Church growth, seeker churches and the megachurch

Affiliation

Disciples of Christ missionary in India (1923-54); founding dean of Fuller Seminary's School of World Mission (1965)

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Church growth, seeker churches and the megachurch, The modern movements in India

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Life

A missionary family

Donald Anderson McGavran was born on 15 December 1897 in Damoh, in the Central Provinces of British India, the son and grandson of missionaries of the Disciples of Christ. The family returned to America when he was a boy. He served in the US Army in the First World War, studied at Butler College in Indianapolis, and in 1920, at a student missionary convention, committed himself to mission. He studied at Yale Divinity School and the College of Missions in Indianapolis and married Mary Howard in 1922.

India, 1923-54

In 1923 he and his wife went to India under the United Christian Missionary Society. He served as an educator and administrator and, from 1929, as secretary of the mission, responsible for its schools, hospitals and churches in the Central Provinces. In 1936 he received a doctorate in education from Columbia University.

He was troubled that after decades of work, the mission's stations had produced only small, static congregations, while elsewhere in India whole communities were becoming Christian in "mass movements". In 1934-36 he worked with the Methodist bishop J. Waskom Pickett, whose study Christian Mass Movements in India (1933) had documented these group conversions, on surveys of church growth in the central provinces. From 1937 he gave up administration to work as an evangelist among the Satnami people of Chhattisgarh, hoping to see a people movement begin; over seventeen years, about a thousand were baptised, fewer than he had hoped.

The Bridges of God

His reflection on these years produced The Bridges of God (1955), which argued that peoples, not only individuals, come to faith, and that missions should seek "people movements" in which groups become Christian together along the bridges of family and kinship, rather than extracting converts one by one from their communities into mission compounds. The book was widely read and widely contested.

The Institute of Church Growth

After further studies of churches in Africa, Latin America and Asia, he founded the Institute of Church Growth at Northwest Christian College in Eugene, Oregon, in 1961. In 1965 Fuller Theological Seminary invited him to become founding dean of its School of World Mission and Institute of Church Growth in Pasadena. He recruited a faculty that included C. Peter Wagner and Ralph Winter, and for a decade the school was the centre of evangelical missiology. Understanding Church Growth (1970) became the standard text of the movement. He continued to write, teach and edit the Church Growth Bulletin until his eighties.

Lausanne and after

His ideas were prominent at the International Congress on World Evangelization at Lausanne in 1974, and controversial there. The Lausanne Committee's 1977 Pasadena consultation was devoted to the homogeneous unit principle. In his last years he defended the priority of evangelism against what he saw as the dilution of mission into social action.

Key dates

• 15 December 1897 - Born in Damoh, India
• 1922 - Marries Mary Howard
• 1923 - Missionary in India with the Disciples of Christ
• 1929-37 - Secretary of the India mission
• 1936 - PhD, Columbia University
• 1937-54 - Evangelist among the Satnami of Chhattisgarh
• 1955 - The Bridges of God
• 1961 - Institute of Church Growth, Eugene, Oregon
• 1965 - Founding dean, School of World Mission, Fuller
• 1970 - Understanding Church Growth
• 1974 - Lausanne Congress
• 1977 - Pasadena consultation on the homogeneous unit principle
• 10 July 1990 - Dies in Altadena, California

Teachings and claims

Church growth as faithfulness

McGavran taught that God wills the growth of His Church, and that faithfulness in mission should be measured by whether people are actually being discipled and churches multiplied. He criticised what he called "search theology", which valued the proclaiming of the gospel regardless of response, and urged "harvest theology": find the responsive peoples and reap.

People movements

He held that people decide together, especially in group-oriented societies, and that missions should welcome "multi-individual, mutually interdependent conversion".

The homogeneous unit principle

His most famous and most disputed thesis was that "people like to become Christians without crossing racial, linguistic or class barriers". Churches grow fastest when they consist mainly of one people group, and missions should plant churches within each group rather than require converts to join a church of another culture or caste.

