» Movement lifecycle

Every living thing has limits to growth. Ever living thing dies. Growth has its boundaries in both space and time.

God made elephants big. He made whales enormous. But even their size has its limits. There are trees on this planet that last thousands of years. Even they die.

Growth is not the point. Size is not [...]

What lives dies.Animal,
vegetable,
enterprise.No escape.
Not even the wise.None!But one—propagation!Conceive of this:A stratified
calcified
petrified
Enterprise
in desperation
forgoes habitual cloning
and Tolerates
(allows)
permits. . . .
genuinebirth.Gordon MacKenzie

Church PlantingChurch Planting MovementsQuotes

Some wisdom from David Mills on why we must resist religious bureaucracy.

1. Religious bureaucracy tends to define the mission of the church as the continuing life and success of the institution as it is, which means, that its processes continue to process.

Bureaucratic processes prefer “process people,” people who by personality and usually conviction fit [...]

What’s going on when a religious movement becomes a religious bureaucracy? David Mills paints a terrifying picture of the damage they inflict.
Any revival in these (mainline) churches will require not the reform but the abandonment of the many layers of bureaucracy they have built up over the last few decades, giving the local bodies the [...]

Seven lessons from the story of the rise and fall of the Student Christian Movement (SCM):

1. Drift to secularism
A recurring pattern in the lifecycle of movements is the drift to secularism. Finke and Stark write, “By ‘secularized’ we mean to move from otherworldliness, to present a more distant and indistinct conception of the supernatural, to [...]