Doing church
To achieve the goal of balance among the five purposes (fellowship, discipleship, worship, ministry, and evangelism), Rick Warren organized the Purpose Driven church around two concepts. According to Warren, the Life Development Process is the “what we do” at Saddleback. Circles of Commitment illustrate the “who we do it with.” Circles of Commitment contain four concentric circles surrounding a core. The goal is to move low commitment/maturity people from the outer circle to high commitment/maturity people at the core.[1]
In this concept of “who we do it with,” the outer circle represents the community or unchurched where the purpose of evangelism occurs. This is a pool of lost people that occasionally attend but have made no commitment to Jesus Christ or the church.[2]
The second circle just inside the outer circle is the crowd or regular attenders and who may be believers or nonbelievers. Their commitment extends only to attendance of a weekly worship service and fulfills the worship purpose of the church.[3]
The third circle is comprised of official members, called the congregation, that are committed to fellowship. To move into this circle, one must have received Christ, been baptized, attended the membership class, and signed a membership covenant.[4]
In the fourth circle as we move inward are the committed that take their faith seriously but are not actively serving in ministry within the church. They are dedicated to growing in discipleship which includes prayer and giving. To be in this group, one must take a spiritual maturity class and sign a maturity covenant card which requires a daily quiet time, tithing ten percent of their income, and being active in a small group.[5]
The central area surrounded by the four outer circles is the core group that is considered as having the deepest level of commitment to ministering to others. The requirements for admission to this group include a third level of training; completion of a personality, skills, and gifts assessment; having a personal ministry interview; being commissioned as a lay minister at Saddleback; and attending a monthly meeting of the core group.[6]
The Life Development Process (“what we do”) is designed to lead people from the outer circle to the core through education and assimilation. The process is visually described as a baseball diamond. Each base represents a level of commitment: first base is membership, second is maturity, third is ministry, and home plate is missions. Warren described the goal of his Life Development Process.
Our goal is to help people develop a lifestyle of evangelism, worship, fellowship, discipleship, and ministry. We want to produce doers of the Word, not hearers only—to transform, not merely inform…Our ultimate goal at Saddleback is to turn an audience into an army.[7]
To describe the Purpose Drive church and its methods, Warren is fond of using military metaphors such as army, target, strategies, front line, and mission, all of which are intended to connote activity, action, and movement. Driven is an action verb whose synonyms include pushed, propelled, urged, goaded, shoved, thrust, forced, coerced, maneuvered, and constrained. When driven is inserted between purpose and church, it is here we begin to see that the restless Purpose Driven march to do church is a reflection of the humanistic spirit of the world that values and exalts the Enlightenment ideal of progress. Progress implies movement, and in one sense it implies the importance of doing as opposed to being. But the frenetic doings of the Purpose Driven church pale in comparison to the serenity and communion with Christ found in the Christian walk even when that walk may take us into the valley of the shadow of death.
Being the Church
Over sixty years ago A. W. Tozer wrote insightfully and perhaps prophetically of the deep inner confusion caused by the antagonism between being and doing. He wrote that modern civilized society, particularly in the West, was firmly entrenched in doing as opposed to being.
We Christians cannot escape this question. We must discover where God throws the stress and come around to the divine pattern.
The tendency to accept without question and follow without knowing why is very strong in us. For this reason whatever the majority of Christians hold at any given time is sure to be accepted as true and right beyond a doubt.
This is why being has ceased to have much appeal for people and doing engages almost everyone’s attention. Modern Christians lack symmetry. They know almost nothing about the inner life. They are like a temple that is all exterior without any interior.
“The accent in the Church today,” says Leonard Ravenhill, the English evangelist, “is not on devotion, but on commotion.”…Externalism has taken over. God now speaks by the wind and the earthquake only; the still small voice can be heard no more. The whole religious establishment has become a noisemaker…The old question, “What is the chief end of man?” is now answered, “To dash about the world and add to the din thereof.” And all of this is done in the name of Him who did not strive nor cry nor make His voice to be heard in the streets (Matthew 12:18-21).
We must begin the needed reform by challenging the spiritual validity of externalism. What a man is must be shown to be more important than what he does.
