The Idolatry of Church Growth With Andrew Root ![rw-book-cover](https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/images/article0.00998d930354.png) 🔗 **Source:** [The Idolatry of Church Growth With Andrew Root](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMowu5HPa8) > [!note]+ Document Notes > tags: [church-growth-movement, american-evangelicalism, capitalism-and-religion, church-decline, idolatry-of-metrics] > author: Andrew Root > source: Holy Post Media > reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMowu5HPa8 > date created: 2026-07-27 > > > [!info] Generated analysis — not the author's words. Sections below are machine-written > > from the captured source. Only text inside `> [!quote]` blocks is verbatim from the author. > > Do not quote or attribute any other line to the named author. > > # 🏷️ Title: The Idolatry of Church Growth with Andrew Root > <!-- deep-read:sections start --> ## 🧭 Table of Contents - [📝 Summary](#-summary) - [📖 Main Content](#-main-content) - [🗒️ Notes](#️-notes) - [📚 References](#-references) - [🗣️ Paraphrase](#️-paraphrase) - [📰 Newsletter](#-newsletter) - [✅ Action Items](#-action-items) - [🧪 Hypotheses](#-hypotheses) - [📊 Methodology](#-methodology) - [❓ Questions](#-questions) - [🔮 Future Research](#-future-research) - [💡 Implications](#-implications) - [🧠 Learning Styles Assessment](#-learning-styles-assessment) - [📊 Accessibility Assessment](#-accessibility-assessment) - [🌍 DEIB Assessment](#-deib-assessment) - [✅ Logical Validity](#-logical-validity) - [🛡️ DARVO Analysis](#-darvo-analysis) - [🎯 Conclusion](#-conclusion) ### 🔗 References (quick pointers) - Andrew Root, *Baal and the Gods of More: Rescuing Church Growth from Idolatry* (book under discussion) - Robert J. Gordon, *The Rise and Fall of American Growth* (economic-history source Root leans on) - Ryan Burge's "nones" research, discussed mid-episode (see full References below) - European Evangelical Alliance, "European Evangelicals in Public Life: Our Identity and Contribution" ## 📝 Summary - **What happened**: Episode 730 of the Holy Post podcast has two halves. The first ~49 minutes is the hosts' (Phil Vischer, Kaylyn Chess/Kaitlyn, Skye Jethani) usual news-and-banter roundup — a viral "Jesus was a psychedelic mushroom" theory, a Brazilian folk theory blaming the national team's World Cup collapse on evangelical players, a European Evangelical Alliance statement distancing European evangelicals from American political evangelicalism, and Ryan Burge's data showing the political signature of religious "nones" is fading across generations. The second half is a long-form interview with Andrew Root about his book *Baal and the Gods of More*, arguing the American church's 50-year obsession with numerical growth is a form of ancient fertility-cult idolatry, generated not by scripture but by the U.S. economy's post-1970 shift from broad-based industrial growth to a "grow-or-die" capital logic. - **Why it matters**: Root supplies a causal-historical account (not just a moral scold) for why "church growth" became a genre, a conference circuit, and a pastoral identity only after 1970 — and ties that timing to the same economic anxiety that produced neoliberalism, mega-institutions, and winner-take-all markets. This reframes church-growth culture as a symptom of a broader "dynamic stabilization" compulsion (Hartmut Rosa's term) rather than a spiritually neutral pastoral best-practice. - **Key stakeholders**: mainline and evangelical pastors and denominational leaders (especially those trained inside the Church Growth Movement lineage), seminary faculty and curricula, megachurch-adjacent consultants and conference circuits, congregants experiencing burnout from growth-driven ministry, and — per the cross-reference frame for this note — the broader Independent Charismatic / New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) network, whose methodology descends directly from the academic Church Growth Movement Root is implicitly critiquing. - **Risks and tradeoffs**: Root's economic-determinist framing risks flattening genuinely different growth phenomena (organic revival, immigration-driven congregational growth, healthy discipleship growth) into a single idol-category; his own hedges ("I wouldn't want to be that deterministic") show he's aware of this. There's also a risk that "growth is idolatry" gets weaponized by declining, poorly-led congregations as a theological alibi for stagnation — a possibility the interview does not address. - **Bottom line**: Root's theological-economic argument is that American Protestantism's compulsive attention to numerical growth since 1970 is not obedience to the Great Commission but an inherited, largely unconscious worship of a fertility/capital idol — and the fix is not a better growth strategy but a theology of the cross that replaces escalation with relational depth. ## 📖 Main Content The episode's news segment functions as a fast, comedic warm-up: a resurfaced 1970 fringe theory (John Allegro's *The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross*) claiming Jesus was a code-name for a psychoactive mushroom cult; a Brazilian sports-media folk theory blaming the national team's World Cup collapse on the rise of evangelicalism displacing a more "improvisational" folk Catholicism; a European Evangelical Alliance (EEA) statement (representing a claimed ~23 million European evangelicals) distinguishing a theologically-defined, non-partisan European evangelical identity from the politically-defined American brand; and Ryan Burge's research on religiously unaffiliated Americans ("nones"), showing that while past waves of church-leavers skewed strongly Democratic (reacting to the Religious Right), people raised with no religion at all are not reliably Democratic — suggesting the "exit" is becoming apolitical and generational rather than an ideological protest vote. The interview with Andrew Root, a professor of youth and family ministry at Luther Seminary and staff theologian at Youthfront, carries the analytical weight of the episode. Root's core historical claim, sourced from economist Robert Gordon's *The Rise and Fall of American Growth*, is that the U.S. economy experienced a unique "special century" of compounding growth from 1870 to 1970 (steam→electricity, then an anticipated-but-delayed third leap in silicon), and that this economic reality was absorbed into American religious identity as a kind of civic Protestantism: going to church, especially a mainline church, was itself an expression of belonging to the American project. When that economic golden age ended around 1970, Root argues, mainline Protestant decline set in and — critically — this is also the moment "church growth" becomes a named genre: conferences, consultants, and a literature of numerical-growth strategy did not meaningfully exist before the 1970s because growth had previously just *happened* as a byproduct of the broader cultural-economic tide. Root's central theological move is to read the Baal narratives of 1 and 2 Kings as an economic story, not merely a moralistic one about sexual temptation. He reframes Jezebel not as a temptress but as an "economist" importing a stabilization system (Baal/fertility cult worship) that promises Israel it can recapture the growth of the Davidic golden age. He generalizes this into a concept borrowed from German sociologist Hartmut Rosa: "dynamic stabilization" — the condition in which a society (or a church) can only remain stable by continually escalating its capital, whether that capital is agricultural yield in the ancient world or money/membership in the modern one. Under industrialization, Root argues (leaning on Marx's account of the M-C-M' circuit, where money is invested in