CHC.E310 posted at 17:39

Hyper-Cooperativism:
When Unity Hinders Evangelism

By Dr. C. Peter Wagner

We live in an age when church cooperation, both formal and informal, is considered a high value. The World Council of Churches is a pioneer in international church unity. The National Association of Evangelicals gains strength in America each year. Separatism, fashionable during the 1930s and 1940s, seems to have little appeal to the general evangelical public anymore. Staunch denominational loyalty among church members is at a low ebb; many people nowadays look for more than traditional denominational distinctives in a local church they are considering joining.

Cooperation being the “in” thing these days, the danger of what we are calling hyper-cooperativism increases. I need to say here that this chapter is in no way intended to suggest that interchurch cooperation is a bad thing in itself nor is it a church disease. It is not in any way an antiecumenical polemic. I believe we need more Christian unity manifested in more tangible ways, not less.

Jesus' prayer “that they also may be one … that the world may believe” (John 17:21) is a directional word for us today. Those familiar with my writings about spiritual warfare will know I am convinced that the wider the agreement we have among Christians, the greater will be our spiritual power as a church. Having said that, I will nevertheless argue in this chapter that cooperation among churches is more useful for accomplishing certain goals than it is for others.

Interchurch cooperation can be useful for social action projects, for providing relief to victims of earthquakes or famines, for sponsoring theological seminaries, for promoting cordial relationships between ministers and for programs of joint enrichment among churches of different cultures. It can also be useful for militant spiritual warfare over a city, for taking public positions on certain political issues such as abortion or taxation of church properties, or even for projects involving E-2 or E-3 evangelism at home and abroad. If our goal at the moment is evangelism that will result in church growth on the local level, however, the cooperative programs that have been tried to date have not proven effective.

Church cooperation, as I have said, is a good thing. Hyper-cooperativism occurs, however, when an attempt is made to use cooperation for unwise purposes. It is frequently not just neutral, but in certain circumstances it can become counterproductive.

A FALSE PREMISE

For at least three decades, evangelicals, who have typically professed to be committed to effective evangelism and church growth, have been told that one way to evangelize more effectively is to cooperate interdenominationally on a local or regional level. Citywide evangelistic efforts have become popular and have constituted a prominent method of doing evangelization in American since the early ‘50s, and even before.

Some of the parachurch evangelistic agencies that have materialized have solicited resources both from the churches of a given city and from their church members to conduct a program of citywide evangelism. Their premise, whether explicit or implied, has been that through supporting the citywide cooperative evangelistic effort, more unbelievers will be won to Christ and folded into the participating churches than without it. Some evangelists will not accept an invitation to come to a city unless a certain degree of interchurch support for the crusade is secured beforehand. The underlying assumption is that the more cooperation, the more fruit will be born by the evangelistic project.

This premise has shown little or no evidence that it is valid. Research done to date about citywide evangelism seems to indicate that just the opposite may frequently be true—the more churches cooperate interdenominationally in evangelistic projects, the less effectively they evangelize.

Of the several reasons hyper-cooperativism frequently reduces evangelistic effectiveness, perhaps the most important is that cooperative efforts tend to dilute the centrality of the local church. Citywide evangelistic efforts involving the churches of just one denomination may have more potential than interdenominational efforts, but the strongest of all is local church evangelism.

In the typical citywide effort, the meetings are held in a neutral place, such as a stadium or a civic auditorium, and consequently in the minds of the unbelievers who attend, there is no natural or necessary connection between making a decision for Christ and commitment to a local church. Unless the local church remains central, the kind of evangelism that produces fruit that remains and results in church growth will be minimal.

--gid.