Southern Baptist contextualization in the Pacific Northwest: Historical perspective and strategic prospects for effective church planting

This dissertation examines the historical factors which contributed to rapid Southern Baptist growth in the Pacific Northwest during the 1940s and 1950s. It also recasts these factors in terms relevant to today's context for the purpose of guiding church planting efforts over the next two decades. The significance of this study lies in the fact that growth stagnated during the 1960s through the 1980s, although methodology did not change. This circumstance indicates that the context for church planting changed, but northwest Southern Baptists failed to recontextualize successfully the principles which contributed to rapid church planting during the 1940s and 1950s.;The basic sources used for the retrospective section, chapters 1-3, included the writings of early Southern Baptist leaders in the Pacific Northwest, taped interviews with these early leaders, Southern Baptist papers from the period, and personal interviews with leaders from that time.;The basic sources used for the analysis and proposal sections, chapters 4-6, were drawn from sociological studies of Baby Boomers and Generation X, material from the field of world missions concerning contextualization, current thinking by contemporary church planters, and interviews with experts in the field of contemporary church planting. The writer also drew on his personal experiences growing up in a Southern Baptist church in the Pacific Northwest.;The research distilled principles of growth from the historical events, especially sociological principles, that contributed to the success of Southern Baptist methods. These understandings were then applied to current sociological conclusions about population groups likely to be in a majority during the next two decades.;The conclusions underlying the proposal for effective development of new work in the next two decades were: effective church planting requires the use of methods that have been contextualized for the target group, expanded lay involvement in ministry is a key to rapid church growth, vision casting by people who model core values is the most important contribution of leadership for the mobilization of laity for ministry, and less formal models of church life are more likely to be successful in reaching northwesterners than the more traditional models advocated by many Southern Baptist denominational leaders.