commodities in order to produce more money, with no terminal point), this stabilization logic detaches from any explicit cultic system and becomes an ostensibly secular, purely economic compulsion — but functions exactly like religion: money "becomes a god" that "demands... our imaginations, our thought life, our action." Root distinguishes two kinds of growth: "growth of" something (escalation, more of the same, without end — his example is a puppy that should stop growing at 60 lbs, not continue to 600) versus "growth into" something (a relational deepening, growth into Christ, which has a shape and a telos rather than an indefinite trajectory). He applies this to explain how American Protestant institutional life — especially post-1970s evangelicalism, which he argues was structurally better positioned than the mainline to exploit the new neoliberal, winner-take-all economy — became "instrumentalized": relationships, the gospel, and the pastorate itself become means to the further end of growth, turning pastors into "sales reps" running what is functionally, in the absence of state-established churches, "a small business." He names two contemporary failure modes inside this logic: "techno-optimists" (who believe the right program, pastor, or innovation will restore growth) and "identitarians," a term he borrows from a French thinker (who believe the church needs to escalate affirmation and recognition of specific identities without end) — arguing both operate the same underlying capital-logic of limitless escalation, just with different currencies (innovation vs. affirmation). His proposed alternative is explicitly Lutheran: a "theology of the cross" (drawing on Luther and Bonhoeffer) in which God is encountered in brokenness and suffering rather than success and scale, and where the church's calling is not to "do better" but to receive a gift and rest in obedience — obedience reframed not as rigid rule-following but as surrender into relationship. He closes with the provocative claim that many churches which say they worship Jesus are functionally worshipping Baal: a fertility god of never-ending growth that enslaves rather than a God who "wants children to be in community with... to be in relationship with." **Terms defined in-episode**: *dynamic stabilization* (Hartmut Rosa) — the requirement to continually escalate capital just to remain stable, not to reach any particular goal; *M-C-M' circuit* (Marx, paraphrased) — the shift from money-for-commodities-for-use to money-for-commodities-for-more-money as capitalism's defining logic; *growth of vs. growth into* (Root's own coinage in the book) — escalation without end vs. relational/formational deepening with a shape. **Contested or under-examined claims**: Root's periodization (no "church growth" genre before 1970) is a strong, checkable historical claim but is not independently sourced in the interview beyond his own reading; the causal chain from GDP growth to congregational affiliation is asserted more than demonstrated, and Root himself concedes he "wouldn't want to be that deterministic" — a hedge that arrives only after the entire interview segment has been built around the correlation as if it were closer to causation. ## 🗒️ Notes #### ⏱️ [00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMowu5HPa8&t=0) Cold open and episode framing - Frames the two headline stories: Root's economic theory of church growth, and Ryan Burge's shifting data on why people leave the church. - Also previews Brazil/World Cup, European evangelicals, and the "Jesus was a mushroom" theory as lighter segments. #### ⏱️ [07:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMowu5HPa8&t=433) "Jesus was a psychedelic mushroom" resurfacing - A 1970 fringe theory by Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John Allegro (*The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross*) claiming early Christianity was a mushroom-based fertility cult, with Jesus as a coded personification of *Amanita muscaria*. - Treated by the hosts as a stock joke-reference in religious studies for absurd, attention-seeking scholarship rather than a live scholarly debate. #### ⏱️ [12:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMowu5HPa8&t=763) Brazil, the World Cup, and "playing like a gringo" - Some Brazilian fans blame the national team's decline since 1994 on the country's evangelical growth displacing a more "improvisational," communal Catholic culture with a "rigid," individualistic evangelical one; a rival theory credits European-style training instead. - Host Phil explicitly names the reasoning problem: "I'll just I'll say this, correlation is not causation" — a self-aware catch inside the same episode that later runs a structurally similar economic-correlation argument (church growth and GDP) with less scrutiny. #### ⏱️ [24:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMowu5HPa8&t=1479) European Evangelical Alliance statement - The EEA (representing ~23 million European evangelicals) issues a statement defining evangelical identity theologically and non-partisan, implicitly distancing itself from American political evangelicalism. - Kaylyn/Skye discuss why European evangelical identity functions differently: it's often a minority theological self-description *within* a larger non-evangelical state church (Anglican, Presbyterian, Lutheran), which produces cross-denominational cooperation rather than the American pattern of denominational proliferation and political consolidation. - Phil names the "no true Scotsman" pattern directly when discussing whether the U.S. National Association of Evangelicals could similarly disown its political fringe. #### ⏱️ [36:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMowu5HPa8&t=2197) Ryan Burge on the "nones" and the fading political signature of church exit - Burge's data: people who left church in the 1980s–90s skewed heavily Democratic/liberal (reacting to the Religious Right); people raised with no religion at all, and younger cohorts (born 1990s–2000s) leaving today, are far less reliably Democratic — only about a third identify as Democrats. - The hosts debate competing interpretations: exits are becoming apolitical/generational "drift" vs. exits are still politically motivated but landing on independent identification rather than Democratic identification, since independents are the fastest-growing political category overall. - Kaylyn raises a "fundamentalism is a mindset, not a set of beliefs" point: people raised in rigid, binary religious environments who leave over political horror often import the same binary, all-or-nothing moral structure into their new (often more progressive) politics. #### ⏱️ [49:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMowu5HPa8&t=2953) Transition and framing of the Andrew Root interview - Host recaps his own formation in 1980s–90s megachurch culture (Willow Creek era) and frames Root's book as answering a question he says he's wanted answered "for so long": what does economics explain about the church-growth obsession? - Introduces Root's credentials: professor of youth and family ministry, Luther Seminary; staff theologian, Youthfront; co-host of *Ministry in a Secular Age*; author of 25+ books. #### ⏱️ [53:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMowu5HPa8&t=3238) The Artemis/Madonna meme and fertility-idol framing - Root opens the book with a meme contrasting a fertility goddess (Artemis of Ephesus) with a Renaissance Madonna-and-child image, drawn from a personal museum-trip anecdote (Israel Museum, then the Vatican Museum). - Argues modern readers over-sexualize ancient fertility imagery (a "puritanical," post-sexual-revolution projection) when the ancient meaning was fundamentally economic: