The Trellis and the Vine by Tony Payne, Colin Marshall Page B

a given ceiling (usually between 100 and 150 regular members).
    Perhaps the most striking disadvantage of this way of thinking about ministry is that it feeds upon and encourages the culture of ‘consumerism’ that is already rife in our culture. It perfectly fits the spirit of our age whereby we pay trained professionals to do everything for us rather than do it ourselves—whether cleaning our car, ironing our shirts, or walking our dog. The tendency is for Christian life and fellowship to be reduced to an hour and a quarter on Sunday morning, with little or no relationship, and very little actual ministry taking place by the congregation themselves. In this sort of church culture, it becomes very easy for the congregation to think of church almost entirely in terms of ‘what I get out of it’, and thus to slip easily into criticism and complaint when things aren’t to their liking.
    Even the good practice of pastoral counselling can become focused on ‘me’ being cared for by the pastor—such that if the assistant minister visits instead, this is not seen as adequate: “The pastor only sent him because he couldn’t be bothered coming himself”.
    None of this is simply to blame the ‘consumer’! For all its historic strengths, the professional pastor-as-clergyman approach speaks loud and clear to church members that they are there to receive rather than to give. As a model, it tends to produce spiritual consumers rather than active disciples of Christ, and very easily gets stuck in maintenance mode. Outreach or evangelism, both for individual congregation members and the church as a whole, is down the list.
    In many respects, this first way of thinking about pastoral ministry reflects the culture and norms of a different world—the world of 16th- and 17th-century Christianized nations, in which the whole community was in church, and in which the pastor was one of the few with sufficient education to teach.
    The pastor as CEO
    In many respects, the ‘church growth movement’ of the 1970s and 80s was a direct response to the traditional Reformed-evangelical view of ministry and church life. People saw some of the disadvantages that we’ve outlined and began to think about how they could be addressed. Speaking in very broad generalizations, the result was a number of key shifts:
• The pastor was still the professional clergyman, but his role became more focused on leading the congregation as an organization with particular goals; he was still a preacher and a pastoral service-provider, but he was also now a managerial leader responsible for making all these things happen on a larger scale. If there was going to be growth, then the pastor had to learn the difference between running a corner shop as a sole trader and managing a department store with numerous staff and a range of services.
• The focus of Sunday shifted towards an ‘attractional’ model, with the kind of music, decor and preaching that would be attractive to visitors and newcomers. If the church was to grow, its ‘shopfront’ needed to be much more appealing to the ‘target market’. It sounds tawdry when put like this, but for many churches it was profoundly gospel-centred. It stemmed from a godly desire to remove unnecessary cultural obstacles to the hearing of God’s word, and to make sure that the only thing weird, offensive or strange about church was the gospel itself.
• Instead of occasional services, the church growth movement spawned a revolution of programs and events, both for church members and for outsiders—everything from evangelistic courses and programs, to outreach events designed to be attractive to the non-Christian friends of the congregation, to seminars and programs to help congregation members with different aspects of their lives (how to raise children, how to deal with depression, and so on).
• In a church of 500 (rather than 150), how could individual members be known, cared for, prayed for and helped in