Discipling and perfecting

He distinguished "discipling" - bringing a people to Christ and baptism - from "perfecting" - their growth in holiness afterwards, and argued that missions had too often delayed the first in the name of the second.

Documented controversies

Segregation and caste

The homogeneous unit principle was criticised from the start as legitimising divided churches - racially segregated churches in America and caste-based churches in India. At Lausanne and at the 1977 consultation, critics argued that the gospel creates one new humanity in which the divisions of race and class are overcome (Ephesians 2:14-16; Galatians 3:28). McGavran replied that he was describing how people come to faith, not how they should remain, but the distinction was not always observed by his followers.

Pragmatism

Theologians criticised the movement's reliance on statistics and the social sciences, arguing that it treated the Church as an enterprise to be optimised and growth as the measure of truth.

Social action

His insistence on the priority of evangelism over social and political engagement placed him at the centre of the evangelical debate on mission in the 1970s.

Death

He died at his home in Altadena, California, on 10 July 1990, aged 92, a few months after his wife.^†

Legacy

McGavran is regarded as the father of the Church Growth Movement. Through Fuller, his ideas shaped evangelical mission strategy for a generation, including the focus on "unreached people groups". In North America, Wagner and others applied them to the local church, giving rise to the church-planting, seeker-sensitive and megachurch movements, and, through Wagner, eventually to the New Apostolic Reformation. In India, people-movement thinking remains influential in mission strategy.

Measured against the creeds

McGavran's concern that the Church actually make disciples of the nations is the concern of the Great Commission (Matthew 28:19), and his insistence that converts not be torn from their families and communities echoes the household baptisms of Acts (16:15, 33) and the Church's long practice of baptising whole peoples. His work drew attention to forms of mission that had, in practice, made Western culture a condition of the gospel.

But the historic churches confess the Church as one, holy, catholic and apostolic. Its catholicity means that it gathers every people into one body at one table, so that in the Eucharist "we, being many, are one bread" (1 Corinthians 10:17). A principle that builds churches around the boundaries of race or caste, however useful for growth, sits uneasily with that confession; the Church in India, in particular, has long struggled against caste divisions within its own congregations. And the Church's faithfulness is not measured by its numerical growth: the seed is sown by the word, and the growth is God's (1 Corinthians 3:6-7; Mark 4:26-29).

Major writings

• The Bridges of God (1955)
• How Churches Grow (1959)
• Understanding Church Growth (1970; rev. 1980, 1990)
• With Win Arn, How to Grow a Church (1973)
• Ethnic Realities and the Church: Lessons from India (1979)

Affiliation

Minister of the Reformed Church in America; founder of Garden Grove Community Church, the Crystal Cathedral and the Hour of Power

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Church growth, seeker churches and the megachurch

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Life

Iowa

Robert Harold Schuller was born on 16 September 1926 on a farm near Alton, Iowa, the youngest of five children of a Dutch Reformed family. He said that at the age of four an uncle who was a missionary told him he would be a preacher, and he never wanted to be anything else. He studied at Hope College in Holland, Michigan (1947), and at Western Theological Seminary (1950), and was ordained in the Reformed Church in America. He married Arvella DeHaan in 1950.

Chicago and California

After five years as pastor of Ivanhoe Reformed Church in Riverdale, near Chicago, he was sent in 1955 to start a new congregation in Garden Grove, Orange County, California. With no building available, he rented the Orange Drive-In Theatre and preached from the roof of the snack bar to families sitting in their cars. The first service was held in March 1955. He went door to door asking people why they did not attend church, and designed his message to answer their objections.

The walk-in, drive-in church

In 1961 the congregation opened a building designed by Richard Neutra in which people could worship either in the pews or in their cars outside, through a sliding glass wall. The Tower of Hope followed in 1968. In 1970 he began the Hour of Power, a weekly televised service which at its peak was watched by millions in many countries. In 1980 the church moved into the Crystal Cathedral, a vast glass building designed by Philip Johnson, built at a cost of about $18 million.