We must show a new generation of nervous, almost frantic, Christians that power lies at the center of life. Speed and noise are evidences of weakness, not strength…The desire to be dramatically active is proof of our religious infantilism; it is a type of exhibitionism common to the kindergarten.[8] [emphasis added]
What is the divine pattern that God emphasizes? It is being his child, loving and being loved, and sharing the inner life of the Trinity forever. We have status as a member of God’s family. Status implies being, not becoming. Being is for eternity. Doing is time-bound and only for a season that is likened to a vapor. Therefore, the emphasis must be on being to which doing must always defer. The Church Growth movement became fixated on the doing to the diminishment or exclusion of being. As a result it became excessively one-sided and therefore lacked symmetry. It has become unbalanced, the exact opposite of what it so vigorously demands. As a result much of the Bible is not taught nor even given much thought. Here we see the fundamental flaw in the Purpose Driven model.
In spite of assurances and protestations to the contrary, the Church Growth movement’s teachings and methods do compromise the biblical message by ignoring or giving scant attention large sections of the biblical narrative, twisting biblical doctrines to fit the Church Growth movement’s philosophies and methods, and an over or under emphasizing of many aspects of the biblical record. Although of great importance, the outworking of the Great Commission has been molded and massaged to justify the teachings and methods of the Church Growth movement. As a result, the focus has moved from Christ’s atoning work on the cross to the felt needs and desires of Warren’s iconic target—Saddleback Sam and Samantha.
The seeker-sensitive formula
As noted in previous chapters, the orthodoxy of the Church Growth movement and its seeker-sensitive model for doing church were inspired by the writings of George McGavran during the 1950s (See Chapters 21 and 24). Its guiding principle is that sociological research and scientific principles can be blended with biblical truths to achieve numerical growth in American congregations. These scientific principles dominate and “selected” Bible verses are used to support those principles. Invariably, as we are told, these properly applied scientific principles will produce numerical growth in any type of organization including churches. But little if any thought is given to the kind of growth that is being achieved. The type of growth desired in businesses and other organizations is not necessarily desirable in the church.[9] We need merely to return to Chapter 3 to see that the kind of growth a church experiences is exceedingly important for its long-term survival. Because of Roman Emperor Constantine’s legalization of Christianity in 313 and its elevation to the official religion of the Western Roman Empire in 381, thousands joined the church, but many were Christians in name only as the narrow gate was made wide which allowed a flood of corruptions to flow into the church.[10]
In the end, Church Growth practitioners see numerical church growth as merely a product of effective marketing. Give the customer what he wants. Customer-sensitive in the business world became seeker-sensitive in the Church Growth world. Robert Schuller’s slogan became the mantra of the seeker-sensitive church, “Find a need and fill it. Find a hurt and heal it.” Being seeker-sensitive is the heart of Warren’s Purpose Driven model and essentially drives all of its activities. To be a seeker-sensitive, a church must survey the community so as to identify its needs. Next the church organizes all of its efforts around meeting the “felt needs” of its target audience.[11]
Warren justifies the satisfaction of people’s “felt” needs by which he means their “heart” needs because it can attract large crowds. He is correct. Churches do grow by appealing to and feeding people’s felt needs. He claims Jesus ministered to the felt needs of the people in order to attract large crowds. However, Jesus’s purpose was not to attract large crowds, but when crowds came anyway, he certainly did not preach a seeker-sensitive message. Jesus’ focus was on the will of God and not numerical growth.
In the seeker-sensitive churches, felt needs are assumed to be legitimate but are often merely diversionary measures used by Satan and his forces to defeat the human soul. As previously noted, the source of man’s felt needs comes from his heart, but the heart is a most unreliable source. As Jeremiah recognized, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” [Jeremiah 17: 9. KJV] This is contrary to the cry of humanistic psychologists, “Get in touch with yourself. Follow your heart.” Aren’t seeker-sensitive churches encouraging the same mindset by focusing on every hurt and whim of the audience?
The seeker-sensitive mindset of church leaders has effectively embraced the humanistic psychology movement of which Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) was one of the principal founders. Maslow developed a hierarchy of human needs to which man must ascend to achieve purpose and happiness in life. According to Maslow, the pinnacle of human needs is reached and satisfied when one becomes self-actualized by achieving a maximum degree of their inborn potential. The next lower need is self-esteem which connotes confidence, achievement, respect of others, and respect by others. It is only when we descend to the third level do we see any mention of relational needs such as love, belonging, friendship, family, and sexual intimacy.[12] But his hierarchy of human needs fundamentally conflicts with the human universal of the primacy of relationships in motivating human beings.
