Jim from Old Truth writes:

Every once in a while you run across a leader in the Church Growth Movement that has a verbal slip which reveals their thinking, and exposes the rotten root structure that this movement is based on. Now perhaps this church leader doesn’t realize what he’s just said, and his statement may not reflect his true beliefs, but have a look at point 3 in his list. He says: “It’s important to learn from churches bigger and smaller then you. Churches that are smaller have to be even more creative, because their success depends on it”. I certainly hope he doesn’t believe that ANY church’s success depends on human creativity. The Apostle Paul never talked like that; he spoke as though success depends on God, and he didn’t want to do anything that would replace or “enhance” the Gospel with human wisdom and cleverness. …

What Jim wants you to believe is that this particular writer believes that churches are the product of only man’s effort. But right there within the same article he quotes from is this:

I couldn’t open the doors that God has to help us grown and learn from people who are way smarter then us.

Wait a second Jim, you just told me that this guy believes that a church’s success is dependent only on man, so why is he crediting God with “opening the doors”? Maybe this was just a mistake.

We need to Lord’s help to get a full year at the school and then more help to renovate some huge building in town.

Wait. What? What’s going on here?

What’s going on is that Jim has either done some real sloppy investigative journalism, or he’s been deliberately deceptive about what the author is communicating. It gets even worse as the author responds to some of Jim’s disciples.

Most people tend to take the naive approach when listening to church planters or people in fast growing churches. Instead of assuming that we all want to see God move and that we are still preaching the same Gospel as First Baptist Somewhereville, they just throw the pastor under the bus for working harder.

Every church wants to grow. Differing methods don’t mean one church must be teaching out of the Koran instead of the Bible or that they are “entertaining” instead of praising God. It’s obtuse to think that pastors have forgotten that God is still sovereign [emphasis mine].

Of course this was written after Jim’s commentary, but I’m sure if Jim was just mistaken rather than malicious we’ll see an update shortly apologizing for his mistake and retracting his comments.