agricultural and national prosperity, not personal reproduction. #### ⏱️ [57:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMowu5HPa8&t=3478) Jezebel reframed as economist; dynamic stabilization introduced - Root's signature reframe: Jezebel is not primarily a sexual temptress but an economic operator importing a "stabilization system" from Baal-worshipping Tyre/Sidon into an Israel anxious about its post-Solomonic decline. - Introduces Hartmut Rosa's "dynamic stabilization": societies (and, by extension, churches) that can only remain stable by perpetually escalating their capital — money for a modern economy, cultic practice/agricultural yield for the ancient one. #### ⏱️ [1:01:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMowu5HPa8&t=3672) Baal's bull and the Wall Street bull - Draws a visual/structural parallel between Baal's bull iconography and the Wall Street "Charging Bull" statue as a symbol of the same underlying escalation-demanding logic, now secularized into capital markets. #### ⏱️ [1:02:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMowu5HPa8&t=3766) Disenchantment, the machine, and money as god - Argues industrialization "disenchants" the cultic system while preserving its underlying compulsion: citing Marx's M-C-M' circuit (money invested in commodities to produce more money, without terminal end) as the mechanism by which growth becomes limitless and quasi-religious. - Names the theological stakes directly: money becomes functionally more powerful than God because it "demands that we serve it with our imaginations." #### ⏱️ [1:05:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMowu5HPa8&t=3959) "Growth of" vs. "growth into" - Root's central conceptual distinction: escalation without end (using an anecdote about wanting his new puppy to grow, but not to 600 lbs, and noting cancer is also "a form of growth that kills you") versus relational, formational growth into Christ that has a shape and endpoint. - Explicitly disclaims being simply "anti-growth"; the target is escalatory, telos-less growth, not growth as such. #### ⏱️ [1:09:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMowu5HPa8&t=4194) Instrumentalization and the pastor as "sales rep" - Connects the growth-of logic to the practical transformation of ministry: the pastor becomes a sales representative for a "small business" (since American Protestantism has no state establishment funding it), and relationships/gospel become instruments toward growth rather than ends in themselves. - Cites Bonhoeffer's 1939 essay on "America: land of Protestantism without reformation" as diagnosing the denominational-proliferation pattern (First Baptist, Second Baptist...) this produces. #### ⏱️ [1:11:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMowu5HPa8&t=4291) The 1870–1970 "special century" and civic Protestantism - Leans on economist Robert Gordon's *The Rise and Fall of American Growth* thesis: a unique, unrepeated century of compounding U.S. economic growth (1870–1970) that got absorbed into American religious identity, especially mainline congregational affiliation, as an expression of the American Dream and "American exceptionalism" (citing Charles Taylor). - Host Phil raises the Cold War/civic-religion counter-explanation (In God We Trust, "Under God" in the Pledge, anti-communist identity) and the immigrant-assimilation angle (joining a "true American" mainline church as a marker of full Americanization); Root affirms both as contributing factors without integrating them into a single revised model. #### ⏱️ [1:17:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMowu5HPa8&t=4670) Post-1970 stagnation and the rise of the megachurch/evangelical era - Argues the absence of a third industrial-revolution-scale GDP leap after 1970 caused mainline disestablishment and decline, while American evangelicalism — structurally suited to neoliberal winner-take-all dynamics — rose to fill the gap, producing genuinely new phenomena like the megachurch and the "12 people to 12,000" church-planting mythology that had no real precedent before the 1970s–80s. #### ⏱️ [1:22:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMowu5HPa8&t=4957) Techno-optimists and identitarians - Names two failure modes inside "do better" church culture: techno-optimists (the right program/pastor/strategy will restore growth) and identitarians (a French-derived term for the belief that endless additional affirmation/recognition of specific identities is what the church needs). - Argues both are structurally the same capital-logic of limitless escalation, just with different currencies (innovation vs. affirmation), and states sympathy for both camps' underlying concerns while rejecting the shared logic. #### ⏱️ [1:25:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeMowu5HPa8&t=5149) Obedience vs. "do better," and worshipping Baal instead of Jesus - Root's proposed alternative: obedience reframed not as rigid rule-following but as surrender/rest, rooted in Luther's theology of the cross and Bonhoeffer's *The Cost of Discipleship* ("only the obedient believe, and only those who believe obey"). - States the book's most provocative claim directly: many Protestant (including evangelical) churches say they worship Jesus but are functionally worshipping Baal — a fertility god of never-ending growth — and cites Luther's advice to Melanchthon (test people by asking about their "afflictions in the faith," since the devil takes on escalation and glory, never humility and brokenness) as the diagnostic test for which god is actually being served. ## 📚 References - [Andrew Root, *Baal and the Gods of More: Rescuing Church Growth from Idolatry*](https://www.eerdmans.com/) — the book under discussion (publisher listing; exact title/ISBN not stated in-episode) - [Robert J. Gordon, *The Rise and Fall of American Growth*](https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691147727/the-rise-and-fall-of-american-growth) — economic-history source for the 1870–1970 "special century" thesis - [Hartmut Rosa on "dynamic stabilization" / social acceleration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartmut_Rosa) — sociological concept Root applies to church growth - [Ryan Burge, Graphs About Religion (Substack)](https://www.graphsaboutreligion.com/) — likely source of the "nones" political-signature research discussed in-episode - [European Evangelical Alliance, "European Evangelicals in Public Life"](https://www.europeanea.org/) — statement discussed in the news segment - [John Allegro, *The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross* (1970)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Mushroom_and_the_Cross) — background on the "Jesus was a mushroom" theory - [Holy Post Media](https://www.holypost.com/) — publisher/host of the podcast - [Holy Post Plus](https://www.holypost.com/plus) — subscription tier referenced for the bonus interview segment ## 🗣️ Paraphrase The show's first half moves through a grab-bag of religion-news items with the hosts' usual comic, self-interrupting banter: a resurfaced fringe theory that Jesus was really a mushroom-cult code name, a Brazilian folk explanation blaming the national soccer team's World Cup collapse on evangelical growth replacing a looser, more "Catholic" style of play, a European evangelical alliance trying to publicly separate its own theological, non-partisan identity from the politically-branded American version, and a data researcher's finding that people leaving religion today don't carry the same reliable Democratic lean that earlier generations of church-leavers did — suggesting exit from faith is becoming a quieter, less ideologically loaded generational drift. The second half is a sustained, serious conversation with