Possibility thinking

Schuller was influenced above all by Norman Vincent Peale, the Reformed Church minister and author of The Power of Positive Thinking, and developed his own "possibility thinking", set out in books such as Move Ahead with Possibility Thinking (1967) and Tough Times Never Last, but Tough People Do! (1983). From 1969 his Institute for Successful Church Leadership taught thousands of pastors his methods for reaching the unchurched, and several of the founders of the seeker-sensitive megachurch movement attended it.

Self-esteem

In Self-Esteem: The New Reformation (1982), sent free to many thousands of ministers, he argued that the Church's message had been "theocentric" when it should be "human-need-centred", and that the deepest human need is self-esteem.

Decline

After his retirement as senior pastor in 2006, disputes within his family over the succession and the direction of the ministry became public. Donations fell, and in October 2010 Crystal Cathedral Ministries filed for bankruptcy with debts of over $40 million. The cathedral was sold to the Catholic Diocese of Orange, which took possession in 2013 and, after renovation, consecrated it as Christ Cathedral in 2019. Schuller was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in 2013.

Key dates

• 16 September 1926 - Born near Alton, Iowa
• 1950 - Ordained in the Reformed Church in America
• 1950-55 - Pastor of Ivanhoe Reformed Church, Riverdale, Illinois
• March 1955 - First service at the Orange Drive-In Theatre
• 1961 - Walk-in, drive-in church opens
• 1969 - Institute for Successful Church Leadership
• 1970 - Hour of Power begins
• 1980 - Crystal Cathedral dedicated
• 1982 - Self-Esteem: The New Reformation
• 2006 - Retires as senior pastor
• October 2010 - Crystal Cathedral Ministries files for bankruptcy
• 2012 - Cathedral sold to the Catholic Diocese of Orange
• 2 April 2015 - Dies in Artesia, California

Teachings and claims

Possibility thinking

Schuller taught that faith is the power to believe that God can make the impossible possible, and that a positive mental attitude is the key to success in life and in the Church. "If you can dream it, you can do it," and "Inch by inch, anything's a cinch," were among his sayings.

Self-esteem as the deepest need

In Self-Esteem he argued that sin is best understood as the loss of self-esteem: "Sin is any act or thought that robs myself or another human being of his or her self-esteem."^† He described hell as the loss of pride that follows separation from God, and held that the Church should not preach in a way that makes people feel worthless. Christ's death, he taught, shows the value God places on every person.

The unchurched

He taught that the Church must meet people where they are, removing barriers - traditional architecture, religious language, demands for commitment at the first encounter - that keep the unchurched away. "Find a need and fill it; find a hurt and heal it" was his principle of ministry.

Documented controversies

The gospel

Theologians across the churches, Reformed and evangelical above all, criticised his message as self-help with a Christian veneer, and his redefinition of sin as a loss of self-esteem as a denial of the Reformed doctrine he had promised to uphold. Some critics compared his reluctance to speak of sin and repentance with the liberal Protestantism he claimed to oppose.

The cathedral

Critics questioned the expense of the Crystal Cathedral and its associated buildings, and the dependence of the ministry on broadcasting revenue.

Bankruptcy

The bankruptcy of 2010 and the family disputes that preceded it were widely reported, and the sale of the cathedral to the Catholic diocese became a symbol of the end of an era.

Death

He died at a care facility in Artesia, California, on 2 April 2015, aged 88, of oesophageal cancer. His wife had died the previous year.

Legacy

Schuller was one of the pioneers of the church designed for the unchurched, of the televised worship service and of the megachurch, and leaders of the seeker-sensitive movement acknowledged their debt to his institute. His positive-thinking theology helped prepare the ground for later "prosperity lite" preaching. The Crystal Cathedral itself now serves as the cathedral of a Catholic diocese.

