INTRODUCTION

The evangelistic mission of the church is not an option. In large measure it defines the church”s existence and purpose. Yet this essential task of bringing the gospel to the world constitutes a perplexing challenge for the church today. How are lost people, in a society as secularized as our own, to be reached with the gospel? How can the church gain the ear of unsaved people who are so enamored with the power of technology and scientific knowhow? How does the church reach those who are completely out of touch with church teaching and church culture? Let’s face it, most unbelievers would rather attend a funeral than attend a worship service. They recognize “church” as a foreign environment wherein they are socially and spiritually inept. Add to that the abuse some people have been subjected to by an uninvited visitor at their door, asking threatening questions about heaven and hell, besides the public scandals of some well-known television evangelists, and we see what a perplexing challenge evangelism is.

Consequently, many church leaders and pastors are ever on the lookout for a “model” approach to evangelism, one that is both successful and doable. What is sought is a method of evangelism that shows itself to be effective unsaved people and can be implented in reaching within one’s own church and ministry. Today, in the minds of many, what is called “seeker-sensitive” approach evangelism represents such a model. It is a method of evangelism, turned into a movement, that is shaping the work of ministry and changing the ecclesastical landscape in North America more than anything else since the rise of neo-Pentecostalism. It is not without its commendable features, Which we will explore in a subsequent article. But, if I may tip my hand at the outset, I also believe the seeker-sensitive approach to evangelism is infected with spiritual compromise and endangers the health of the church. What is more, the seeker-sensitive, or what some have dubbed the user-friendly movement, is making some Reformed people insecure or at least defensive about their life and practice as church. The question for debate, at the extremes, is whether this movement is a heaven-sent model which churches should emulate, or is it a modem idol that threatens to press us into its image?

The user-friendly movement is making itself a visible presence in communities large and small across North America. Many churches of varying size are adopting, as best they can, this model for ministry. And it should be noted, if success is measured by numbers, many such churches are successful.

The seeker-sensitive or user-friendly movement offers a theology about church and evangelism. I think it also offers a distinctive theology about God and preaching, the latter bringing a crisis for the gospel itself.

In this article I want to get inside the mind of user-friendly evangelism, kind of a take off from a popular user-friendly title by Lee Strobel, “Inside the Mind of Unchurched Harry and Mary.” First, I propose to outline what the seeker-sensitive approach is; and then, secondly, look at five specific theological miscues in this approach. In a subsequent article I hope to offer some observations for a Reformed approach to evangelism today.

I. An Outline of the User-Friendly Approach

In giving a brief outline of what is involved in this new way of being church and doing evangelism, I will be focusing particularly upon Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois. I choose Willow Creek because it is spear-heading the movement. Moreover, the best resources are available about that church.

The co-founder and senior pastor of Willow Creek, Bill Hybels, believes that traditional churches fail to organize themselves according to spiritual gifts, and do not have proper discipleship mechanisms in place. Moreover, most traditional churches, according to Hybels, “do not understand or practice Biblical worship.” They generally are just “teaching centers” that try to influence people primarily for an hour a week. They also tend to be seeker-hostile, meaning that they make no effort to welcome and minister to those outside of the church.1

The matter of providing an environment to which to bring a disillusioned former churchgoer or an outright at atheist is really what set Hybels to rethinking how to do church and how to do evangelism. Having grown up in a typical CRC in Kalamazoo, Michigan during the sixties (he even attended Dordt College for two years), Hybels, reacting to some personally sour experiences in his home church, determined that the traditional church was seeker-hostile. It was a foreign, unfriendly, uncomfortable, utterly alien environment for unbelievers, whom he affectionately refers to as “unchurched Harrys” and “unchurched Marys.” He determined that a type of gospel-service needed to be put into place where “seekers” could feel comfortable, that is, a service that is user-friendly. With that basic principle in mind, all aspects of ministry were scrutinized and run through the grid.