theologian Andrew Root, who argues that the American church's decades-long fixation on numerical growth is not a neutral pastoral best-practice but a specific historical artifact: it appears as a named phenomenon — conferences, consultants, a whole growth-strategy literature — only after 1970, exactly when the U.S. economy's century-long unprecedented expansion ended. Root reads this as structurally identical to ancient Israel importing Baal worship under Jezebel: not primarily a sexual or moral failure but an economic one, an attempt to import a "stabilization system" that promises escalating prosperity when the golden age has passed. He distinguishes healthy relational growth ("growing into" Christ) from idolatrous, limitless escalation ("growth of" market share, membership, or capital), and argues most American church-growth culture — whether pursued through innovation-chasing "techno-optimism" or endless-affirmation "identitarianism" — has collapsed into the latter. His remedy is explicitly theological: a cross-centered obedience that finds God in brokenness and rest rather than in scale and success. ## 📰 Newsletter This week's listen: the Holy Post crew runs through their usual news gauntlet (a resurrected "Jesus was a mushroom" theory, a Brazilian soccer-and-evangelicals blame game, a European evangelical identity statement, and fresh Ryan Burge data on why people are quietly leaving church without the old political charge) before settling into a genuinely substantive interview with theologian Andrew Root. Root's pitch — that the American church-growth industry is a 1970s-onward artifact of the end of an unrepeatable economic golden age, not a timeless biblical mandate — is one of those arguments that reframes a whole category of ministry practice you may have taken for granted. If you've ever felt the low hum of guilt that your church, project, or community "should be growing faster," this is worth an hour of your time; it's more diagnosis than solution, but the diagnosis is sharp. ## ✅ Action Items #### DevRel - Not applicable to this source — no developer relations, advocacy, or tooling content is discussed; the episode is a theology/culture podcast with no software or developer-community subject matter. #### OSPO - Not applicable to this source — no open-source program office, licensing, or software governance topics appear anywhere in the transcript. #### Community - Not applicable to this source in its literal (open-source/software community) sense. One genuinely resonant transfer: Root's "growth of vs. growth into" distinction is directly applicable to any community org (including open-source or maker communities) that measures its own health primarily by member/contributor-count escalation rather than relational depth — worth carrying into community-health frameworks, but the source itself makes no such claim. #### WordPress - Not applicable to this source — no WordPress, CMS, or web-platform content appears in the transcript. #### The WPOCC - Not applicable to this source — no WordPress Open Community Collective content, funding models, or governance topics appear in the transcript. ### FAIR - Not applicable to this source — no FAIR (Federated and Independent Repositories) or plugin-directory governance content appears in the transcript. ## 🧪 Hypotheses - H1: The founding dates of "church growth" as a named genre (conferences, consultancies, book titles) cluster after 1970 and correlate with a measurable slowdown in U.S. GDP growth rate, not merely with cultural shifts like the 1960s counterculture. - H2: Denominations/traditions structurally suited to decentralized, entrepreneurial expansion (per Root, American evangelicalism) will show disproportionate adoption of explicit numeric-growth KPIs (attendance, giving, baptisms) compared to hierarchical/state-linked traditions, controlling for theology. - H3: Movements descended from the academic Church Growth Movement (Donald McGavran, C. Peter Wagner at Fuller Seminary) — including the New Apostolic Reformation that Wagner later named — will exhibit business/franchise-style language (metrics, market segmentation, "harvest" targets, territorial expansion) at measurably higher rates than mainline or non-Church-Growth-Movement-descended evangelical traditions. - H4: Pastors whose compensation, denominational standing, or self-worth is explicitly tied to numeric growth metrics report higher burnout and higher rates of instrumentalizing congregational relationships than pastors in traditions without such metrics, independent of congregation size. - H5: The "techno-optimist" and "identitarian" postures Root describes are not truly independent factions but co-occur within the same institutions across different eras or factions of a single congregation's history, both invoked at moments of perceived decline. - H6: The GDP-to-church-growth correlation Root proposes for the U.S. will not hold, or will invert, in comparative national cases (e.g., South Korea's megachurch boom occurred during its own high-growth developmental period, which would support Root's thesis; but rapid-growth Pentecostalism in some Latin American and African contexts occurring during economic stagnation would complicate it). ### 📊 Methodology - **H1**: Build a timeline of church-growth-movement institutional milestones (Fuller Seminary's Church Growth program founding, first "church growth" conference, first bestselling church-growth book) and regress against U.S. GDP growth-rate time series 1950–2000; test lag structures. - **H2**: Content-code denominational annual reports/mission statements for explicit numeric KPI language across a stratified sample of mainline vs. evangelical/independent-charismatic denominations; compare frequency and prominence of growth metrics. - **H3**: Genealogical/discourse analysis tracing shared vocabulary (e.g., "harvest," "homogeneous unit," "apostolic networks," "territorial") from McGavran/Wagner Church Growth Movement texts through Wagner's later NAR writing and into contemporary NAR-adjacent materials (Seven Mountain Mandate literature), scored for lexical and structural overlap. - **H4**: Survey instrument measuring pastoral burnout (validated scale, e.g., Maslach Burnout Inventory–adapted) cross-tabulated with self-reported presence/absence of numeric-growth compensation or evaluation criteria; control for congregation size and tenure. - **H5**: Longitudinal case studies of individual congregations tracking which rhetorical posture (techno-optimist vs. identitarian) dominates internal communications at different points in the congregation's growth/decline cycle. - **H6**: Comparative national case studies pairing GDP growth-rate time series with religious-growth-movement timelines in South Korea, Nigeria, Brazil, and the U.S., testing whether the correlation Root proposes is a general pattern or a U.S.-specific artifact of Gordon's "special century." ### ❓ Questions - Does the academic Church Growth Movement's founding methodology (Donald McGavran's "homogeneous unit principle," later formalized by C. Peter Wagner as Professor of Church Growth at Fuller for three decades) already encode the same "dynamic stabilization" logic Root critiques — meaning the New Apostolic Reformation Wagner later named isn't a deviation from church-growth theology but its most literal, market-maximizing expression? - If a pastor's growth-drivenness genuinely feels like obedience to them, what observable, falsifiable markers would distinguish idolatrous "growth of" from legitimate "growth into" in real time, rather than only in hindsight via burnout or scandal? - Root leans heavily on a U.S.