Measured against the creeds

Schuller remained a minister of a Reformed church whose confessions - the Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgic Confession and the Canons of Dort - begin with the knowledge of human sin and misery before the knowledge of redemption. His redefinition of sin as a want of self-esteem inverts that order. The historic churches with one voice confess that sin is rebellion against God and the corruption of human nature, that Christ died "for our sins" (1 Corinthians 15:3), and that the gospel brings repentance and forgiveness, not self-esteem. The Lord said that whoever exalts himself will be humbled (Luke 14:11).

His concern for those outside the Church, and his conviction that God values every person, are true and important. But the historic churches hold that the Church serves the unchurched by offering them Christ in word and sacrament, not by reshaping its message to their felt needs. The danger he illustrates is that a gospel adapted to self-esteem ceases to be the gospel of the cross.

Major writings

• Move Ahead with Possibility Thinking (1967)
• Your Church Has Real Possibilities (1974)
• Self-Esteem: The New Reformation (1982)
• Tough Times Never Last, but Tough People Do! (1983)
• My Journey: From an Iowa Farm to a Cathedral of Dreams (2001) - autobiography

Affiliation

Missionary in Bolivia (1956-71); professor of church growth, Fuller Theological Seminary (1971-2001); presiding apostle of the International Coalition of Apostles (1999-2009)

Appears in

The New Apostolic Reformation and the "five-fold ministry", The Third Wave, the Vineyard and the Kansas City Prophets, The Seven Mountains Mandate and dominionism, Church growth, seeker churches and the megachurch

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Life

New York and conversion

Charles Peter Wagner was born on 15 August 1930 in New York City and grew up in the city and in upstate New York, in a family with no active faith. He studied agriculture at Rutgers University, intending to become a dairy farmer. In 1950 he was converted, largely through the influence of the young woman he married that year, who made his commitment to Christ a condition of marriage; together they resolved to become missionaries.

Bolivia

After studying at Fuller Theological Seminary and Princeton Theological Seminary, he and his wife went to Bolivia in 1956 with the South America Mission and the Andes Evangelical Mission, where he taught at a Bible institute and seminary in Cochabamba and worked in mission administration. He was, by his own account, a convinced cessationist and a critic of Pentecostalism in these years. He observed, however, that the Pentecostal churches of Latin America were growing much faster than those of his own missions, and in Look Out! The Pentecostals Are Coming (1973) he sought to explain why.

Fuller and church growth

In 1971 he joined the faculty of the School of World Mission at Fuller, under Donald McGavran, and for thirty years was its best-known professor of church growth. He wrote prolifically on the subject: Your Church Can Grow (1976), Our Kind of People (1979, a defence of the homogeneous unit principle, based on his doctoral work at the University of Southern California), and Leading Your Church to Growth (1984). He founded the Fuller Evangelistic Association's church growth department in 1975 and recruited John Wimber to lead it.

Signs and wonders

Through Wimber he came to accept healing and the gifts of the Spirit. He co-taught the course MC510, "Signs, Wonders and Church Growth", with Wimber at Fuller from 1982, and in 1983 coined the term "Third Wave" for evangelicals who embraced the gifts without becoming Pentecostals. He said that he had himself been healed of high blood pressure through prayer.

Spiritual warfare

From the late 1980s he became the leading promoter of "strategic-level spiritual warfare". He coordinated the United Prayer Track of the AD2000 and Beyond Movement and founded Global Harvest Ministries in Colorado Springs in 1991. He taught that demonic "territorial spirits" rule cities and nations, that they can be identified through "spiritual mapping" and research, and that they must be bound through targeted prayer before evangelism can succeed. He organised prayer journeys to sites believed to be strongholds of such spirits.