The result is that the church is completely restructured in order to be seeker-friendly or seeker-attractive. For Hybels this ought to begin with the church architecture: “unchurched Harry” isn’t comfortable with anything that feels “churchy.” Hence, the Willow Creek facilities do not look like “church”—you’ll find no crosses, no steeples, no stained glass, no pipe organ. Instead, in the words of one author, what you find as you approach the campus is a massive but attractive edifice of concrete, steel, and glass beside a beautiful lake. The narthex is like stepping into a huge four-star-hotel-like atrium, which leads to an auditorium, filled with individual, well-cushioned movie theater seats.2 Willow Creek feels more like a modem civic center than a church—and that’s by design.

As for the seeker services themselves, each one is carefully crafted by Hybels and his ministry staff, and each is geared to appeal to the unchurched—both the ecclesiastically disenfranchised, as well as the hostile or skeptical underachiever. Since “unchurched Harry” will likely visit a church only on Sunday, if he visits a church at all, it is imperative that the seeker service takes place on Sundays. These services for seekers, according to Hybels, are not worship services; they are evangelistic services (this in part distinguishes Willow Creek from some other seeker-sensitive churches). Thus, there is no reciting of creeds, and no use of hymnals (in fact, designing songs for · unbelievers to sing about God has proved to be a challenge). If a collection is taken, the unchurched are encouraged not to participate in that part of the service. Contemporary instrumentation and music, professional drama and multi-media, complement a message geared for the unchurched. According to Hybels, these media are attractive to “unchurched Harrys and Marys,” and disarm them.

On that score, Hybels is insistent and believes it is essential—that the church make use of a wide variety of artistic genres in order to communicate the gospel and make unchurched people more receptive to listen to the gospel. He does not, in his words, believe in the use of drama, or contemporary Christian music, or multi-media in order to “entertain” or “titillate,” but since God is the master composer who created the arts, why should the church narrow its options and select a “talking head” as its only form of communicating the most important message on the planet? He states, “Even though preaching is the primary way the truth of God has been and should be communicated, we add texture and feeling and perspective to it through the use of music and media and drama.”

For Hybels, Willow Creek is simply following the pattern of the first-century church. He also believes that Willow Creek has recaptured the important theological point—that lost, wayward, irreligious people, in spite of their sin, really matter to God. The three parables in Luke 15 about a lost sheep, a lost coin, and a missing son, make the point, says Hybels, that that which is missing really matters to somebody.3 Integral to the program of finding the missing and the lost, is the lay witness of Willow Creek attendees, whose task it is to develop a friendship with Harry and share a verbal witness with him. Then Harry is invited to a weekend seeker service.

Perhaps. the best single source for understanding the Willow Creek philosophy is Lee Strobel’s book (which I mentioned earlier), Inside the Mind of Unchurched Harry and Mary: How to Reach Friends and Family Who Avoid God and the Church. Strobel is a teaching pastor at Willow Creek.

For many in our modern ecclesiastical climate, Willow Creek is the mega-church par-excellence. And the proof is in the pudding, as they say. Numbers don’t lie. Willow Creek has the numbers. The church regularly has between 14,000 to 15,000 churched and unchurched attendees on any given Sunday. They do baptism by the hundreds. Over 280,000 audiotapes are sold annually. Certainly by human standards, at least, it seems that Hybels and Willow Creek are a huge success. In fact, three times a year the church sponsors a conference at which over 500 church leaders from around the country gather to see how it is done. And in 1992 Willow Creek created the Willow Creek Association—which currently has a membership nearing a thousand churches—to provide support to other seeker-sensitive congregations. Many believe that Willow Creek is the model for doing church in the 21st century. It has already spearheaded a worldwide movement that is revolutionizing churches.4

     

       

II. Five Miscues

I know that there are some people who respond to this with a wave of the hand. They say, “That’s not reformed,” or something similar to that, and are done with it. Others respond with unrestrained enthusiasm. Leaders at Christian Reformed Home Missions are so enthusiastic that they sent about a half dozen copies of Strobel’s book to each of the churches. I count myself in neither camp. I think we have to give the user-friendly movement our attention for at least three reasons: (1) because I believe more and more churches under the Reformed umbrella are trying to model the seeker-sensitive movement to some (detrimental) degree; (2) because inevitably our own people will become exposed to it and some of them will likely become intrigued by it; and (3) because if we disagree with this movement, then we need to know why, and we need to be prepared to offer a Biblical critique of it.

