Yesterday I had a chance to meet and talk with friends who are mature Christians struggling with the direction their local church is taking. Apparently this church is yet another in a growing population that has left behind classical evangelical commitments to pursue the seeker-sensitive, marketing model of church growth. While I understood and affirmed their hurts, I encouraged them to stay the course and stay in faith. After all, we believe that the church is a supernatural institution; men may try to hijack it, but Christ is its head. Since the Church is God’s plan, we should remain in it and cry out to God for direction and help.
I doubt my arguments were persuasive; I couldn’t help but feel that they thought me to be at best naïvely blind or, at worse, co-opted by money or position. Yet, neither of us could resolve the matter. At the end of the conversation, we agreed that we were limited in our options. After all, where else could we go?
I remained troubled by the conversation, and later, after returning home, I thought I would do some more investigating. I knew they attended a church that made much of its reformed theology and conservative evangelical roots, so how bad could it be? I looked the church up on-line, and when website opened, I felt as though I was kicked in the stomach. The admittedly beautiful site resembles more a retail store than a church. The graphics remind one of the opening scenes of the Extreme Home Makeover television program.
As I browsed each page I became increasingly depressed. This wasn’t Christian evangelism and preaching, this was life-style marketing. And yet I forced myself to ask, what’s so wrong? What’s my problem? Am I jealous? Or am I just an old curmudgeon, out of touch with reality? After all, they repeatedly claim to be about the work of Christ. They seem to be reaching people. Isn’t that what church and ministry is about? What is wrong with me?
Yet I couldn’t shake the feeling, and when I clicked on the screen titled ‘Beliefs,’ it hits me. The page is devoid of any enumerated beliefs. In their place are paragraphs of values. Beliefs require a stand, a committed submission to an objective, external Truth. Values are modified emotions, an expression of what we feel. While in some ways synonymous, at their root they are dramatically different. And this is enormously significant in a church context. Beliefs have their source in Scripture; values have their source in people. Scripture is eternal, certain and fixed, because it was authored by God. Values are temporary, vague and changeable, since people who are corrupted by sin write them. When a church replaces beliefs with values, know this—that church has abandoned theology for the sake of culture. I cannot help but remember what an old minister once said to me long ago, “whatever we compromise to keep, we lose.” When theology is compromised to win the culture, it is only a matter of time before the church will be that culture. And that will be anything but Christian.
Yet now, what now do I tell my friends? Or for that matter, what do I tell any of the numerous individuals I interact with who are wounded, hurt and frightened by this change in the church landscape? The evangelical protestant church in the United States has been thoroughly infected by this cancer of entrepreneurial ministry. Marketers and experience have replaced pastors and the Word. These churches offer lifestyle improvements like Advil offers pain medication: All this can be yours if you come to our place—find purpose and meaning for your life, make new friends, and do good things! They avoid discussions of sin, hell, and rebellion and just welcome you into the “family.” Forget teaching the Bible and theology; that’s for those “churchy” places that wear “religious masks.” Instead, these churches are “relevant;” they understand. Just tell them your needs, and they’ll help you fulfill them!
How did we get here? Didn’t anyone see this coming? Does anyone care? And what do we do? Where do we go? I wish I had an easy answer. All I have is a strange, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, with a frightened foreboding that the problem might just be me. Which means it demands prayer. And study. And a word from the Lord. Would you join me in waiting on Him and petitioning Him in prayer? May a revelation of His truth come forth to all of us—church marketers and old curmudgeons! May God have mercy on us all.
