Elmer Gantry, The Church Growth Guru

Having finished reading Sinclair Lewis’s famous 1927 fictional novel about the scandalous pastor, Elmer Gantry, I was delightfully surprised at discovering that this little novel written by a non-Christian gives such a rich insight into the birth of the contemporary Church Growth movement.

Some of the Church Growth concepts seen in this book include:

• “Mega-church” concept (latter one-third of book is Gantry desiring to grow his church into a mega-church). This isn’t 1980’s; this is 1920’s.
• Marketing and commercial salemanship used to help boost revival and church attendance (various pages throughout book).
• hiring a professional fund-raiser to boost church giving for building projects (p.381)
• methodically playing soft, slow background music to emotionally influence the audience to come forward during the invitation (p.194)
• repeatedly regurgitating to the “audience” that the church statistics show less than 10% of revival converts remained faithful to the church to increase more people to come forward during the invitation to boost numbers being reported (p.189)
• hiring some paid and volunteer individuals to come forward during the invitation to help make the invitation feel more at ease for “first timers” (p.196)
• Sermons on practical “felt-needs” of the people (happy marriage, dreams for better living, etc.) rather than on doctrine (p.368)
• Charismatic personality and leadership style are more important to win people to Christ and be an effective pastor than doctrine and the Gospel message itself (characterized by Elmer Gantry)
• Personality surveys to help identify one’s strengths and weaknesses (p.224)

Toward the end of the book in the 1970 Signet edition, Mark Schorer, a retired English professor emeritus of U.C. Berkeley, critiques the book and the author. Schorer notes that Sinclair Lewis had no personal upbringing nor knowledge of the Christian religion or any religion to write anything like Elmer Gantry. Lewis had to ensemble a team of religious leaders whom he could consult with regularly during his writing stage. This religious consulting team comprised of:

• A Methodist Episcopalian pastor, who was the primary source for Lewis on writing about churches employing commercial methods of salesmanship and business practices. Also, this pastor happened to have authored one of the first clerical books on modern church growth in 1920: Standing Room Only. Hyland Jack recently published a biography on this pastor.
• A Unitarian, agnostic pastor, who was the primary source for Ferguson to see that one did not have to be biblically orthodox to be a clergy.
• A Roman Catholic priest.
• A rabbi.
• The head of Rationalist Society, who was also an agnostic.

At the March 2007 Sacramento PCRT conference, Ligon Duncan mentioned that the problem facing conservative evangelicalism in the last few decades is that they have openly embraced and adopted the methodologies and church growth philosophies (as mentioned above) of the mainline and liberal denominations (e.g. PCUSA, the United Methodists, the Episcopalian church, the Unitarians, etc.), who were the ones to develop and begin using them from the early 1900’s. Today, a century later, we are witnesses to seeing these denominations reaping what they have sown: their fast, precipitous death.

Conservative evangelicals like the SBC have eagerly embraced and adopted the very same church growth philosophies and practices left by the dying mainline and liberal denominations. So many pastors, evangelism professors, church planting consultants, and church growth experts in the Southern Baptist Convention salivate and enjoy the mainline and liberal denominations’ Church Growth concepts. Often, they can be heard saying, “Hey, these are some great ideas on growing our churches and growing our Southern Baptist denomination.”

To which, Ligon Duncan asks: “Why!? Doesn’t observing the mainline and liberal denominations teach us conservatives anything? If their idea of looking to the business world as a model for the church, “felt-need” preaching, personality surveys, etc. did not help them in any way to grow nor to avoid their fast ecclesiological and denominational declension, why do conservative evangelicals want to imitate them by adopting their practices and thinking it’s going to help them boost in numerical growth? That makes no sense!”

Time to now watch the 1960 movie of this novel, starring Burt Lancaster.