Winter appeared to be unable or unwilling to explain how his vision of churches deliberately seeking “a certain social level” differed substantially from segregationist stances of old. Predictably, some of the white South African delegation at Lausanne appropriated Winter’s speech as an endorsement of apartheid. Winter claimed he was appalled, but he had little reason to be surprised.27 At a time when many evangelical churches remained functionally closed to African Americans, church growth theorists did not explain how their vision was meaningfully distinct from the long-standing theological
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