Keeping Watch: A New Testament Model of Church Leadership Ministry for Healthy Growing Churches with Specific Regard to the Christian and Missionary Alliance

Most church growth and church leadership literature comes from the perspective that churches are essentially the same. The approach of books like Twelve Keys to an Effective Church, God's Way to Keep a Church Going and Growing, and How to Grow a Church, as examples, at best indicate that there are enough similarities that common principles will solve the problems. This approach, while helpful in areas of similarity, is dangerous in that it promotes a simplistic attitude toward the problems that create non-growing churches. Readers are encouraged to grasp simple answers that will solve their problems and make their churches grow.
The Christian and Missionary Alliance embraced this philosophy rather wholeheartedly in its approach to non-growing churches. The denomination has for years recognized that non-growing churches exist and that many of them will die. Their basic approach to this problem has been to plant new churches to replace the dying ones. This has led them to the forefront of church planting in a denominational setting. In the mid to late eighties the Alliance, as it is referred to, was planting more churches per capita than any other evangelical denomination in the United States. (Paul Redford, Easter 100 Training Seminar, Nyack, New York, 1986.) This intentional strategy was directed toward becoming a growing denomination in a period of history where most were plateaued or declining. (See Constant Jacquet, Jr., Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches [Nashville: Abingdon Press] for years 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989.)