Tom’s Big Picture

In my criticisms of the megachurch/seeker-friendly movement, I try hard to avoid reactionary thinking. There are some people who, seeing the problems associated with the sort of growth a megachurch brings, find themselves opposed to growth itself in reaction. My opinion is that a healthy church is a growing church- and by “growing” I mean in numerical numbers over a long period of time, not short-term trends. I also do not mean “growing” in the postmodern sense of constantly seeking new vanities, fads, programs, etc. I’m talking about numbers, people, here. We have this on Biblical authority:

Isaiah 9:7: Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever. The zeal of the LORD of hosts will perform this.

I have bolded the word increase. In calculus terms, the first derivitive of church numbers will always be positive. We have it on Scriptural authority that the Church will always grow.

What is the engine of this growth historically? It’s not evangelism and it’s not missions, in the programmatic sense of those words. It’s Christian families having Christian children. God has clearly ordained the family, the seed of believers, as His preferred method of growing the church. Missions, evangelism and revivals are secondary historically.  The most efficient way to grow the church is to simply encourage Christians to have more children; of course, infants don’t pay tithes that support purchasing basketball arenas for your “church”.

Baptists, sometime early in American history, drifted into a sort of hyper-individualism, where one’s faith was not based so much on the objective truth of Scripture and the dispensation of Grace through the ordinances of God’s Church, but rather on a subjective emotional experience and “journey”.

In Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, it is the Scots-Irish “heart religion”, of camp meetings, invitations, and dramatic emotional turning points; this Baptist faith was tailor-made for the Celtic soul, and it turned a country of Scottish Presbyterians into Baptists in a generation. It was no longer enough to be simply born into the faith like most Christians historically, Protestant or Catholic, but rather each individual had to decide for himself which path to follow. Concepts that are rather loose Biblically (”a personal relationship with Jesus Christ”), and the attendent emotional dramatics associated with a heart-centered faith, began to replace the primacy of Scripture- if not formally (as Baptists have always been doctrinally studious), then at least practically by the retail evangelist.

This had some good effects. In the short-term, it tended to correct gross errors made by some who believed the faith of their parents was automatically valid for them (though, it must be stated that this was their error, as they would receive no sanction from any church, Baptist or not, for this position) . In the long run, however, this focus on individualism would lead to a focus on “hell avoidance” as a priority over everything else.

The logic runs something like this: people are dying without Christ, and we are dooming them to eternal loss if we do not do everything possible to turn them back. That means we need to distill the Gospel down to its bare minimum to maximize its appeal, and everything else beyond this minimum is negotiable. Now, for a while the Church coasted on centuries of tradition, and as the health of society generally improved between the 1700’s and the 1800’s (the 1800’s of the Victorians was a much more conservative and healthy society than the effete Enlightenment idealism of the 1700’s), this change in priorities had no effect. However, as the great cultural decline of the 1900’s began to take place, this change would have its effect.

The 1900’s saw the mass-commidization of everything: banking, retail, restaurants, even churches. There’s nothing particularly ground-breaking about the megachurch- it’s just the least common denominator in taste scaled up, no more significant than McDonald’s. Like McDonald’s, it’s mediocre, consistent and predictable. It’s an ok place to eat if there’s not a better choice available, and you know what you’re going to get. But nobody expects McDonald’s to become an authority on good food or release a recipe book.

In the same way, Rick Warren and Bill Hybels have appealed to the least common denominator of church leadership: the appeal of raw numbers, bigger facilities, bigger budgets and the human vanity of catching the bandwagon and pursuing the latest fad. And just like McDonald’s, their success is based on appealing to man’s weaknesses instead of his real needs. We don’t need a greasy hamburger, but it sure tastes better than steamed brocolli. And we don’t need a self-help sermon, but it makes us feel better than the offense of Christ crucified for sinners.

McDonald’s has a legitimate excuse: the market. Its purpose is to make money, and the shortest way to that destination is to appeal to our gluttony, not meet our nutritional needs. The Church, however, is supposed to be about the business of what we need, not what we want (the seeker-friendly word for this is “felt needs”).

In brief, here are the factors leading to the megachurch ascendancy:

1. Dissatisfaction with God’s provision of growth through the children of believers and supplemental evangelism/missions, switching a balanced approach with individual-centered “heart religion” entirely focused on numbers. 

2. The reductionist approach of 1) sufficiently simplifies the operation of the church to allow for an industrial scaleup by the megachurch pastors.

Rick Warren is merely taking heart religion to its natural end with ruthless efficiency.

I’m not necessarily opposed to industrial scale-up. Standardization and mass economy can lead to improvements in quality with a reduction in cost. It is not unthinkable that a technological breakthrough of some sort could happen for the Church- if you’re a postmillenialist (as I am starting to lean), then it seems downright necessary.

But are Rick Warren and the seeker-friendlies leading this “Second Reformation” as they claim? Let us focus on results, not rhetoric.

We are now starting to see the first complete generation coming out of the Church who were entirely raised on the megachurch methodology of self-focused worship, self-help sermons and infotainment religion. And statistically, the Church has failed them.

Josh McDowell, the author of Evidence That Demands a Verdict, has recently written a book called The Last Christian Generation.  This book is based mostly on a study conducted by the Barna Group (a Christian pollster) of teens in youth groups at “born again” churches.  Remember, these are kids who attend church.  Here are the findings:

Conclusions:

1. I think we must question the whole “seeker sensitive”, megachurch genre of authors. In my opinion, they have lost all credibility (I hear Rick Warren is worried about discipleship now in his church- which is great, except where’s the “sorry guys, guess I was wrong about watering down the message” memo?). For twenty-odd years, the church has been marketing itself to felt needs and pushing hard doctrine and Bible study under the rug. And now we see the fruit: we have a generation coming out of the church who have no idea what being a Christian even means. If the church can be compared to a tree, it is as if we have been sold a fertilizer that grew the branches (as toning down the offense of the cross will certainly draw greater numbers) but killed the fruit. And now, instead of admitting the mistake, we are just doing more of the same, expecting a different result. That’s a popular and useful definition of insanity!

2. Dave Ramsey talks about how the “me generation” attitude towards debt and consumption leads to the bondage of debt slavery today- and Ramsey’s prescription is not a quick fix, just hard work and no easy way out: as Dave says, “My advice comes from God and grandma.” We need to be looking to our grandparents and great-grandparents, the oldest in the church, for the wisdom and Biblical instruction of the old-time-religion that has sustained a Christian people for 400 years in the American South. That’s the only way to recover our priceless inheritance, before it’s too late, from the fruit in our young people that the megachurch, seeker-sensitive methodologies have wrought.

I think, in general, as we look at what has happened over the last 50 years, we have to give our grandparents and great-grandparents a lot of credit; they were right about nearly everything and the Baby Boomers, who thought they would change the world, were mistaken.

In other words, the doctrinal crisis in the church right now demands a big, fat “undo” button.  It’s as if we had this beautifully formatted document in Microsoft Office, and then some chubby guy in a Hawiian shirt walks up and offers to “improve” it.  He adds lots of clip art, logos and cutesy fonts, but deletes the text, which was the whole point of the document anyway.  Our first reaction shouldn’t be to try and “work with” or “manage” his innovations- we need to find the undo button, and fast.

We need to dig out the worship music of the 1930’s, the children’s Sunday school curriculum of the 1930’s, and everything else we can find to undo this damage before it’s too late.  Only once we’ve undone the damage by starting over can we begin to move forward with real, instead of false, progress.

“We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.” - C. S. Lewis