The errors of the Seeker movement come home to roost

The megachurch seeker movement has turned the visible church into an unrecognizable counterfeit. What we are seeing today is the fallout from this movement, which I outlined in How Dan Southerland’s seeker-strategy shapeshifted the Church. I shared my own story of how as a church communications director for a seeker church, the Lord graciously opened my eyes to the damage we were inflicting on the sheep. (I also encourage you to read, The Rejection of Sola Scriptura: The Seeker-Driven Movement’s Core Error.)

From church marketing, to “seeker-friendly” or “seeker-sensitive” strategies, the visible Church still seems to want to make church all about the “unchurched.” Why is that? Why do we think being part of a church is the end-all “wow!” goal of evangelism? What happens to the saints hoping to be sanctified when church is all about goats rather than sheep? Those terms aren’t mine; Jesus called humans goats and sheep.

The stated goal of seeker-friendly churches is reaching the lost, which is a noble cause. However, the methods that have traditionally been used are based on engaging their fleshly desires rather than their spiritual need. One tactic has been marketing, as in profiling consumers, finding out what their “felt needs” are, and then creating a product (church programs, messages from the pulpit, etc.), to appeal to the target audience. Church growth guru George Barna, says that marketing for the church is vital to growing the church.

But that’s not what Scripture says.

Jesus needed no such marketing gurus to reach the lost. He simply told them to believe and repent, and follow Him. No smoke machines, no emotional manipulation by dramatic music and teary-eyed altar calls, with “heads bowed, no peeking, I see that hand in the second row.” He simply gave them Truth of who He is.

An article, Four Unintended Consequences of the Megachurch Movement – And How To Solve Them by Steven Whitlow over at Clear Truth Media caught my eye today and I am sharing a part of it, hoping you’ll dive in and read the rest:

The hype (of the seeker movement) wasn’t worth the long-term damage. My realization of this came in a management team meeting in the early 2010s. I, in my mid-twenties, was pastoring and preaching in a church of well over 8,000 people. We were having a meeting about the kids ministry and I asked a simple question: “We’ve had some of these kids for 18 years now, what do they know?”

The answer was that they knew very little. Sure, they knew our mission statement and where the pop fountain was, but little else. It dawned on me that we had failed them miserably.

Such an answer to this simple question is a snapshot into what was happening in the American Church across the country at that time. Since then, the unintended consequences of the megachurch have started to be revealed.

Here are four of them.

Unintended Consequence #1: Church as a product. 

A me-centered church was ripe to fall to self-serving humanistic thinking. We were setting ourselves up for failure without really knowing the impending doom our nation would face as it struggled to figure out its identity apart from God.

The seeker sensitive church built self-service into its very foundations. How could we challenge people to repent of their feelings when we had spent the last two decades telling them how much they mattered and how special they were?

Unintended Consequence #2: Doctrine as secondary. 

We replaced solid Biblical teaching with self-help Ted-talks. Sure they often referenced the Bible, but there is a big difference between using Bible verses and preaching the text.

The seeker movement managed to stay somewhat theologically sound for a decade or two, not because it grew former unbelievers into well-instructed, mature disciples, but because it inherited a group of mature believers who had been previously well-instructed.

But after twenty years of self-help sermons, even those formerly mature believers were now sufficiently doctrinally-emaciated that they were ripe for the progressive infiltration of the church.

Read the rest of Four Unintended Consequences of the Megachurch Movement – And How To Solve Them here.