to SBC Growth By States, 1970–1980,” July 1981, 19, AR631-10, Box 46, Folder 17, SBHLA.

71 Donald McGavran to Cal Guy, October 10, 1969, CN 178, Box 4, Folder 7, BGCA.

72 For contemporary examples see Strong, Josiah, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis, rev. ed, (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1891)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clark, Joseph Bourne, Leavening the Nation: The Story of American Home Missions (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1903), 262–82Google Scholar. As one historian has described Southern Baptist Home Missions efforts in this period, “For immigrants, conversion was a call to become not only a Christian but an American as well.” This would supposedly have the additional benefit of dispelling the attraction of radical political ideologies. See Harper, Keith, The Quality of Mercy: Southern Baptists and Social Christianity, 1890–1920 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996), 23–24Google Scholar. Another historian wrote, “Home mission workers were agents of Christ, but they were also protectors of the state. ‘The home mission problem . . . [was] to American and Christianize’ immigrants, and frequently in that order.” McDowell, John Patrick, The Social Gospel in the South: The Women's Home Mission Movement in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1886–1939 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 69Google Scholar. For a broad overview of the Protestant encounter with immigration, see Davis, Lawrence B., Immigrants, Baptists, and the Protestant Mind in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973)Google Scholar. See also Chang, Derek, Citizens of a Christian Nation: Evangelical Missions and the Problem of Race in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)Google Scholar; and Teasdale, Mark R., Methodist Evangelism, American Salvation: The Home Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1860–1920 (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2014), 88–126Google Scholar.

73 The CGM's rise to prominence in the 1970s does suggest, however, an echo of the earlier period. Immigration led to anxious efforts to convert the immigrant masses, efforts that lost their urgency at midcentury as American society became more homogeneous. The CGM gained prominence as Americans took note of a new era of immigrant-led diversity after the Hart-Celler Act of 1965 removed some of the most onerous restrictions of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. Although CGM leaders did not speak in the hysterical tones of racial panic and nation building of the earlier era, they did stress the need to reach these new immigrant groups.

74 “Testimony: C. Peter Wagner,” CN 178, Box 34, Folder 3, BGCA.

75 Waymire, Bob and Wagner, C. Peter, Church Growth Survey Handbook, 2d ed. (Santa Clara: Global Church Growth Bulletin, 1980)Google Scholar.

76 Quoted in Orjala, Paul R., Get Ready to Grow: A Strategy for Local Church Growth (Kansas City, MO: Beacon Hill, 1978), 23Google Scholar.

77 Raymond W. Hurn, “Nazarenes . . . Is the Third Wave of a Religious Movement Commencing?” July 27, 1981, CN 178, Box 85, Folder 2, BGCA.

78 C. Peter Wagner, foreword to Schuller, Robert H., Your Church Has Real Possibilities (Glendale, CA: Regal, 1974)Google Scholar.

79 This description is found on the back cover of the paperback edition of Schuller, Your Church Has Real Possibilities (Glendale, CA: Gospel Light/Regal, 1975)Google Scholar.

80 Consumption—religious and otherwise—increasingly ordered Americans’ lives and identities in the second half of the twentieth century. See Cohen, Lizabeth, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003)Google Scholar; Moreton, Bethany, To Serve God and Walmart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lofton, Kathryn, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011)Google Scholar. For an evangelical critique of the nexus of consumerism and evangelicalism, and the CGM that fostered it, see Metzger, Paul Louis, Consuming Jesus: Beyond Race and Class Divisions in a Consumer Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007)Google Scholar.

81 “Revalidating the Homogeneous Principle,” Church Growth America, summer 1977, 2, AR631-10, Box 15, Folder 10, SBHLA; Win Arn, “The Pastor and Church Growth,” Church Growth America, September–October 1977, 4, AR631-10, Box 15, Folder 10, SBHLA.

82 Wagner, C. Peter, Your Church Can Grow: Seven Vital Signs of a Healthy Church (Glendale, CA: Regal Books, 1976), 124–34Google Scholar.

83 Paul D. Simmons, “The Pastor as Change Agent,” Churches in Racially Changing Communities Conference, April 23–25, 1979, AR631-10, Box 18, Folder 15, SBHLA.

84 Clarence Hilliard, “Down with the Honky Christ—Up with the Funky Jesus,” Christianity Today, January 30, 1976, 6–8.

85 Hilliard, “Down with the Honky Christ,” 7.

86 Quoted in Cone, James, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011), 132Google Scholar.

87 Donald L. Robert, “The Meteoric Rise of the First Church of the American Dream,” Eternity, June 1976, 24–26.

88 Donald McGavran, Understanding Church Growth, 198.

89 Donald McGavran, “The Genesis and Strategy of the Homogeneous Unit Principle,” CN 46, Box 13, Folder 24, BGCA.

90 The use of the word mongrel or mongrelized was such a staple of white supremacist rhetoric that it seems incredible that McGavran could be unaware of its connotations. One example will suffice. Amid the tumult of 1968, the Southern Baptist evangelist Vance Havner complained that Christians were living in “a day of unholy mixtures.” Churches, religions, nations, even races—all seemed to be mixing, and this “opens the door to mongrelization.” As in the days of Noah, the terrible judgment of God surely was not long in coming, he warned. Vance Havner, “As It Was . . . So Shall It Be,” The King's Business, May, 1968, 11–13.

91 Wagner, C. Peter, Our Kind of People: The Ethical Dimensions of Church Growth in America (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1979)Google Scholar, back cover.