-specific economic periodization (1870–1970). Does his fertility-idol framework travel to non-U.S. contexts where church growth is exploding under very different economic conditions (e.g., Pentecostal growth amid stagnation in parts of the Global South), or is the theory quietly a theory of American Protestantism specifically dressed in universal-sounding theological language? - Root distinguishes "growth of" from "growth into," but who gets to judge, in a live congregation, which kind of growth is actually happening — and does that judgment itself risk becoming a new metric-free but equally coercive spiritual gatekeeping tool ("you're not really growing into Christ, you're just growing")? - Given that Root names "identitarians" as a mirror-image idolatry to techno-optimists, would his framework predict burnout and instrumentalization in progressive/mainline-adjacent churches pursuing endless DEIB-style affirmation targets at the same rate as it predicts burnout in growth-obsessed evangelical megachurches? ### 🔮 Future Research - A direct genealogical study connecting Fuller Theological Seminary's Church Growth Movement (McGavran, then C. Peter Wagner) to the New Apostolic Reformation's business/apostolic-network structure, testing whether NAR is best understood as a doctrinal movement or as the Church Growth Movement's logical endpoint once stripped of denominational restraint. - Comparative economic-religious history beyond the U.S. case, testing whether Root's fertility-idol/dynamic-stabilization framework explains megachurch and prosperity-gospel growth in South Korea, Nigeria, Brazil, and the Philippines as well as it explains the American case. - Empirical burnout research specifically isolating "growth metric exposure" as a variable, distinct from general ministry workload, congregation size, or theological tradition. - A study of whether "growth into" language (relational, formational, cross-centered) is itself being adopted as new marketing/branding language by growth-oriented churches — i.e., whether Root's own corrective vocabulary is already being absorbed into the instrumentalizing logic it was meant to resist. ### 💡 Implications - **Practice**: Seminary formation and denominational leadership pipelines that build in explicit "growth of vs. growth into" language checks could give pastors a working diagnostic for their own institutional pressures, separate from any specific growth strategy's merits. - **Policy**: Denominational and nonprofit reporting structures that require attendance/giving-growth metrics as a condition of standing or funding directly reproduce the idolatrous "dynamic stabilization" pattern Root critiques; policy reform could decouple institutional survival from escalation metrics. - **Security/civic**: Because the academic Church Growth Movement is a direct intellectual ancestor of the New Apostolic Reformation (C. Peter Wagner was Professor of Church Growth at Fuller for 30 years before naming and leading the NAR), Root's diagnosis of growth-idolatry supplies a broader interpretive frame for NAR's business-style, market-segmented, Seven-Mountains resourcing logic — useful context for anyone tracking NAR's political mobilization (see [[The New Apostolic Reformation Is Not a Cult]]) as an intensification of, not a break from, mainstream American church-growth culture. - **Education**: Seminary curricula that still teach "church growth" as a largely value-neutral discipline (metrics, strategy, church-planting playbooks) would need to explicitly address the theological-economic critique Root raises, rather than treating growth strategy as adjacent to or separate from theology proper. - **Funding models**: Any funding model (denominational, parachurch, or nonprofit) that ties resource allocation to growth metrics is, per Root's framework, structurally reproducing the idol it claims to merely measure — a consideration directly relevant to grant/fellowship models built around measurable "impact growth" rather than relational or formational outcomes. ### 🧠 Learning Styles Assessment - **Reading level estimate**: Mixed by segment. The banter/news segment (first ~49 minutes) reads at roughly a 7th–8th grade level by informal Flesch-Kincaid estimate (short sentences, colloquial vocabulary, comedic interruption). The Root interview segment runs closer to 12th grade/early college level (academic vocabulary — "dynamic stabilization," "disenchantment," "instrumentalization," "M-C-M' circuit," references to Marx, Bonhoeffer, Luther, Charles Taylor, Hartmut Rosa — delivered in long, subordinate-clause-heavy spoken sentences). Overall episode estimate: roughly 10th–11th grade, weighted toward the interview's density. #### 👀 Visual learners - Present: none — this is audio-only content with no diagrams, charts, or on-screen visuals referenced in the transcript itself (the Artemis/Madonna "meme" Root describes exists only in the book, not shown here). - Improve: a companion visual timeline (1870–1970 GDP growth vs. church-growth-movement milestones) or a simple two-column diagram contrasting "growth of" vs. "growth into" would make Root's core distinction immediately legible without requiring the listener to hold two abstract categories in working memory across a 40-minute conversation. #### 🔊 Aural learners - Present: strong fit — the entire piece is a conversational podcast, and Root's ideas are actually easier to follow by ear than on the page precisely because of his frequent self-interruptions, hedges, and concrete illustrations (the puppy, the homeschool-mom museum-tour anecdote). - Improve: chapter markers/timestamps in the show notes (the raw YouTube upload appears to lack them) would let aural learners jump directly to the interview, skipping the ~49-minute news segment if their interest is specifically theological/economic. #### 🗣️ Verbal learners - Present: Root is generous with definitions-by-example (Jezebel as "a top of the field... Harvard economist," money as something that "demands... our imaginations"), and the host frequently restates Root's abstractions in plainer language for the audience. - Improve: a short glossary (dynamic stabilization, M-C-M' circuit, growth of/into, techno-optimist/identitarian) appended to the show notes would consolidate the verbal analogies scattered across an hour into a quick-reference form. #### 🧩 Kinesthetic learners - Present: minimal — there is no exercise, checklist, or interactive prompt in the episode itself. - Improve: a simple self-audit checklist for pastors/leaders ("Does our budget conversation ever end without a growth number attached? Would we still fund this ministry if it stayed the same size forever?") would translate Root's abstract critique into an actionable diagnostic. #### 🧠 Logical learners - Present: the episode does build a rough timeline (1870–1970 economic golden age → post-1970 decline → rise of church-growth genre → megachurch era), which logical learners can follow as a causal chain even without a visual aid. - Improve: an explicit decision-tree or RACI-style breakdown distinguishing which growth signals are "growth of" (escalation, red flag) vs. "growth into" (relational deepening, healthy) would give logical learners a reusable framework rather than a one-time narrative. #### 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Social learners - Present: the format itself (three co-hosts plus a live studio audience reacting in real time) models social/collaborative processing of the news items, though the interview segment is a two-person conversation without audience participation. - Improve: discussion questions for small groups or staff teams (e.g., "Where in our own church's language do we hear 'growth of' language versus 'growth into' language?") would extend the social-learning affordance already present in the show's format into the listener's own context. #### 🧘‍♀️ Solitary learners - Present: the interview's reflective, confessional tone (Root repeatedly qualifies his claims "in great humility") invites private reflection rather than demanding immediate reaction. - Improve: a set of journaling prompts tied to the Luther/Melanchthon "afflictions in the faith" test Root cites at the end would give solitary learners a concrete self-examination tool drawn directly from the source. #### 🌿 Naturalistic learners - Present: Root's central illustrations are organic/biological (a growing puppy, cancer as lethal growth, agricultural fertility as the ancient world's growth metaphor), which naturally appeals to naturalistic/ecological thinking. - Improve: extending the puppy/cancer metaphor explicitly into an ecosystem framing (healthy ecosystems have carrying capacity and equilibrium, not infinite growth) would strengthen the naturalistic on-ramp Root has already half-built. ### 📊 Accessibility Assessment #### Screen reader semantics - Present: a full transcript of the episode exists (the source of this analysis), which is itself a baseline accessibility good. - Improve: the transcript does not consistently label which host (Phil, Kaylyn, Skye) is speaking — many lines are marked only with a bare ">>" — which means a screen-reader or transcript-only user following along cannot reliably attribute quotes to individuals, unlike a sighted viewer watching the video. Adding speaker labels would close this WCAG 1.3.1 (Info and Relationships) gap. #### Keyboard navigation - Not applicable to this source — the artifact under analysis is a linear audio/video recording and its transcript, not an interactive interface with navigable controls. #### Contrast and readability - Not applicable to this source in its literal sense (no visual text/UI to assess for contrast); the closest relevant control is caption/subtitle contrast on the YouTube player itself, which is outside this transcript's scope. #### Text resizing and reflow - Not applicable to this source — no responsive text layout exists to evaluate; this is audio/video content, not a reflowable document. #### Media and captions - Present: the existence of a full timestamped transcript functions as a caption/transcript accessibility feature (WCAG 1.2.2 - Captions, prerecorded — satisfied via transcript). - Improve: per-speaker timestamps and audio-description-style bracketed cues already appear informally (e.g., "[laughter]", "[music]", "[snorts]") but inconsistently; standardizing these nonverbal cues would help low-hearing users relying on the transcript alone follow tone shifts (e.g., knowing when a comment was joking vs. serious). #### Forms and interactions - Not applicable to this source — no forms, inputs, or interactive elements exist in a podcast/video transcript. #### Standards reference - Maps to WCAG 2.2 AA: 1.2.2 Captions (Prerecorded) — met via transcript; 1.3.1 Info and Relationships — partially unmet due to missing consistent speaker labeling; 1.4.x (contrast/reflow) and 2.1.x (keyboard) — not applicable to this media type. ### 🌍 DEIB Assessment #### Cultural breadth - Present: the episode explicitly compares American, European, and Brazilian evangelical/Catholic contexts, and Root's interview draws on ancient Near Eastern (Israelite, Canaanite) religious history alongside American economic history. - Improve: Root's thesis is built almost entirely from U.S. economic history; explicit engagement with non-U.S. church-growth phenomena (South Korea, Nigeria, Brazil's own Pentecostal boom, discussed only in the unrelated soccer segment) would test whether the fertility-idol framework is universal or America-specific. #### Inclusive language - Present: generally casual, non-technical language accessible to a broad lay audience. - Improve: the term "gringo" is used repeatedly by the hosts in the Brazil segment in a joking register ("if we pray like a gringo then we play like a gringo") without any framing or definition; while quoting a genuine Brazilian popular saying, the hosts' own extended riffing on it ("playing like a gringo," "dribbling") edges toward treating a foreign cultural frame as comedic material without a Brazilian voice present to contextualize it. #### Neurodiversity support - Present: minimal — the news segment jumps rapidly between unrelated topics (mushroom theory → World Cup → European evangelicals → Burge study) with frequent joke-interruptions and cross-talk, which can be difficult to track without visual/chapter cues. - Improve: chapter markers or a written topic index in the show notes would give listeners who need clearer structural signposting (e.g., attention or auditory-processing differences) an easier way to track topic transitions than following cross-talk in real time. #### Representation - Present: the panel includes multiple hosts of different genders discussing the material, and the interview features an academic guest outside the panel's usual banter register. - Improve: no Majority World or non-American voice is present to weigh in directly on the Brazil segment (a Brazilian sports journalist is quoted secondhand but not interviewed) or to test Root's U.S.-centric economic thesis against a non-U.S. case; inviting such a voice would strengthen representational breadth on a topic (global evangelicalism) the episode itself flags as important. #### Psychological safety - Present: the BetterHelp sponsor segment directly names and destigmatizes a specific in-group psychological-safety failure ("Aren't you a Christian? How could you be depressed?"), and the Root interview explicitly addresses pastoral burnout as a structural, not merely personal, problem. - Improve: given the interview's direct engagement with burnout, a specific resource pointer for pastors/ministry leaders experiencing growth-driven burnout (beyond the generic therapy-platform ad) would better serve the audience most likely to be affected by the episode's central argument. ### ✅ Logical Validity #### Strong reasoning - **Analogical reasoning grounded in a named mechanism** (~58:00–1:00:22): Root's Baal/Wall Street and Jezebel/economist analogies are not merely surface resemblance — he supplies Hartmut Rosa's "dynamic stabilization" as the actual theorized mechanism connecting ancient fertility-cult economics to modern capital markets, which is what elevates the comparison from a clever image to a structural argument. - **Falsifiable historical-causal claim** (~1:11:31–1:12:19): "There were no church-growth conferences before the 1970s" is a specific, checkable historical claim (not vague spiritual commentary), and it is the load-bearing evidence for Root's entire periodization — a genuinely strong move because it invites verification rather than assertion. - **Preemptive definitional move** (~1:05:59–1:08:21): by distinguishing "growth of" from "growth into" before making his idolatry claim, Root defuses the obvious rebuttal ("so you're just anti-growth/anti-Great-Commission") in advance — a well-sequenced argumentative structure. - **Model of self-correcting reasoning elsewhere in the same episode** (~20:40): host Phil's explicit "correlation is not causation" catch during the Brazil/World Cup segment shows the show's own standard for causal rigor — a standard the interview segment's GDP-to-church-growth correlation does not fully meet (see Fallacies below), making this a useful internal benchmark. #### Fallacies 1. **Mono-causal / near-post-hoc reasoning on GDP and church growth** — Location: ~1:16:15–1:17:50. Root builds the entire economic-history argument around the correlation between the 1970 end of Gordon's "special century" and the rise of both mainline decline and the church-growth genre, then only afterward adds "I wouldn't want to be that deterministic" when Phil raises the Cold War/civic-religion and immigrant-assimilation counter-explanations. The hedge arrives too late to actually revise the argument's structure — the interview proceeds as if the economic account were primary and the other factors merely additive color. **Fix**: state the claim's actual scope upfront ("a necessary contributing factor among several," not an implied prime mover), and integrate the Cold War/immigration threads into a joint account rather than treating them as afterthoughts raised by the interviewer. 