The New Apostolic Reformation

In the mid-1990s he began to describe the growth of independent charismatic networks under "apostolic" leaders as the "New Apostolic Reformation", the most significant change in the way of doing church since the Reformation. He founded the Wagner Leadership Institute in 1998 to train leaders in the new paradigm and in 1999-2000 became the "presiding apostle" of the International Coalition of Apostles. He declared that the "Second Apostolic Age" had begun in 2001. He retired from Fuller in 2001.

Dominion

In his later writings, especially Dominion! (2008), he taught that the Church is called to take dominion over the "seven mountains" of society - religion, family, education, government, media, arts and entertainment, and business. He identified himself with what he called "dominion theology", while distinguishing it from Christian Reconstructionism.

Key dates

• 15 August 1930 - Born in New York City
• 1950 - Converted; marries
• 1956-71 - Missionary in Bolivia
• 1971 - Joins the School of World Mission at Fuller
• 1975 - Recruits John Wimber
• 1982-85 - Co-teaches MC510 with Wimber
• 1983 - Coins the "Third Wave"
• 1991 - Founds Global Harvest Ministries
• 1994-96 - Begins to speak of the "New Apostolic Reformation"
• 1998 - Founds the Wagner Leadership Institute; Confronting the Queen of Heaven
• 1999-2000 - Presiding apostle of the International Coalition of Apostles
• 2001 - Retires from Fuller; declares the "Second Apostolic Age"
• 2008 - Dominion!
• 21 October 2016 - Dies, aged 86

Teachings and claims

Church growth

Wagner held that the growth of the Church is a measurable fruit of faithfulness and that churches should study the factors that produce growth. He taught McGavran's homogeneous unit principle and its pastoral application to North American churches.

Modern apostles and prophets

He taught that God is restoring to the Church the offices of apostle and prophet (Ephesians 4:11), which he held had been neglected since the early centuries. Apostles are leaders with extraordinary authority over networks of churches or spheres of society; prophets bring direct revelation for the Church's strategy.

Territorial spirits

He taught that Daniel 10 and other texts show that demonic princes rule territories, and that strategic intercession must identify and bind them by name. He developed the practices of spiritual mapping and "identificational repentance" - repenting on behalf of a city or nation for historic sins.

Dominion

He taught that the Great Commission includes the transformation of society by believers taking leadership in its spheres, and that the kingdom advances as the Church gains influence.

Documented controversies

The Queen of Heaven

In Confronting the Queen of Heaven (1998) he identified a demonic principality, the "Queen of Heaven", behind Marian devotion, the cult of Diana of Ephesus and other religions, and described prayer journeys to bind it. Catholic and many Protestant readers regarded the book as offensive and without biblical basis.

Spiritual mapping

Evangelical missiologists and theologians, including participants in a Lausanne consultation on spiritual warfare in 2000, criticised the theology of territorial spirits as speculative, and spiritual mapping as resembling animistic rather than biblical thought.^†

Apostolic authority

Critics across evangelical and charismatic circles argued that the NAR's apostles claim authority without accountability or confession, and that Wagner's description of the movement placed new revelation above the historic faith. Wagner himself denied that apostles add to Scripture.

Failed declarations

Some of the prayer campaigns he promoted were accompanied by announcements of the defeat of particular spirits or of coming breakthroughs that critics noted did not occur.^†

Death

He died on 21 October 2016, aged 86, after a period of illness.

Legacy

Wagner was the intellectual architect of three movements: church growth in its North American form, the "Third Wave", and the New Apostolic Reformation. His books, more than seventy in number, gave each a vocabulary and a rationale. The apostolic networks he described are now among the largest and fastest-growing forms of Christianity in the world, and the dominion teaching he promoted has entered political as well as religious life.

Measured against the creeds

The creeds confess "one holy catholic and apostolic Church". In the historic understanding, the Church is apostolic because it continues in the apostles' teaching and is built on their foundation, which is laid once (Ephesians 2:20; Acts 2:42); the apostles' authority is handed on through the Scriptures they wrote and the ordered ministry of the Church, not through new apostles with fresh revelation. Wagner's "Second Apostolic Age" is a claim the creeds do not allow for.

