Market Driven Church by Gary Gilley  (con't)

The Consumer is King

The premise of all marketing is that the consumer must be pleased; he must be kept happy; he must be given what he needs, or has been programmed to think he needs, if we are to succeed. This premise works very well for say, McDonald's, but can it be adopted by the church? Certainly it can, but is not the church, and more importantly, the gospel message, altered and distorted in the process? Listen to these words by Wells, "The fact is that while we may be able to market the church, we cannot market Christ, the gospel, Christian character, or meaning in life. The church can offer handy childcare to weary parents, intellectual stimulation to the restless video generation, a feeling of family to the lonely and dispossessed -- and, indeed, lots of people come to churches for these reasons. But neither Christ nor his truth can be marketed by appealing to consumer interest, because the premise of all marketing is that the consumer's need is sovereign, that the customer is always right and this is precisely what the gospel insists cannot be the case" (Wells, p. 82).

Even the liberal New Yorker magazine sees a problem with today's audience-driven preaching, "The preacher, instead of looking out upon the world, looks out upon public opinion, trying to find out what the public would like to hear. Then he tries his best to duplicate that, and bring his finished product into the marketplace in which others are trying to do the same. The public, turning to our culture to find out about the world, discovers there is nothing but its own reflection. The unexamined world, meanwhile, drifts blindly into the future" (As quoted by Guinness, p. 59).

But What if the Consumer Changes?

The following two quotes are worthy of pondering: "He who marries the spirit of the age soon becomes a widower." "To be always relevant, you have to say things which are eternal" (Guinness, p. 63). What happens when the fickle consumer changes his interests, or develops new wants, as he inevitably will? Will today's cutting edge pastor suddenly find himself stampeded by the herd tomorrow? In order to avoid such a tragedy, must he keep his ear to the ground of modern marketing techniques? Will he become a slave to polls and surveys? And how does all of this affect his use of the Scriptures? We don't have to have a crystal ball to answer these questions; all we have to do is look behind us.

The church has always fought, and too often lost, the battle with its age. Parallels with today are plentiful. For example, the "Downgrade Controversy" of Spurgeon's time ultimately led to the liberalization of the evangelical churches of England. In our own country, we think back to the early nineteenth-century changes that came about through the revivalism movement, best known by some as "Finneyism". Guinness sees this as an important precedent, because as in our time, the change was not "so much from Calvinism to Arminianism as from theology to experience, from truth to technique, from elites to populism, and from an emphasis on 'serving God' to an emphasis on 'servicing the self' in serving God" (Guinness, p. 27).

Some are still alive who experienced the great Fundamental/Modernist battle of the first half of the last century, in which the big names of the church invited us to court the spirit of the age. The fad was so popular that almost every major denomination in America eventually married that spirit and moved away from Biblical Christianity. It was at that point that new fundamentalist denominations, churches, schools, and associations were formed. It is these very institutions that are now flirting with the spirit of our age. The results are predictable.

Origen, in the third century, taught that "Christians are free to 'plunder the Egyptians' but forbidden to 'set up a golden calf' from the spoils" (Guinness., pp. 30,31). Easily said, but as history has proven, almost impossible to implement.

Another writer summarizes things well, "By the time we are finished, we have entirely transformed the communion of saints. We did not even have to officially jettison the Bible, as the modernists did earlier this century. We did not have to say that Scripture failed to provide answers for the modern world or speak to the real needs of contemporary men and women, as the liberals said. All we had to do was to allow the world to define the church instead of allowing the Word to define it" (The Coming Evangelical Crisis, edited by John H. Armstrong, "Recovering the Plumb Line," p. 254).

Summary

When we speak of marketing the church, we are not referencing such things as advertising church events, providing excellence in church programming, being kind to visitors, or providing ample parking. No one is arguing the importance and value of such things. Marketing, as defined by the new paradigm churches, goes much further, because its focus is on what the consumer (Unchurched Harry) wants and thinks he needs, rather than on what God wants and what He says Harry needs. In other words, market-driven churches are built upon the foundation of polls, surveys, and the latest marketing techniques, instead of upon the Word of God. In order to market a church to the unsaved, the consumer must be given what he wants.