2. **False dichotomy: techno-optimists vs. identitarians** — Location: ~1:22:37–1:24:47. Root presents these as the two failure modes of "do better" church culture, but the typology (drawn from his own denominational experience) omits at least one obvious third category: traditionalist/liturgical-retrieval movements (e.g., Anglican or Orthodox convert circles) that also pursue growth-as-escalation, but through recovered historic liturgy and doctrinal rigor rather than either innovation or affirmation. **Fix**: explicitly frame the two named types as illustrative poles from his own denominational vantage point rather than an exhaustive taxonomy, or add the traditionalist-retrieval case as a third node operating the same underlying capital-logic. 3. **Weak/coincidental analogy risk: the Baal bull and the Wall Street bull** — Location: ~1:01:12. The visual coincidence of bull iconography in both Baal worship and the Wall Street "Charging Bull" statue is rhetorically vivid but is not, by itself, evidence of a genuine structural link — a viewer could be persuaded by the coincidence of imagery rather than by the argued mechanism (dynamic stabilization) Root supplies elsewhere. The interview does not clearly separate "this is a memorable illustration" from "this is evidence." **Fix**: explicitly flag the bull-statue parallel as mnemonic/illustrative rather than evidentiary, and let the Rosa-based mechanism carry the actual argumentative weight. #### Tone of voice - The news/banter segment (through ~49:00) is irreverent, fast-paced, and comedic — frequent joke-stacking, sound effects transcribed as "[laughter]," "[snorts]," "[gasps]," and a live studio audience providing real-time reactions (e.g., the "would you play a video game collecting Jesus mushrooms" bit). - The interview segment shifts to an earnest, intellectually dense but self-deprecating register — Root repeatedly hedges his own authority ("I know enough to fake it here," "I say this in great humility," "I laugh because... I've just created a reality where I can have no friends") even while making a sweeping, provocative theological claim (that many churches worship Baal, not Jesus). This combination of humility-framing and totalizing claim is a recognizable rhetorical pattern in prophetic-critique genres: soften the messenger's authority to make room for a hard claim about the audience. ### 🛡️ DARVO Analysis - Not applicable to this source — there is no abuse allegation, accountability dispute, or accused party under discussion anywhere in the transcript. Root is offering a theological-historical critique of an institutional pattern (church-growth culture), not responding to a personal accusation, so none of Deny/Attack/Reverse-victim-offender apply. The closest adjacent structure — the discussion of whether the NAE could disown its political fringe as "not really evangelicals" (the "no true Scotsman" moment, ~44:31) — is a boundary-definition move, not a DARVO response to an accusation, and is already explicitly named by the hosts as a fallacy rather than left implicit. ## 🎯 Conclusion Root's core claim — that the American church's 50-year fixation on numerical growth is a historically specific, economically-driven idolatry rather than a timeless biblical mandate — is the episode's strongest and most useful contribution: it gives church leaders a non-moralistic, structurally grounded reason to interrogate their own growth pressure, distinct from either "growth is always good" or "growth is always bad." The weakest link is the causal architecture underneath the historical claim (GDP correlation treated as closer to explanation than the evidence, on its own, supports), and the productive next step for a reader is not to adopt Root's periodization uncritically but to test it — against comparative national cases, against the direct genealogical line from the academic Church Growth Movement to the New Apostolic Reformation's business-style resourcing logic, and against one's own institution's actual budget and metric conversations, using Root's "growth of vs. growth into" distinction as the diagnostic rather than the conclusion. ## 🔄 Refactor Appendix — The Idolatry of Church Growth with Andrew Root > Density: 2–5 Literature atoms (H3), 0–3 Permanent candidates (H4). > Defaults: 3 Literature, 1 Permanent. Resonance filter: if you can't > articulate in one line why a claim matters, drop it. > > Konik claim-header rules: present tense, declarative, ≤10 words when > possible, searchable, unique, mirrors annotation focus if present. > > Atomicity: one declarative sentence per atom. "and"/"also" → split. > > Tag pool: #bmf · #addendum · #xref · #articleseed · #storystem · #share · #aphorisms ### 📚 Literature Atoms (H3) #### [H1] Yahweh wants relationship, not escalation > [!quote] ID:rw_root_yahweh_clogs > Yahweh doesn't want clogs in a machine of escalation. Yahweh wants children to be in community with, to be in relationship with. **Context & use**: - ~1:03:34, mid-argument distinguishing Yahweh's kingship model from Egypt/Baal-style cultic escalation systems. - This is the theological pivot point of the whole interview — the counter-image to "growth of" logic, and the seed of the later "growth of vs. growth into" framework. **Tags**: #xref #aphorisms **Highlight**: [view highlight](readwise://) <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ --> #### [H2] Money functions as a god under industrial capitalism > [!quote] ID:rw_root_money_god > Money becomes more powerful than God because money in some sense becomes a god. **Context & use**: - ~1:05:10, following Root's paraphrase of Marx's M-C-M' circuit (money invested in commodities to make more money, without terminal end). - Load-bearing for the book's title claim — this is the mechanism by which "growth" becomes literally idolatrous rather than metaphorically so. **Tags**: #xref **Highlight**: [view highlight](readwise://) <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ --> #### [H3] Jezebel is an economist, not a temptress > [!quote] ID:rw_root_jezebel_economist > Jezebel isn't a sexual temptress, she's an economist. **Context & use**: - ~58:46, reframing the 1–2 Kings Baal narrative away from a sexual-morality reading toward an economic-stabilization reading. - Directly relevant to the WPOCC/NAR cross-reference: this is Root's method for reading ancient religio-economic systems as systems, which is the same lens useful for reading the Church Growth Movement's own economic logic. **Tags**: #xref #addendum **Highlight**: [view highlight](readwise://) <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ --> #### [H4] Techno-optimism believes one program restores growth > [!quote] ID:rw_root_techno_optimist > we're just one program away from getting our growth back **Context & use**: - ~1:23:24, defining the first of Root's two "do better" failure modes. - Directly names the operating assumption of the Church Growth Movement's methodology (right program/pastor/strategy = growth), which is the same assumption underlying much NAR apostolic-network resourcing rhetoric — the strongest single bridge in this transcript to the C. Peter Wagner/NAR cross-reference. **Tags**: #xref #articleseed **Highlight**: [view