The Case for an Evangelistic, Growing MNFC
A note offered with respect, not as a verdict. The reading underneath this is Tyler Hendricks’ The Believers’ Responsibility (which is itself a Unificationist application of growth-church thinking) and Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Church. Both arrive at the same place from different sides: a church that does not turn outward slowly stops being a church and becomes a memory.
This is meant as input for prayer and discernment, not a critique.
1. The frame in one sentence
A church does not have to choose between depth and growth. The growing churches in America for three centuries are the ones that combined both — and the Divine Principle calls Unificationists, by name, into that work.
2. Why this is a theological question, not a strategic one
Hendricks’ core move is to ground evangelism in the Divine Principle itself, not in church-growth literature.
- Exposition of the Divine Principle, p. 186: “the people of faith on earth and in heaven are to bear the third responsibility to defeat Satan… this period is called the age of the providence based on the believers’ responsibility.”
- The first responsibility was God’s. The second was Jesus’ and the Holy Spirit’s. The third — ours.
- Predestination is conditional on members fulfilling that portion. Hendricks: “God’s predestination is realized by human beings fulfilling their portion of responsibility.”
- True Father shifted in the late 1970s from street/campus witnessing to home church / hometown — not away from outreach, but toward indigenous, lay-driven outreach.
Implication for MNFC: the question is not “should we evangelize?” It is “are we currently fulfilling our portion?” That reframes the conversation from preference to faithfulness.
3. What the two books actually say
3a. Hendricks — The Believers’ Responsibility
The argument in compressed form:
- Churches that grow in America share an organizational form Hendricks calls populist: flat, decentralized, gifts-based, locally owned, focused on direct experience of God.
- Churches that decline share the opposite: hierarchical, control-heavy, program-driven, dependent on professional clergy.
- The Unification Church began populist (Oakland, Durham, the 1970s pioneer model) and has drifted toward the denominational pattern.
- The path back is not nostalgia. It is structural: flatten, release control, empower lay ministry, plant.
Hendricks’ four shifts (Ch. 5):
- Radically decentralize. Decisions made closest to the people they affect.
- Put young leaders in real positions and let them spin off experimental ministries.
- Empower clergy to turn control over to members. Gifts-based ministry. “Abolish 80% of committee meetings.”
- Reconsider leadership formation. Apprenticeship inside the local church, not credentialing apart from it.
His five transition models (Ch. 7) — these become the menu for the roadmap below:
- Rebirthed — discontinue the old, begin new.
- Blended — combine old and new in one service.
- Multiple-track — old and new side by side, different segments.
- Seeker — keep the old, reorient outreach toward a target audience.
- Satellite — plant a new congregation.
The Sugita case study (Tokyo) is worth reading in full: a Unification pastor, in a hostile media environment, tripled his church by openly proclaiming True Parents, simplifying Divine Principle for daily life, redesigning the worship service around music + video + applied sermon, and giving members a clear weekly target. Same theology MNFC has. Different posture.
3b. Warren — The Purpose Driven Church
Warren’s contribution is structural complementarity to Hendricks. Where Hendricks names the form, Warren names the purposes and the process.
The five biblical purposes (Great Commandment + Great Commission):
- Worship — love God.
- Fellowship — love one another.
- Discipleship — grow in maturity.
- Ministry — serve others using your gifts.
- Evangelism — share the good news.
A healthy church does all five. A church that overdevelops one and underdevelops another plateaus. MNFC, candidly, is strong on fellowship and worship, thin on evangelism, structurally vague on discipleship and ministry.
Warren’s Circles of Commitment — the diagnostic we most need:
- Community — the unchurched in our area.
- Crowd — those who attend Sunday but have not committed.
- Congregation — committed members.
- Committed — those growing in spiritual disciplines.
- Core — those serving in ministry.
A growing church has visible movement inward across these circles. A plateaued church has people stuck in one ring with no path forward, and an empty outer ring.
Warren’s two load-bearing claims:
- “You are organized either for control or growth. You can have one or the other, but not both.” (Hendricks quotes this approvingly.)
- Health produces growth, not the other way around. The goal is not numbers. The goal is faithfulness to all five purposes — numbers follow.
4. Where MNFC actually sits (read against the frameworks)
Held lightly. Stated to be argued with.
- Form: denominational drift, not populist. Hospitality and ministry concentrate in a small core. Few entry points for new lay ownership.
- Five purposes: Worship and Fellowship strong. Evangelism weak as a habit, not just a program. Discipleship has no defined arc — a member doesn’t know what “growing” looks like next. Ministry is structural rather than gifts-based.
- Circles of Commitment: Community ring is nearly empty (few unchurched in regular contact). Crowd ring is small and porous (newcomers don’t reliably reach Congregation). Most weight sits in Congregation/Core with little movement between.
- Believers’ responsibility: members carry the message in their hearts but rarely on their lips. The most distinctive thing we have — True Parents and the Blessing — is the thing we are quietest about.
None of this is a moral failing. It is a structural pattern that, per both books, predicts the next ten years if unchanged.
5. The roadmap — five years, phased
Sized so that no single phase requires more than the church can carry. Each phase is a posture shift before it is a program.