Maslow’s theories of human motivation are based on the humanistic worldview. They fail as human motivators because they dramatically diminish the importance of relationship in favor of self. Apart from physiological and safety needs which are creational givens, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is upside down as it reflects human nature and leads to a false worldview. The societal disorder that permeates the entire planet is a result of this widely held humanistic worldview which has elevated self above relationship. The whole of the seeker-sensitive movement’s dedication to meeting the felt needs of people taps into the humanistic spirit of the world and its devotion to self.
The great god of entertainment
Not only does the seeker-sensitive church attempt to meet the felt needs of their audience, they also attempt to meet their felt wants. Udo W. Middelmann cuts to the heart of the matter in his stinging indictment of many evangelical churches in America.
In the course of a very few decades much of the church has embraced the way of mass culture in its drive to reduce everything to play and attractive entertainment. It has bowed to the demands of a consumer society and offers a message that more often distracts for the moment than comforts for the long run. Adjustments in content and form to match the perceived needs of future possible converts eat away at the content necessary to understand God, the fall of man, and redemption. Marketing priorities preside. The product is matched to the customer’s expectations. There is little room for the doctor to prescribe the medicine or for God to set forth judgment and conditions for redemption.[13]
In his book Storm, Jim Cymbala echoes much of what Middelmann said with regard to the reasons for the decline of the American evangelical church. Many blame the decline on forces outside the church including failed political solutions and a decaying secular culture that is increasingly hostile to the message of Christ and His followers.[14] Certainly these are contributing influences, but the Church has survived far worse in its 2000 year history. Therefore, the modern evangelical church cannot blame the world for the church’s failures because
…we simultaneously mimic the ways of the world in hopes of packaging our faith into “Christianity Lite”—a spiritual candy we can toss at nonbelievers rather than confronting the hostile reactions that can occur when we proclaim the real gospel of Jesus Christ. Pandering to the culture with prepackaged truth nuggets hasn’t made us more effective; it has made us ineffective. [15] [emphasis in original]
Tozer recognized this trend in the early 1950s and wrote that religious entertainment is in many places is rapidly replacing the serious things of God with the “full approval of evangelical leaders who can even quote a holy text in defense of their delinquency.”[16] Tozer compared these carefully-programmed services with the New Testament model.
So the fast-paced, highly spiced, entertaining service of today may be a beautiful example of masterful programming—but it is not a Christian service. The two are leagues apart in almost every essential. About the only thing they have in common is the presence of a number of people in one room.[17]
The battle between Christianity and the forces of Satan is described in Ephesians 6:12. It is a spiritual conflict with an army of evil spirits headed by their commander Satan. They are the spiritual rulers of the world who energize the ungodly, oppose the will of God, and attack the believers of this age. They are a vast and highly organized empire of evil. [18] With cultural decay abounding in every facet of society, there never has been a period in American history when there has been such a desperate need for mature Christians to do battle with the forces of Satan. But to our great harm and dismay, a vast number of believers have reverted “to spiritual childhood and clamor for religious toys.”[19]
Larry G. Johnson
Sources:
[1] Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Church, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing
House, 1995), pp. 130-131.
[2] Ibid., p. 131.
[3] Ibid., pp. 131-132.
[4] Ibid., pp. 132-133.
[5] Ibid., pp. 133.
[6] Ibid., p. 134.
[7] Ibid., pp. 143, 145.
[8] A. W. Tozer, The Root of the Righteous, (Camp Hill, Pennsylvania: WingSpread Publishers, 1955, 1986), pp. 83-86.
[9] Marshall Davis, More Than A Purpose, (Enumclaw, Washington: Pleasant Word, 2006), pp. 23-24.
[10] B. K. Kuiper, The Church in History, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1951, 1964), p. 27.
[11] Davis, pp. 28-29.
[12] Neel Burton, M.D., “Our Hierarchy of Needs,” Psychology Today, May 23, 2012. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hide-and-seek/201205/our-hierarchy-needs (accessed September 18, 2014).
[13] Udo W. Middelmann, The Market Driven Church, (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 2004), p. 124.
[14] Jim Cymbala with Jennifer Schuchmann, Storm – Hearing Jesus for The Times We Live In, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2014), pp. 14-15.
[15] Ibid., p. 15
[16] Tozer, The Root of the Righteous, p. 33.
[17] Ibid., pp. 105-106.
[18] Commentary on Ephesians 6:12, The Full Life Study Bible, King James Version, ed. Donald C. Stamps, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Bible Publishers, 1990), p. 439.
[19] Tozer, The Root of the Righteous, p. 34.
