Andrew Heard, Growth and Change: The Danger and Necessity of a Passion for Church Growth. Matthias Media, 2024. 264pp.
Andrew Heard, a prominent leader in the Australian reformed evangelical world, has written a challenging and important book. It is designed to help church leaders face the need for change. If churches are to grow, change will often be needed in our ministries and leadership. So Heard writes to provoke purposeful change that is specifically targeted at seeing more people saved. He is deeply aware that our failure to change can be a serious hindrance to both spiritual and numerical growth.
Heard argues his case carefully and biblically. He is the master of balance, looking at one side of an issue and then the other. He knows both the urgent need of change in many churches, but also the great dangers it brings. He is passionate about seeing churches grow, but he readily articulates the risks of being driven by numbers and growth. He is deeply aware of the importance of cultural relevance but does not hesitate to name the risks in pursuing it. With careful nuance, he navigates the “just be faithful” versus the “we must be fruitful” debate. He pointedly addresses the relationship of God’s sovereignty and human responsibility. He also discusses what he calls, “theologically principled pragmatism” as opposed to either rampant pragmatism or a complete lack of pragmatic thinking.
Throughout the book, Heard passionately presents the urgency of evangelism and the high priority of churches reaching lost sinners. This was the overarching impact of the book on me. The church has a mission, and it really matters. There are eternal consequences. It will cost us dearly to pursue it, and doing so will often necessitate changing things we would rather not change. But we cannot merely stand for the truth, vital as that is, nor simply work for the maturity of the saints, as important as that is. We must press vigorously into the harvest field to see more people won to Christ.
Such a driving passion for growth and change has significant implications for church life, leadership and the focus of pastoral ministry. Heard discusses many of those implications, generating stimulating, and sometimes provocative, perspectives on the role of a pastor, church structures, and leadership models. One major emphasis is on the need for leaders to focus on outputs, not just inputs. That is, we must lead and pastor not only by injecting the right things into church life (like preaching, teaching, training, care, prayer, evangelism), but focusing on what the outputs of those inputs is meant to be and refusing to passively accept poor outputs or little output.
This strong focus on outputs may leave some readers uncomfortable, as will some other emphases that emerge in the book. For example, some of his perspectives on church and leadership structures (his ecclesiology), on the relationship of gospel work to other areas of work and vocation, and on continuity and discontinuity between this world and the world to come, are areas where my own views differ somewhat from those presented in the book. But these concerns do not undermine the importance and significance of this book. It presents a strong and forceful challenge that many of us need.
This is a book that should not be ignored. It is a comfortable but important challenge. Pastors, elders and other church leaders should engage with it, be convicted by it, think through what it says, and allow it to stimulate both a greater passion for the advance of the gospel, and a greater willingness to embrace necessary change in order to see more people saved.