Phase 1 — Months 0–6: Name the calling
The point of this phase is permission. Until evangelism is named from the pulpit as a responsibility, not a personality type, nothing else lands.
- Pulpit: a sermon series on the believer’s responsibility (DP, p. 186). Frame growth as faithfulness, not strategy.
- Adopt Warren’s five purposes as the church’s working language. Audit every existing program against them.
- Identify the church’s target community — the actual unchurched person within a 15-minute drive whom MNFC is best positioned to reach. Specificity unlocks everything.
- Begin a newcomer-tracking system (no one falls through). Names, contact, follow-up by Tuesday.
- Pastor publicly commissions 3–5 lay members to lead pilot ministries with real authority. Hendricks’ second shift.
Phase 2 — Months 6–18: Build the entry path
Designed for the person not yet here.
- Redesign Sunday with the Crowd ring in mind: a service a stranger can enter without translation.
- Launch a Blended worship element (Hendricks’ second model) — preserve liturgical/theological core, modernize music, add testimony, add visual aid in sermon. Sugita’s three pillars: music, video, applied sermon.
- Start a defined newcomer path: Sunday → newcomer lunch → 4-week intro class → small group placement → ministry inventory. This is the discipleship arc.
- Build small-group infrastructure. Warren’s load-bearing structure for fellowship + discipleship at scale. Lay-led, gifts-based, multiplying.
- Begin gifts-based ministry inventory: every member identifies their gift, every gift gets a place to be exercised. Hendricks’ third shift.
- Reduce committee meetings deliberately. Free people for ministry.
Phase 3 — Year 2: Train and release
- Identify the next generation of leaders (under 40, under 30, under 20). Give them real territory, not advisory roles.
- Launch a Multiple-track stream (Hendricks’ third model) — a young-adult / second-gen ministry that is peer-led, not parent-led. Hendricks: “It has to be solved by the second-generation themselves.”
- Apprentice 2–3 lay ministers toward formal pastoral function. Begin internal lay-pastor formation.
- Open the network. Stark’s principle: a movement grows in proportion to its members’ contacts with non-members. Track and celebrate this.
- The Blessing taught from the inside out — meaning before mechanics — both internally and externally.
Phase 4 — Years 3–4: Saturate the local context
- Move from attracting individuals to engaging households. Home blessings, family ministry, hospitality across generations.
- Adopt Seeker elements (Hendricks’ fourth model) for specific occasions — Christmas, Easter, True Parents Day — where the service is explicitly designed for the friend a member brings.
- Public identity: stop hiding the name. Sugita’s lesson — the church grew because he openly proclaimed True Parents, not in spite of it. Discretion has not protected us; it has muted us.
- Develop one or two flagship outward-facing initiatives that serve the neighborhood without strings — schools, recovery, marriage support, youth — chosen by lay leaders, not assigned from above.
- First measurable goal: net growth in the Congregation ring of 25% over the prior baseline.
Phase 5 — Year 5: Plant
- A growing church plants. A self-protecting church does not.
- Satellite model (Hendricks’ fifth): identify 1–2 households called to plant — a Twin Cities second site, an outstate site, a campus site, whatever the Spirit names — and release them with sponsorship, not control.
- Begin the second-generation handoff in earnest. Leadership rotation becomes normal, not exceptional.
- MNFC understood — by itself and by the neighborhood — as a church that produces churches.
6. What this asks of you specifically
Stated plainly, with full awareness of the cost.
- Preach evangelism as discipleship, not as an extra burden on already-tired members. The pulpit is the only place the calling becomes normative.
- Release control before you feel ready to. Hendricks and Warren agree on this and so do the case studies. The pastor’s instinct to safeguard quality through personal involvement is the single biggest brake on growth in mature churches.
- Tolerate experiments that fail. A populist church grows by running ten small bets, killing seven, scaling three.
- Name the target community out loud. Until MNFC has an answer to “who specifically are we trying to reach?”, every program will be designed for ourselves.
- Make the Blessing legible. Teach the meaning before the procedure. To insiders and outsiders both.
- Measure differently. Not Sunday attendance alone — movement across the Circles of Commitment. What we measure is what we produce.
7. The cost of not doing this
Hendricks: “It takes super-human effort to grow a church, so if we are not sure that it is really necessary, the outcome is predictable.”
If MNFC remains as it is:
- It will stay warm and sincere — for a season.
- The Core ring will keep carrying the church on goodwill and overwork until burnout breaks structurally what affection has been holding together.
- The second generation will not inherit a church; they will inherit a memory of one and look for spiritual home elsewhere.
- The Blessing will remain a private mechanic rather than public good news.
- The mission entrusted to True Parents’ followers in this region — the third responsibility — will pass, in this generation, undelivered.
This is not a prediction made in alarm. It is the pattern Hendricks documents across three centuries of American church history. We are not exempt from it.
8. The ask
Not adoption of this plan. Three things only:
- Read both books. Hendricks first (it’s ours), Warren second (it’s the structure).
- Pray about whether the Divine Principle’s call to believers’ responsibility is being met by MNFC’s current posture.
- If the answer is no, let us begin Phase 1 together — not as a strategy, but as repentance and re-commissioning.
The rest can be discerned in its own time. But the first step has to come from the pulpit.
Offered with love for this church and trust in your leadership.