Johnson says it better than I have, so please keep reading. I once asked an advocate of that unbiblical church growth paradigm, in a seminary classroom setting, what he would do if elderly people showed up at his church.  He said, “We’re not targeting them.” What a bizarre and unbiblical answer to the question.

Here are the copied portions of Johnson’s article against churches targeting specific groups of people :

Aim the ministry at one type of person and, behold, one ends up with a church made up of one kind of person. Every noncowboy who walks into a cowboy church immediately thinks, “This is not for me,” or “I don’t belong here.” This is exactly what my aging mother said when she walked into her church in Laguna Woods, California, and saw a “praise band” up front. “They don’t care about the old people anymore,” she said. “They’re running us off.”

Churches ought not to adopt the cultural preferences of any single demographic in the church. To do so is to give an unwarranted preference to one group and unnecessarily alienate everyone else. What should the church do? What did Protestant churches do for the last four hundred years? Or two hundred years? Or one hundred years prior to 1980? [....]  A church that targets a specific demographic, be it the young or the old, cowboys or surfers, rockers or hip-hoppers, forfeits apostolicity. Why? Because the apostles did not target specific kinds of people. They cast their gospel nets widely, and their churches, as a consequence, were heterogeneous [not homogeneous].

The church in Jerusalem, as Luke describes it, contained Hellenistic Jews as well as Judean Jews, whose cultural differences were enough that tensions developed between them (Acts 6:1-6). The apostle Paul found it necessary to address the discrimination of Jewish Christians against Gentile Christians (Gal. 2:11-14). The churches of the apostles featured the employed and the unemployed (2 Thess. 3:10-12), Jew and Greek, slave, master, and free, as well as male and female (Gal. 3:28).The apostles found themselves addressing matters of propriety regarding older men and younger men, older women and younger women (1 Tim. 5:1-2; Titus 2:1-8). They had to deal with the conduct and concerns of singles and married people (1 Cor. 7), of the formerly married and families (1 Tim. 5:3-16), of children and parents (Eph. 6:1-4; Col. 3:20-21), of the rich and the rest (1 Tim. 6:17-19; James 2:1-10). Apostolic churches were not homogenous units. They were generationally, ethnically, socially, culturally, and economically diverse [emphasis mine]. Commenting on the three members of the Philippian church to whom we are introduced in Acts 16 (the wealthy Lydia from Asia Minor; a poor slave girl, probably a Greek or a foreigner; and the jailer, probably a retired Roman jailer, and a member of what we would call the middle class), John Stott remarks, “It would be hard to imagine a more disparate group than the business woman, the slave girl, and the gaoler. Racially, socially, and psychologically they were worlds apart. Yet all three were changed by the same gospel and were welcomed into the same church.” “Did the early church separate itself out into units of the like-minded in terms of ethnicity, class, and language?” asks David Wells. “It did not,” he answers forcefully.

We have had several new people attending the church, lately, and we are very thankful for that. We hope to take a group photo in a couple of weeks, so that we can include that on our first mass mailing. Please pray for the growth and health of New Covenant Church. There have been many good developments over the last several months, which give us cause to praise God for His work in our midst.

Your brother in Christ,

Pastor Scott

My great uncle called traditionalism, “Churchianity.” May the Lord deliver us, and keep us, from that; while we strive to maintain and promote that which is best, regarding our Christian traditions.

Scott