![]() ![]() Reflecting on this event, Towns later wrote, "A 99-page term paper built self-esteem. One term paper written for this teacher was unremarkable for its content but highly remarkable for its length - the paper filled ninety-nine handwritten pages. During this year, his teacher challenged him to make the honor roll and, perhaps most important for his future, to write. Towns' academic record remained undistinguished until his seventh-grade year. Despite the difficulties of his home life, Towns earned perfect-attendance pins for fourteen consecutive years. When Elmer Towns, Jr., was in first grade, a door-to-door salesperson introduced him to Sunday School. This habit depleted the family's income and eventually took the senior Towns' life. The values embraced by Towns' family were those of the Southern middle class. The senior Towns worked as a hardware clerk in Savannah, Georgia. This capacity to apply sociological principles to local-church ministries without compromising an essentially fundamentalist theology has been a chief characteristic of Towns' entire career.Įlmer Leon Towns, Jr., was born to Elmer Leon Towns, Sr., and Erin McFaddin Towns on October 21, 1932. Towns, however, treated their insights as bases for more effective church growth. Richard Niebuhr, and David Moberg (see, e.g., Towns, 1967). Many fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals had rejected or ignored the social understandings of the church proposed by Ernst Troeltsch, H. Later, from platforms in Christian higher education, Towns established himself as a well-respected advocate for achieving church growth through effective organization and leadership.Įlmer Towns' focus on congregational growth-patterns flowed not only from his passion for evangelism but also from his application of sociological insights to church growth. Magazine had dubbed Sunday School "the most wasted hour of the week" (Shrader, 1957, p. One particular article, "The Ten Largest Sunday Schools in the United States," led to a series of articles and a book that focused on the dynamics of rapidly-growing conservative and fundamentalist churches in an era when Writing for periodicals aimed both at ministers and at lay-people, Towns popularized Sunday School growth strategies to a broad cross-section of fundamentalist, conservative-evangelical, and Charismatic Christians. American Christians, Elmer Leon Towns, Jr., had a passion for large churches. Decades before megachurches became popular among U.S. ![]()
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