Introduction: When Mission Becomes Functionally Godless
Most of us leading evangelical churches would never dream of calling ourselves atheists. We preach Christ, we pray, we plan missions because we genuinely want people to meet Jesus. But if you sit in enough strategy and church growth weekends, you start to notice something subtly unsettling. While there certainly is the language of the church being used, a time of worship and prayer, much of everything else is not too different from what you might find at a business conference. At the very end someone offers a quick prayer “Lord, bless our plans” and everyone goes home feeling like they’ve been faithful. Yet a nagging question remains: if everything we just mapped out “worked,” would we be able to say God actually did anything, or would the whole thing be explainable in terms of technique, psychology, and branding? That’s the question this piece wants to poke at. Not to sneer at planning or to baptize laziness, but to name a quiet reality: it is possible to ask God to bring in the results and still run our ministries in a way that would basically work if God were not real. Call it “practical atheism.”
One of the most obvious and influential sources of this is in the person of Charles Finney. Finney did not invent that problem, but his “new measures” gave it a powerful shape and memory in American revivalism, and a lot of our current strategies are still drinking from that stream. This is not a grumbling complaint against Finney specifically, or what many call the church growth or exponential movements. What it is, is a prayerful question as to whether our means to the mission of the Church have replaced the true source of it all.
Symptoms: How Practical Atheism Shows Up in Mission
One of the first places this shows up is in how we ask, “Does it work?” That’s not a bad question; it’s just a terrible first question. In a lot of ministry literature and conference chatter, “what works” becomes the unquestioned dogma, with faithfulness quietly assumed but rarely examined. We borrow language from the business world best practices, scalable models, proven pipelines and then sprinkle some Bible verses and spiritual platitudes about the great commission over the top. The underlying assumption sounds a lot like Finney’s: if you use the right means in the right way, you should expect the right spiritual results. Revival is “the predictable outcome of proper measures.” That logic now lives on in our church messaging, our pathways to programs and our haunted‑house‑level control over the Sunday “experience.” When our cues, lighting, and language are designed so precisely that almost any outcome can be produced on schedule, we should at least pause and ask: which of these core strategies could a secular nonprofit copy with almost no changes?
Another subtle sign is the way God becomes a kind of brand asset. We’ve all heard and said lines like “God gave us this vision,” sometimes as a genuine testimony, sometimes as a way of putting our plans beyond question. Finney defended his new measures with real conviction, he was sure they were necessary tools for reaching people, and many after him have done the same with whatever their version of the anxious bench is. Today it might be a particular worship style, a pipeline, or a growth strategy. We tell story after story about people who “went through our process” and came out changed. The danger isn’t in the stories; it’s in where they point. Do they draw attention to the sheer, free work of God, or to the cleverness of our funnel? If we stripped out our logos and trademark language, would anyone listening still be able to tell that God, not our brand, was the main actor?
Finally, practical atheism shows up in how we respond when the graph stops sloping up and to the right. This is something that I fall prey to at times. When attendance flattens, giving dips, or the energy in the room feels off, most of us feel a familiar panic rise in our chests. The instinct is to find a new model, see “what sticks”, or copy what’s working down the road. In Finney’s framework, if revival isn’t happening, it’s because someone is not using the right measures or using them with enough passion. Many of us, without thinking, have absorbed that same instinct: if the system is lagging, we must need a better system. What rarely comes naturally is calling the church to fasting, repentance, or rigorous self‑examination. It is far easier to fix the optics than to face the possibility that God might be withholding visible “success” for our sanctification. When growth slows, do we first reach for a different playbook, or do we fall on our faces and ask whether the Lord might be trying to get our attention?
Roots: The Theological Imagination Behind Practical Atheism
Underneath all of this is a particular way of imagining God and the Church. One root is a kind of functional deism. On paper, we believe in a God who is all powerful, can work miracle and knows all things; in practice, we lean on a God who set up certain “laws” of ministry and now expects us to work them. Finney captures this mindset bluntly when he insists that revival is “not a miracle,” but a natural outcome when the right means are used. That doesn’t mean he denied God’s existence or sovereignty, but it does mean he thought in fairly mechanical terms: do the right things, in the right way, and you should expect the right results. A lot of modern leadership material assumes something similar. Once the strategy is set, the right people are in place, and the systems are running as they should, we expect the ministry engine to behave itself. Divine interruption becomes the exception, not the norm.
There’s also a thin doctrine of the Church at work. When the local church is primarily imagined as an organization with a mission statement instead of as the Body of Christ gathered at font and table, it makes sense to treat it like any other organization. Finney’s focus fell often on “the meeting” rather than on a particular congregation’s ongoing life. The big event whether in a town square or a church was the center of communal life. That emphasis has filtered down to us in the form of the endlessly optimized Sunday “experience” and the traveling conference. Meanwhile, the slow, sacramental life of a concrete community; washing people in baptism, feeding them at the Lord’s Table, visiting the sick, bearing one another’s burdens, sits in the background. When the “real action” is happening on the stage, and the sacraments are add‑ons, we’ve already adopted a self-produced revivalist imagination, even if we’ve never read Finney.