The doctrine of territorial spirits rests on a few texts (Daniel 10; Ephesians 6:12) that do not prescribe the methods he taught; the historic churches confess that Christ has "disarmed the principalities and powers" (Colossians 2:15) and that the Church resists the devil by faith, the word and prayer, not by research into the names of spirits. His treatment of Marian devotion as demonic was a grave misrepresentation of the faith of the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

Finally, the identification of the kingdom's advance with the Church's gaining dominion over society is foreign to the theology of the cross. The Lord taught that His kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36) and that it comes as a mustard seed and leaven, hidden and small (Matthew 13:31-33).

Major writings

• Look Out! The Pentecostals Are Coming (1973)
• Your Church Can Grow (1976)
• Our Kind of People (1979)
• The Third Wave of the Holy Spirit (1988)
• Warfare Prayer (1992)
• Confronting the Queen of Heaven (1998)
• The New Apostolic Churches (1998)
• Apostles Today (2006)
• Dominion! (2008)
• Wrestling with Alligators, Prophets, and Theologians (2010) - memoir

Affiliation

Assemblies of God pastor; founder of Yoido Full Gospel Church, Seoul (1958)

Appears in

Church growth, seeker churches and the megachurch, Word of Faith and the prosperity gospel

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Life

Ulju and illness

Cho Yong-gi was born on 14 February 1936 in Ulju County, near Ulsan, in Japanese-ruled Korea, the eldest son of a Buddhist family. His father's business failed during the Korean War, and Cho left school for a time to work. As a teenager in Busan he fell seriously ill with tuberculosis and was told he had little time to live. A young Christian girl visited him and gave him a Bible, and he was converted; he said he was healed of the tuberculosis through prayer and that Jesus appeared to him and called him to preach.^† He worked as an interpreter for American missionaries, including the evangelist Lester Sumrall.

The tent church

In 1956 he entered the Full Gospel Bible College in Seoul, run by the Assemblies of God. There he met Choi Ja-shil, a widow and fellow student, and in May 1958 the two began a tent church in Daejo-dong, a poor district on the outskirts of Seoul, with five members. They prayed for the sick and visited the poor; the church grew. In 1961 it moved to Seodaemun in central Seoul, and in 1965 Cho married Choi's daughter.

Collapse and the cell groups

In 1964, exhausted by preaching, visiting and baptising, Cho collapsed during a service. Unable to carry the work alone, he divided the congregation into home cell groups led by lay people, mostly women - a decision that met with resistance but became the foundation of the church's growth.

Yoido

In 1973 the church moved to a new auditorium on Yoido Island in the Han River, beside the National Assembly. It was renamed Yoido Full Gospel Church. With Choi he founded a prayer mountain at Osanri, where thousands came to fast and pray. By the early 1980s the church was widely described as the largest single congregation in the world, and by 2007 it reported some 830,000 members, with many satellite churches.^† Cho founded the Kukmin Ilbo daily newspaper in 1988 and an array of educational, welfare and broadcasting organisations. He used the name Paul Yonggi Cho in the West until 1992, when he took the name David.

International influence

From the 1970s Cho spoke at church growth conferences around the world; Church Growth International, which he founded in 1976, taught his cell-group model to pastors of every denomination. He was chairman of the World Assemblies of God Fellowship from 1992 to

1. He retired as senior pastor in 2008 but remained influential.

Key dates

• 14 February 1936 - Born in Ulju County, Korea
• c. 1953-54 - Tuberculosis; conversion
• 1956 - Enters Full Gospel Bible College, Seoul
• May 1958 - Founds a tent church with Choi Ja-shil
• 1961 - Church moves to Seodaemun
• 1964 - Collapses; begins cell groups
• 1973 - Church moves to Yoido
• 1976 - Founds Church Growth International
• 1979 - The Fourth Dimension
• 1988 - Founds the Kukmin Ilbo
• 1992-2000 - Chairman of the World Assemblies of God Fellowship
• 2008 - Retires as senior pastor
• 2014 - Convicted of breach of trust and tax evasion
• 14 September 2021 - Dies in Seoul

