IrContent

As of last week my wife and I officially joined the parent club (well, we were nine months ago, but now it’s just more obvious!), so I have not been as ircontent as usual. I have some stuff brewing, though, so maybe the next time I am up at 3am listening to my boy scream for no good reason I’ll get back on these posts.

I can’t help it - I love these things.

Beginning with Bill Hybels and the 1992 launch of Willow Creek Association and spreading through the likes of Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church and Andy Stanley’s North Point Community, the “seeker sensitive” movement has gripped many of America’s churches.

In a word, ‘seeker sensitivity’ refers to churches that cater to the desires of “the Unchurched” (i.e. unbelievers who would not be ‘comfortable’ in traditional churches). Saddleback states this quite clearly on their website: “At Saddleback, we feel that it’s OUR responsibility to ‘clear the way’ for you to come to church.” At North Point visitors are told that “Our Sunday morning worship services are ‘foyer’ environments. We want our guests to come back, so we do everything with them in mind.” I can certainly appreciate a welcome environment – especially when doing outreach. However, besides the basic problem of seeing the church service as an outreach event, and the typically low standards for discipleship often found in seeker sensitive churches, the very notion of “seeker sensitivity” is, I think, biblically flawed. . . .

The philosophy behind seeker sensitivity is that unbelievers won’t come to a church that makes them uncomfortable. Therefore, the church environment (including the music, the message, etc.) needs to be made attractive to them. Of course, there is nothing more uncomfortable to a non-believer than the gospel or divisive doctrines, so the messages will often focus on “relational” Christianity rather than salvation from punishment.The problem is that unbelievers are not missing out on a relationship with God. They have a very strong relationship, actually: they are His enemies (Jas. 4:4; Rom. 5:10; 8:7; etc.). This does not mean that God does not love them (Jn. 3:16), but that they stand in relation to him as rebels who will be punished for their sin.

This leads to a fundamental flaw in seeker sensitivity – unbelievers are not seeking God! Paul makes this perfectly clear in Romans 3:11 - “There is no one who understands, there is no one who seeks God” (see also Rom. 10:20). It is difficult to imagine a more clear statement on the status of the unbeliever. What sense does it make to build an entire ministry around making “seekers” comfortable when seekers, in this sense, don’t exist?

The biblical idea of seeking has been turned on its head. God’s love is manifested in that He seeks unbelievers. This has always been the case – from the OT (in the Garden of Eden who did the seeking and who did the hiding?) to the NT. In all of Jesus’ “lost” parables (e.g., Luke 15) it is God who seeks – not the lost. Luke 19:10 specifically says that “the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost,” and John 4:23 explains that “the Father seeks such people to be his worshipers.” God rewards those who seek Him – but these are people who already believe (Heb. 11:6).

Seeker sensitive churches ignore the fact that it is not simply a case of unbelievers not liking this or that church worship format – it is also that unbelievers do not want God in the first place. In fact, I know of unbelievers who have been lulled into a false sense of (eternal) security because they think that they are being told how to be Christians at services designed not to offend them with the truth.

While relevance can go hand in hand with the truth, it must not supplant it. It does not seem to me that holding whole services for “seekers” in order to attract them to the truth is a ploy much in use in the Bible. When Jesus encountered people unwilling to listen to Him He did not change His methodology to be more “relevant” – He let them go their way (e.g., the rich young ruler of Mark 10, or the fallen disciples of John 6:60-65, or His use of confusing parables later in his ministry). I also do not see a lot of seeker sensitivity going on in Acts either. This book records the genesis of the Church and yet the sermons are anything but user-friendly. In Peter’s first sermon (that drew 3,000 new members) he calls them murderers (Acts 2)! (And note who added the members – not the cool worship team or the tattooed youth leader – it was God Himself).

Paul points out in 1 Cor. 1:18 that the Gospel is foolishness to unbelievers. Paul’s remedy for this attitude is not to change the Gospel or make it more “relevant” – he simply says it’s a stumbling block to the world and lays the burden on God to call these people to salvation through it (see verses 21-28).

While some of the particular methods of these so-called ‘seeker sensitive’ churches may not be wrong per se, the attitude that it is the purpose of the church service to placate unbelievers certainly seems to be antithetical to how the Bible describes it. The purpose of the church service is, simply, to edify believers through prayer, preaching of the word, ordinances, fellowship, etc. Churches may enlist other means to draw crowds of unbelievers to outreach events – but it must always be for the purpose of communicating truths that will save the unbeliever from eternal hell, not simply “inviting them to encounter the community” or whatever often passes for evangelism these days.