When I first got [to the church], there was a member of the church staff who asked me very confrontationally what I was going to do in order to build this church. She was of a denominational tradition where that meant a three-ring circus. That meant some exciting new programs. Some attention-grabbing, new exciting method was going to be used in order to wake up the whole community and draw attention to ourselves, get everybody talking about us, and all the exciting and wonderful things that were happening downtown in Savannah. My answer to her was, we are going to preach and pray. That is what we are going to do. After we had experienced some pretty significant growth in those early years, I had a denominational representative for a visit. He had heard that we had about doubled all our numbers. We quadrupled [in attendance on] Sunday nights, our Sunday School attendance tripled, and the Sunday morning attendance had doubled. Lots of exciting growth was happening. And so I got a visit…and he wanted to know what we were doing. He had pen in hand. He was ready to take down all the ingredients of the new program that we had brought to Savannah, and how that has stimulated all this excitement at our church. I told him we actually are not doing anything different. We have the same service as we always had. All we are doing is ministering the Word of God and praying. That is it!

He continued to question me. He found that almost unbelievable that that would be the case. But within five minutes in the conversation our meeting was over because I did not have anything new and exciting that I could tell him about, that he could write about, and which could become the next new key to the growth of church…That is really what is behind the worship revolution, by the way. What is behind it is that these are the keys to growth: if you have a praise band up front, if you adopt a certain format that is kind of informal, and you have a gregarious leader up front, that is going to build the church. That is going to grow the church. These things come through the church in waves and it is very distressing to me. Whole denominations just get swept over by the latest thing that the latest person is doing to build their church…

We have seen this kind of thing happening and it is no different in our denomination. A new thing, a new exciting method, a new program that has quadrupled the size of the church! [Someone says] Come, and everybody jumps on that wagon and they race to do the new thing. And then basically nothing happens. It worked because of the dynamics of a certain place and a certain person and certain ingredients that were being overlooked. I would maintain that wherever you see a church truly growing, that when you strip off all the external trappings and get to the heart of it, somebody is praying a lot and the Word of God is being preached. And it is not all of the extravagant additions; it is not the external trappings. It is at its core the Word of God and prayer that builds the life and restores the people of God.¹

Terry L. Johnson