Homogeneous Unit Principle, Revisited
You may never have heard of the Homogeneous Unit Principle, but chances are your church life has been profoundly shaped by it.
HUP is a key observation of the Church Growth Movement (which enjoyed its heyday in the latter half of the last century) that congregations which focus and tailor its ministry efforts on one homogeneous people group tend to grow numerically the fastest. Perhaps not surprisingly, somewhere along the way HUP transformed from an observation and a description into a prescription, a strategic principle for churches who sought to grow numerically and for new congregations being planted. One could argue that many of the newer church plants of the last couple of decades were directed by the spirit of HUP.
Not many church leaders may consciously profess their belief in the HUP, but the effects of HUP are seen and felt all around the North American ecclesial landscape. Most congregations we encounter are made up of homogeneous people groups, identified by the markers of their ethnicity (I don’t only have in mind those groups that have traditionally been labeled “ethnic” congregations here, of course; white congregations are ethnic congregations too), socioeconomic status, cultural similarity, or theological camp. Most church leaders seem to accept this situation as “the way it is” — they presuppose the effectiveness or the rightness of HUP, a bit helplessly pronounce that those who fall outside their target homogeneous unit aren’t within their particular church’s scope of vision for ministry, and end up feeding the cycle of homogeneous congregations and stratification within the Church.
I live and work in the City of Philadelphia, where many communities are constantly transitioning and becoming ever more diverse — ethnically, culturally, socioeconomically, ideologically. Unfortunately, churches are usually the last ones who notice the changes, but some have come to see that there is a new mission opportunity here.
However, how does a HUP-shaped church welcome to Christ their new friends who don’t fit nicely into its target demographic? In an increasingly pluralistic community, could HUP churches merely end up as relics of a bygone era, ill-suited to function as witnesses to the eschatological shalom community where every nation has been gathered under Christ?
The urban context raises critical questions that challenge the way we’ve “always done” church. The church must answer them if we are to faithfully carry on the gospel mission in our own time. I pose a few of those questions here.
1. Is numerical growth a sufficient end that justifies the means?
Church Growth Movement studied numerical growth and sought to identify the factors that contributed to numerical growth of churches. However, does that approach put undue emphasis on numbers and thereby on the marketing techniques that promise to boost those numbers?
It is worth affirming that numerical growth is a goal to be desired — a byproduct of a faithful kingdom mission lived out by God’s people. However, a numerical-growth-by-any-means-necessary approach may give up too much to a bottom-line technocratic worldview. Fixation on the number of members on church rolls and the number of baptisms may have created an ecclesial industrial complex at the expense of a deeper spirituality and the formation of communities marked by grace-filled obedience. Many of the younger generation moving into urban communities are deeply suspicious of such approaches.
A growing chorus of voices calls for an alternative emphasis on discipleship over against an emphasis on numbers. Impressive numerical growth doesn’t necessarily mean that life-transforming discipleship (or sanctification) is taking place. Has our fixation on the numbers (and the “success” they seem to represent) taken our eyes off the call to enter more fully into the life of the Spirit of Christ?
2. Could HUP be all too accommodating of our ethnocentrism, racism, and classism?
The observation that we naturally incline towards the saying, “Birds of a feather flock together,” and that those churches tend to do better numerically can quite easily justify our natural tendency towards inwardness and exclusivism. HUP can be used, and we could make a good case that it has been used, to baptize our desire to turn a blind eye to those on the outside of our own in-group, and to affirm our love of comfort and ease within a church made after our own image. However, our society is full of outsiders to communities of grace. How will the insiders welcome the outsiders into their faith communities, which, we believe, have been called to be shaped by the good news that those who were far from God are now brought near by the grace of Christ?
Harvie Conn has said, “The church is the only organization in the world that exists for the sake of its non-members.” Is this true of our congregations?
3. Could HUP tend to promote an over-reliance on technique and methodology borrowed from the corporate world?
Eugene Peterson has sounded a warning against the siren call of Prometheus in Working the Angles. Equally urgent is the warning against Narcissus. We have a long and tragic history of leadership that have fallen through the allure of celebrity cult and an overweening confidence in individual ability and charisma. Will history teach us nothing? In the midst of perennially popular church growth seminars and conferences, could the casualty be a humble reliance on the power of the Spirit?
In contrast, the shalom community of God’s kingdom is one deeply marked by confidence in the Savior who was broken out of his love for the wayward world. It is not a community of triumphalism, but one of the cross. It is one that beckons us to come out of our own insider groups which enable our love of comfort and power, and which have contributed to the multiple fractures of our world, in order to partake in the one new community under the one King, a unity made of a diversity of outsiders. Such a community is good news for our urban neighborhoods that are becoming wonderfully diverse yet remain superficially so at best and deeply divided at worst. Our cities need to see that a new city has come upon us in Christ, and churches can demonstrate that new urban reality when they gather in the midst of our cities and seek to more faithfully reflect the heavenly throng of New Jerusalem made up of all tongues and nations, giving worship to the Lamb on the throne.
An edited version of this article was republished in The Narthex on November 12, 2014, as “New Math on the Homogeneous Unit Principle for Church Growth”.