highlight](readwise://) <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ --> ### 🧠 Permanent Candidates (H4) #### [P1] Escalation without a telos is idolatry, not growth **Claim** (one sentence, Courtney's voice): Any system — church, community, or organization — that measures its own health by continuous escalation of a single capital metric rather than by relational or formational depth has swapped a telos for an idol. **Evidence pointer**: [[#H1]] [[#H2]] — cancer-is-a-form-of-growth-that-kills-you illustration reinforces this same distinction. **Scope & conditions**: Holds for any institution (church, open-source project, community org) whose survival narrative is framed as "grow or die." Breaks down as a critique when the metric in question genuinely tracks a relational/formational outcome rather than raw scale (e.g., tracking depth of mentorship relationships is not the same escalation trap as tracking headcount). **Links** (≥1 with annotation): - [[Church Growth Movement]] — because evidence-for - [[Community metrics culture]] — because applies-in open-source and volunteer-community contexts - [[The New Apostolic Reformation Is Not a Cult]] — because contrasts on scale (NAR's Seven-Mountains resourcing logic is this same idol pursued at the level of national/cultural dominion rather than congregational growth) <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ --> #### [P2] The Church Growth Movement is the NAR's direct methodological ancestor **Claim** (one sentence, Courtney's voice): The New Apostolic Reformation's business-style, metrics-driven, territory-segmented approach to church expansion is best read as the academic Church Growth Movement's own logic carried to its least-restrained conclusion, not as a doctrinal aberration from it. **Evidence pointer**: [[#H4]] — "we're just one program away from getting our growth back" names exactly the operating assumption C. Peter Wagner formalized as a discipline at Fuller before he went on to name and lead the NAR. **Scope & conditions**: Holds as an intellectual-genealogy claim (shared methodology and market logic); does not claim doctrinal identity between mainstream church-growth practitioners and NAR theology (apostles/prophets offices, Seven Mountain Mandate), which are separate claims requiring separate evidence. **Links** (≥1 with annotation): - [[The New Apostolic Reformation Is Not a Cult]] — because extends the cross-reference frame given for this source - [[C. Peter Wagner]] — because evidence-for (Professor of Church Growth at Fuller for 30 years before founding/naming the NAR) - [[#P1]] — because applies-in the specific case of NAR's Seven-Mountains resourcing logic <!-- atomicity: 1 idea ✓ --> ### ✏️ Fleeting Queue - [F1] Does Donald McGavran's original "homogeneous unit principle" already contain the growth-idolatry logic Root critiques, or did Wagner's later systematization introduce it? — worth a dedicated read of McGavran's *Understanding Church Growth* #xref #inbox - [F2] Check whether Root's book directly names the Church Growth Movement/Fuller/Wagner lineage anywhere, or whether that connection is only implicit and needs to be drawn externally for the WPOCC/NAR cross-reference #xref #inbox ### → Things 3 (max 2 actions) - [ ] Read Robert Gordon's *The Rise and Fall of American Growth* (at least the 1870–1970 chapters) to verify Root's periodization independently — background #things - [ ] Skim C. Peter Wagner's Church Growth-era writing (pre-NAR, Fuller period) for direct textual overlap with the "techno-optimist" logic Root names, to firm up the [[The New Apostolic Reformation Is Not a Cult]] cross-reference — research #things <!-- deep-read:sections end --> 📄 **Full text:** [[Full Document Contents/Articles/The Idolatry of Church Growth With Andrew Root.md|The Idolatry of Church Growth With Andrew Root by Holy Post Media]] ## Highlights - [00:57:58] fertility deities represented in the ancient world and why you equate them to where we are in late capitalism today. >> Yeah, I mean, I think that's really true. I like we look at those those pieces in museums and we do, you know, we're we're products post sexual revolution, you know, a a consumer society that's sold products by uh sexual uh titillation, if you will. So, we we always see it through kind of pornographic perspectives, but really it is about kind of economic gains. It's really, you know, like we we even we even say this when we read uh first and second Kings. You know, we talk about the Jezebel spirit as if it's a sexual kind of reality. And I think the better way to read that is Jezebel isn't a sexual temptress, she's an economist. I mean, she's like a top of the field, uh you know, Harvard economist and she's ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kyj68kkr8mq1vac1rc48490y)) - Note: [H1] Root's signature reframe: "Jezebel isn't a sexual temptress, she's an economist" — the Baal cult imports a *stabilization system* promising escalating prosperity, not merely sexual temptation. This is the interpretive method that lets Root read ancient fertility-cult economics and modern church-growth economics as the same underlying pattern. NOTABLE for the NAR cluster because "the Jezebel spirit" is a staple of NAR spiritual-warfare vocabulary (see the Queen of Heaven proponent material) — here a mainstream-evangelical scholar re-reads the same figure as a critique of prosperity/growth-as-idol rather than a demon to war against. The strongest bridge to the C. Peter Wagner / Church Growth Movement cross-reference (Wagner taught Church Growth at Fuller for 30 years before naming the NAR). - Tags: atom/zettel/z1, church-growth-movement, atom/literature/h1 - [01:22:37] to use all the strategies of corporations and businesses things like that. And you talk about this coming in two forms, and you draw this from a another source, but techno-optimists and identitarians. So, relatively briefly, can you define what those I know it's a big question. What those two things are, but more specifically how they manifest in the church? >> Yeah, yeah. Well, I laugh because it's just going to it it I I've just created a reality where I can have no friends. Like, I'm just making everyone angry with me. But I do I mean, in the in the kind of church world that I'm in and in the denominations that that that I find myself in, you find these people. And you find the techno-optimists who essentially feel like we're just one program away from getting our growth back. You know, like, we can get our ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01kyj696ffdx3rxjabb1mgvd5q)) - Note: [H2] Names the "techno-optimist" operating assumption Root critiques: that the right program, pastor, or strategy will restore numeric growth — "we're just one program away." This is functionally identical to the methodology the academic Church Growth Movement (Donald McGavran, then C. Peter Wagner at Fuller) formalized, and which Wagner carried directly into the New Apostolic Reformation he later named. The cross-cluster payoff: Root diagnoses growth-as-idol from *inside* mainstream evangelicalism without ever mentioning the NAR, yet describes the exact intellectual lineage that produced it. Read alongside [[The New Apostolic Reformation Is Not a Cult]] — Wagner's Seven Mountains "business finances the other mountains" logic is the techno-optimist assumption operationalized. - Tags: atom/literature/h2, idolatry-of-metrics ## Links - [[3. Resources/Permanent Notes/Growth Pressure Converts Institutional Mission Into Revenue Logic]] — extends: numeric growth can become the test of faithfulness before revenue becomes the explicit institutional demand. - [[3. Resources/MOCs/Faith & Theology MOC]] — belongs-to: ecclesiology and the theology of institutional growth.