Since unsaved consumers do not desire God, or the things of God, they have to be enticed by something else. Thus, the temptation then arises for a church to change, or at least hide, who they are so that they appeal to Unchurched Harry. Additionally, the church is tempted to alter its message to correspond with what Harry wants to hear and thinks he needs. The end result is a felt-need gospel that appeals to Harry's fallen nature in an effort to entice him to come to Christ, the ultimate felt-need supplier, so that he is fulfilled and feels better about himself. But, "Can churches really hide their identity without losing their religious character? Can the church view people as consumers without inevitably forgetting that they are sinners? Can the church promote the gospel as a product and not forget that those who buy it must repent? Can the church market itself and not forget that it does not belong to itself but to Christ? Can the church pursue success in the market place and not lose its biblical faithfulness" (Losing Our Virtue, by David Wells, p. 202)? The answers to these questions are self-evident.

Part III -- I Feel a Need Coming On

We Are Driven

Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Valley Community Church in Orange County, California, has written the definitive book promoting the market-driven concept of evangelism and church growth. The Purpose-Driven Church, which admittedly has a considerable amount of practical and helpful advice, nevertheless is laced with a felt-need philosophy that undermines, in my opinion, the value of the whole book. It is Warren's view that in order to reach the lost we must begin with their felt needs (p. 197ff). He writes, "[For] anybody can be won to Christ if you discover the key to his or her heart" (p.219). In order to discover the felt needs of the Saddleback Valley citizens, he orchestrated a community survey of the unchurched (p.139). Once those needs were discovered, a program was implemented to reach the community by offering Jesus Christ, the gospel, and the church as a means of fulfilling those needs. Warren is so committed to this approach that written into the bylaws of Saddleback is this sentence, "This church exists to benefit the residents of the Saddleback Valley by providing for their spiritual, physical, emotional, intellectual and social needs" (p.220).

In support of this philosophy, Warren does a couple of things. First, he offers Jesus' example as a model for reaching the lost through the felt needs porthole (see pp. 197ff). Unfortunately for Warren's position, the passages he uses are misunderstood, misapplied, and simply do not teach that Jesus reached the lost through felt needs. Quite the contrary, in Jesus' evangelism He always quickly got to the heart of the real need of his audience -- their sin which separated them from God (e.g. John 3; 4; Mark 10:17-31) (in contrast to loneliness, poor self-esteem, lack of fulfillment, etc). Next, Warren defends himself by stating, "Beginning a message with people's felt needs is more than a marketing tool! It is based on the theological fact that God chooses to reveal himself to man according to our needs" (p.295). Warren offers no theological proof for this assertion of course, for there is none. The apostles would be absolutely dumbfounded to find their "God-centered" teachings twisted to make them so "man-centered."

This needs-oriented approach to the Christian life is so prevalent within the seeker-sensitive camp that the little jingle, "Find a need and meet it, find a hurt and heal it" has become the unofficial motto. Os Guinness observes, "Few would disagree that church-growth teaching represents a shift from the vertical dimension to the horizontal, from the theological to the practical, from the prophetic to the seeker-friendly, from the timeless to the relevant and contemporary, from the primacy of worship to the primacy of evangelism, and from the priority of Christian discipleship in all of life to the priority of spiritual ministries within the church. But what happens when the much-heralded new emphases are seen from the standpoint of the Scriptures to be quite simply wrong? And what happens if tomorrow's 'need' is for what is overlooked today" (Dining with the Devil, by Os Guinness, p. 84)?

Continuing with Guinness' line of questions, we might ask: What are the new paradigm churches really offering that is attracting great throngs of people? Is this offering the same old message (the Biblical message) in new wrapping, or is it a mutation of the real thing? And if it proves to be a mutation, what effect is it having, and will it have on the modern church?

The New Message

A. W. Tozer warned decades ago of a new wind spanning across the fields of the evangelical church:

If I see aright, the cross of popular evangelicalism is not the cross of the New Testament. It is, rather, a new bright ornament upon the bosom of a self-assured and carnal Christianity. The old cross slew men; the new cross entertains them. The old cross condemned; the new cross amuses. The old cross destroyed confidence in the flesh; the new cross encourages it.