The way we talk about the Holy Spirit reveals another root. In a lot of evangelical spaces, the Spirit is language for energy: “God really moved” often means “the room was buzzing, and I felt like it went good.” Finney’s lectures on revival tend to describe the Spirit’s work in moral and psychological categories. Divine persuasion meeting human decision. There is, in his scheme, less room for the Spirit to say “no,” to withdraw, to discipline the church, or to confound a carefully planned campaign. When that imagination trickles down, we begin to think of the Spirit as the power that makes our methods effective, rather than the Lord who might blow them up. We plan, the Spirit fuels, and the only thing that would cause us to change course is a drop in visible results, not a word from God.
Towards Needing God Again: Constructive Practices
So what might it look like, practically, to run ministries that make no sense without God? One starting point is rediscovering practices that look gloriously “unproductive” on a spreadsheet. Churches can decide, as an act of faith, that major decisions will be wrapped in fasting and prayer, not as a last‑minute add‑on but as the main work. That may mean delaying a building project, a campus launch, or a new program because the people of God have not yet had time to wait on the Lord together. It may mean building silence into elder meetings and staff retreats, not just brainstorming and whiteboarding. None of that will make a great conference talk. It will, however, force us to confront whether we actually believe God speaks, leads, and intervenes.
Another move is to re‑center Word and sacrament as the Church’s first “strategy.” Instead of treating preaching as content that supports the program, we could recover it as the moment when the risen Christ addresses His people through Scripture. Instead of letting baptism be tagged onto the end of a service, we could let it shape how we talk about conversion: as a passage into a new community and a new identity, not just a personal decision. Instead of treating the Lord’s Table as a quarterly speed bump, we could make it the weekly heart of our gathering, where mission begins and ends. Revivalistic patterns, from Finney onward, tend to decenter the Table in favor of the meeting. A sacramental imagination does the opposite: the meeting is in service to font and table, not the other way around.
We can also choose to embrace holy inefficiency. That might mean slowing leadership processes, inviting more people into discernment, or telling the truth when we don’t know what to do next. It might mean walking away from techniques that “work” emotional manipulation, fear‑based preaching, relentless hype, because they damage the Body, even if they produce decisions. In a world shaped by Finney’s confidence in new measures and our own addiction to the latest model, saying “no” to an effective tactic for the sake of the Church’s health is a profoundly theological act. It is us saying, “We would rather appear unsuccessful than wound Christ’s Body.”
Finally, we can put metrics back in their place. Numbers matter; they tell part of the story. But they are not the judge of the Church. Instead of using them as a silent verdict—“we’re winning” or “we’re failing”—we can use them as prompts for prayer: “Lord, what are you saying to us here?” Alongside attendance and giving, we can start to name other signs of grace: reconciled relationships, long‑term faithfulness, growth in generosity, courage in suffering. In a culture trained by revival reports and conference highlight reels to only notice the spectacular, this is training our eyes to see the quiet work of God.
Pastoral Examination: Questions for Leaders and Teams
None of this lands unless it becomes personal. For those of us who lead, there are some uncomfortable but necessary questions: Where do I feel most panicked in ministry, and what does that reveal about where I’m trusting strategies more than the Spirit? Which of my habits; sermon prep routines, counseling practices, leadership decisions, would look utterly foolish if God were not alive and active? For leadership teams: Can we name one area of church life we currently run on autopilot? What would repentance there actually look like? When we look back over the last year of big decisions, which ones were clearly shaped by prayer, waiting, and a readiness to be wrong, not just by urgency and imitation? And for whole congregations: If an outsider watched our life together for a month, where would they see that we actually *need* God, not just believe in Him?
If some of these questions sting, that’s not necessarily bad news. Finney was right about at least one thing: God really does work through means, and there are ways of arranging our common life that welcome or resist His work. The invitation is not to throw away planning, preaching, or passion, but to let the Spirit of God re‑baptize them.
Conclusion: From Strategy‑Driven to Presence‑Dependent Mission
The problem is not that we care about mission, or that we want to plan wisely. The problem is how easy it has become to build churches and ministries that run beautifully on principles any practical atheist could affirm. Finney stands in this story as both a caution and a mirror: a man aflame with evangelistic zeal who helped normalize the idea that spiritual outcomes are the predictable result of the right tools in the right hands. Many of us have inherited that confidence without realizing it. The way forward is not to romanticize the past or demonize every modern method, but to become communities whose most treasured practices; preaching, prayer, baptism, the Supper, confession, healing, patient love, only make sense if Jesus Christ is risen and reigning. That might start very simply: a season of fasting and prayer before the next big initiative, a fresh look at how your church treats Word and sacrament, an honest conversation among leaders about where you’ve trusted systems more than the Spirit. The question underneath all of it is disarmingly simple: in our mission as a church, do we actually need God?