Can a church be too seeker-friendly? How big can your tent be, before it’s not a tent anymore?
A few years ago, Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church put out a “brand book”–which to me sounded like instructions for creating a content-free church.
La-dee-dah, we believe in everything, we believe in nothing, of course you can bring an idol into the sanctuary…
We want to bring people in, of course we do. But there’s no point in bringing them into a church where Jesus Christ is not the one and only Lord of lords.
The opening chapter of Matt Walsh’s book “Church of Cowards” does an excellent portrait of this kind of thing. He presents a parable of an anti-Christian army arriving in the USA with the intent of obliterating Christianity and Christians. They wind up going to various different churches, from low-evangelical to high-liturgical, and decide they may as well go home because they can’t find any real Christianity to obliterate. I’m oversimplifying and (paradoxically) exaggerating the parable, which Walsh handles much more tellingly. He then goes on to do a wonderful analysis of both modern society and the state of Christianity within (or outside) it. The subtitle of the book is “A Wake-Up Call to Complacent Christians.” I highly recommend the whole book.
Maybe I ought to review it.
Absolutely true. This drifting is very dangerous. I just finished an article of warning about that very same thing. It bothers me to see so much of the prattle that is going on in some of the “churches”.
We live in an age of sound bites and empty catch phrases. You would think that the churches would know better.