“Worship services” provide little opportunity for
silent awe in the presence of God but plenty of opportunity for performance on
the part of a select few professional speakers and musicians, who fill all the
space with their words and sounds. Other gatherings of the church are
characterized by relentless activity. It is Christian activity, of course, but
it still fills the space that might be taken by silent adoration. Thus,
“church” comes to resemble simply another form of human group endeavor and
indeed often comes to mimic in a serious way the culture around it that is
supposedly governed by different values. “Church” is increasingly thought of in
terms of organization rather than of people worshiping God together, and
leaders bring business and management models to bear on its
development—planning growth, programming success, and managing change.
Leadership itself is
understood and evaluated from a secular point of view. What counts as “good
leadership” in the church-as-organization has been borrowed from the secular
world. The modern pastor is seen in this light as a kind of CEO of the company,
trained as an expert in problem solving and management, and thus gains
respectability in a world and in a church that no longer thinks in a truly Christian
way, particularly about the church. He is “a CEO in his study and a shrink in
his pulpit.”2 As Vinoth Ramachandra rightly notes, “Many seminary
graduates are now skilled in management techniques, or counselling skills and
even ‘church-planting’ methodologies, but lack any integrating theological
vision.”3
The story is told of a Christian leader returning from a church-growth
conference puzzled because he had heard no theology and no serious references
to God—only the exaltation of technique and numbers.4 Church
advertising often reflects this ethos, as illustrated in these comments of an
advertising executive regarding a contract from an Episcopal church in
Minneapolis:
Promoting one’s church and
marketing is a big part of evangelism.… George [the pastor] was used to getting
on his knees a lot and asking for favors, and he wondered why he couldn’t
promote his own parish with messages as hard-hitting as a lot of the ads he’d
admired.5
The narcissistic, self-absorbed church thus develops by degrees to
respond to the narcissistic culture, mimicking that culture in its move from
word to image, from passion for truth and righteousness to cultivating intimacy
and “good feelings,” from exposition to entertainment, from integrity to
novelty, from action to spectacle.6 A survey of sermons by evangelical
ministers between 1985 and 1990 suggests, in fact, that over 80 percent of
these made God and his world spin around the surrogate center of the self. This
is related to the professionalization of the ministry, in which the fulcrum around
which ministry turns is no longer God but the church, which itself thus turns
out to be a kind of idol.7 Of this kind of consumerist religion,
Jacques Ellul commented rightly a number of years ago that it was not so much a
“Jesus revolution” as a “gigantic religious expediency, in which Jesus and the
revelation are served up to suit everybody’s taste.”8
2 O. Guinness,
“America’s Last Men and Their Magnificent Talking Cure,” in No God but God, ed. O. Guinness and J.
Seel (Chicago: Moody, 1992), 111–32 (quote on p. 123).
3 V. Ramachandra, Gods That Fail: Modern Idolatry and
Christian Mission (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1996), 18.
4 O. Guinness,
“Sounding Out the Idols of Church Growth,” in No God but God, 174–88 (quote on p. 165).
__________________________________
[1] Provan, I. (2001). Ecclesiastes,
Song of Songs. The NIV Application Commentary (121–122). Grand Rapids, MI:
Zondervan.
1 comment:
So happy to be given a privilege to post a comment here. You have a wonderful site. Thank you for the effort to publish this.
www.gofastek.com
Post a Comment