Teachings and claims

The threefold blessing

Cho's central teaching, drawn from 3 John 2 ("that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth"), was the "threefold blessing": salvation of the soul, prosperity in all things, and bodily health. He set it alongside a "fivefold gospel" of regeneration, the fullness of the Spirit, healing, blessing and the second coming.

The fourth dimension

In The Fourth Dimension (1979) he taught that the spiritual world is a higher dimension that governs the three dimensions of the material world, and that believers, by clearly visualising what they pray for and speaking it in faith, "incubate" the answer and bring it into being. He gave examples of praying for specific items, down to the make of a bicycle. He also wrote that non-Christian religions and occultists use the fourth dimension, which critics seized on.

Prayer and the Spirit

He taught persistent prayer, fasting and the baptism in the Spirit with tongues in the classical Pentecostal manner, and laid great weight on personal communion with the Holy Spirit.

Cell groups

He held that the Church grows through small groups meeting in homes under lay leaders, each expected to multiply, and that this recovers the house churches of the New Testament.

Documented controversies

Visualisation

Evangelical and Pentecostal critics alike argued that the "fourth dimension" owed more to positive thinking and New Thought than to Scripture, and that it treated prayer as a technique for obtaining what one wants.

Blessing theology

His threefold blessing was criticised in Korea and abroad as a prosperity gospel suited to the Korean economic boom, and for teaching that health and wealth are signs of spiritual health.

Financial conviction

In February 2014 the Seoul Central District Court convicted him of breach of trust for causing the church losses of about 13 billion won by directing it to buy shares in a company owned by his eldest son at inflated prices, and of tax evasion on the transaction. He was given a suspended prison sentence and a large fine; his son was also convicted. The convictions were upheld on appeal.^†

Succession and governance

Disputes over the control of church-related organisations by members of his family drew public protests from church elders in the 2010s.

Death

He suffered a brain haemorrhage in July 2020 and was cared for in hospital for more than a year. He died in Seoul on 14 September 2021, aged 85.

Legacy

Yoido Full Gospel Church is the most famous example of the megachurch built on cell groups, and the model has been copied in thousands of churches worldwide. Cho was the best-known Pentecostal leader in Asia, and his blessing theology shaped Pentecostal and charismatic preaching across the continent. His care for the poor in the early years, and the welfare institutions he founded, are part of his legacy alongside the financial scandal of his last years.

Measured against the creeds

Cho confessed the Trinity and the Apostles' Creed and preached Christ's death and resurrection. His recovery of the ministry of lay people in small groups echoes the care of souls in the historic parish and the household prayer of the early Church.

His teaching departs from the historic faith at two points. The first is the threefold blessing: the creeds promise the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and eternal life, not prosperity and health in this life; 3 John 2 is a conventional greeting, not a covenant promise, and the apostles taught contentment in want and plenty alike (Philippians 4:11-13; 1 Timothy 6:6-10). The second is the fourth dimension: prayer in the historic churches is the petition of children to their Father, "Thy will be done", not a technique by which visualised desires are brought into being. The confidence that faith creates its own reality is closer to the New Thought movement than to the Lord's Prayer.

His conviction for breach of trust also illustrates the dangers, described in this section's pages, of a church built around one man and his family without independent oversight.

Major writings

• The Fourth Dimension (1979; vol. 2, 1983)
• Successful Home Cell Groups (1981)
• Prayer: Key to Revival (1984)
• Salvation, Health and Prosperity: Our Threefold Blessings in Christ (1987)