In Part IV of this report we will examine the gospel message itself. We now want to look at the corollary and overlapping issue of mankind's need(s). What has happened, I believe, is this: the evangelical church has become a reflector of our times rather than a revealer. "The problem is not that Christians have disappeared, but that Christian faith has become so deformed. Under the influence of modernity, we modern Christians are literally capable of winning the world while losing our own souls" (Guinness, p. 43).

A Personal Tale

How has this happened? What has changed our message from a force to a farce? A large part of the answer lies in the almost wholesale embracing of psychology by the Christian community. Following is Gary Gilley's experience.

My first encounter with the encroachment of psychology upon the church was my senior year of Bible college in 1972. As I prepared for the pastorate at Moody Bible Institute, I had been immersed in the study of Scripture and theology. As a senior I was required to take a course in "pastoral counseling," which proved to be almost identical to a course in psychology that I had taken at the University of Virginia. That same year I was asked, along with several others, to be a RA in the dorm. As part of our preparation we were given training in the latest rage of pop-psychology, which by the way has since been relegated to the psychological junk heap. At the time I remember my wide-eyed amazement that all my studies in Scripture apparently did not equip me to deal with the real problems that would face me in my future ministry. Bible study and knowledge were great for salvation and sanctification, but there apparently existed a set of problems and needs "out there" that needed more than the "simplistic" solutions as found in God's Word. Scripture, after all the dust had cleared, needed help from Freud.

Unable and ill-equipped to deal with my newfound knowledge, I tucked it away for safekeeping. Later, in the early days of pastoring, I decided to pursue a master's degree in psychology in order to help people with their "real" problems. But it soon became abundantly clear that something was seriously wrong. Virtually everything that I learned in my psychology courses contradicted the Scriptures. So, I ended my illustrious career as a would-be pastor/psychologist and went back to the study of Scripture, which has proven itself more than adequate throughout the years for every need and concern that has come my way. Meanwhile, immersed in my own ministry and the study of Scripture, I was somehow oblivious to psychology's hijacking of the evangelical church during the 1970s and 1980s. One day I awoke, sort of a Rip Van Wrinkle experience, to find that my world, the world of the church, had changed, and I had been left behind. Where had everyone gone? Most churches were now talking about dysfunctional families, poor self-images, co-dependency, addictions, 12-step programs, and needs -- lots and lots of needs that the church was supposed to meet. More "Christians" were obtaining their philosophy for living from Oprah and Sally Jesse than from Jesus and Paul.

When "Christian" leaders saw this metamorphosis of God's people, a metamorphosis that they had helped create, they could either pull in the reins, denounce this caricature of the Christian faith and repent of their part in its birth, or they could jump on the float and join the parade. Most, recognizing that this is what the people now wanted, what they expected, what they had been trained to "need," choose the float approach. Give Christians the need-oriented pop-psychology that they had grown to love, they decided, just alter it a bit with a little Scripture and some references to Jesus -- they would never catch on that what they were swallowing was not Biblical Christianity at all, but an almost unrecognizable perversion. Whether this approach was calculated or naively taken matters little, the result is the same: a psychologized Christian community which no longer recognizes the difference between the teachings of Scripture and the teachings of Carl Rogers, and no longer cares.

Since the Christian was now indistinguishable in philosophy from the world, both having fallen in love with psychobabble, the offense of the cross became far less offensive. It was only a short step for someone (Robert Schuller is a worthy candidate as we will see) to develop a psychologized church for the already psychologized Unchurched Harry (as the Willow Creekers call him). This would be a church that would offer the same things to Harry that secular society offered, only better, since Jesus was better than a Carl Rogers, Oprah, and Freud combined. And so it was -- "The new paradigm churches, then, appear to be succeeding, not because they are offering an alternative to our modern culture, but because they are speaking with its voice, mimicking its moves" (Losing Our Virtue, by David Wells, p. 32).

                                                                                                    part 4

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