The movement miscues on at least five points, each of which merits our attention.

1. The Problem with Pragmatism.

My first concern is what I call the problem with pragmatism. In 1993 John MacArthur, Jr. published a book entitled, Ashamed of the Gospel, in which he severely critiques the user-friendly movement by showing its similarities to what became known as the “Down Grade” controversy in the ministry of Charles H. Spurgeon. Spurgeon warned the church of his day that Christianity was on the slope of decline, the gospel was on the downgrade. Christian leaders were becoming worldly and doctrinally inept; increasingly wishing to attract a crowd, the preachers and church leaders of the “Down Grade” resorted to using worldly models for doing ministry. Spurgeon believed that this constituted a forfeiture of the gospel itself, a selling out of evangelical truth; and, according to MacArthur, history has proved Spurgeon right.

This all serves to warn us, says MacArthur, about what is happening in the evangelical community today. However, instead of modernism, which was the dragon Spurgeon sought to slay, today the dragon is pragmatism. According to MacArthur, when pragmatism supersedes theology and Biblical truth in the life of the church, when “What works?” becomes the question before “What’s Biblical?”, then tragic results are inevitable. Success displaces an unashamed proclamation of God’s Word and, consequently, church doctrine is sacrificed for church growth; attracting a crowd through various vehicles of entertainment supersedes a ministry of edification and spiritual growth, and truth yields to “what works”—or worse, truth is redefined as what works.

I believe MacArthur’s concerns are on target. For example, Bill Hybels is the ultimate pragmatist. This is confirmed by Dr. G. A. Pritchard who has degrees, in both the social sciences and theology. Pritchard spent two and a half years intensively studying Willow Creek. In making his study, he attended all Willow Creek services and its various programs during that two and a half-year period. He even transcribed a year of weekend messages (from June 1989 to May 1990) and did a content analysis of these talks, using a computer concordance to sort out thematic emphases. Besides all this, he interviewed countless Willow Creek staff people; he sorted: through their written materials. The end result was a dissertation of more than 800 pages and 1,900 footnotes. Pritchard has recently published a simplified and abbreviated version of his dissertation entitled Willow Creek Seeker Services: Evaluating a New Way of Doing Church.

In Pritchard’s analysis, Hybels will use any aspect of academia if it helps the cause. Hybels is particularly fond of psychology, business management, and a common-sense apologetic, while, curiously, he disdains education itself and doesn’t have much use for seminary training. Seminaries are for book people, not people people. While the whole seeker-friendly movement may not be painted with that brush, the leaders of the movement at Willow Creek fit the portrait. Pragmatism has no time for academics; it is not interested in theology or the Christian past. It simply wants to know what works, what gets results. Productivity is the final authority. Hybels frankly admits, “I’m a pragmatist, and I measure things by whether or not they work.”5

It is of course Hybels’ prerogative if he wishes to be a pragmatist. But it is not his prerogative to think that’s Christian. If what works is the standard, where does that leave Paul and Jesus? How is it that our Lord failed to grasp what seems intuitive to Hybels? Pragmatism forgets that it is God’s prerogative to convert souls and make preaching fruitful. Once we start down the path of trying to “effect” results, that is, to preach the gospel not only faithfully but ifruitfully, not only searchingly but success fully, then we have resorted to technique—and that’s a bottomless pit. Technique displaces dependence upon God. Fruits of numbers displace fruits of faith.6

More narrowly focused, this pragma-tism manifests itself in an infatuation with psychology, or what I prefer to call therapy. According to Pritchard, a therapeutic worldview dominates much of the Willow Creek program of ministry.7 A gospel of self-fulfillment is a common theme in Hybels’ weekend (seeker) messages. Of course, self-fulfillment does not fit the categories of Scripture. But it does fit the categories of psychology.

MacArthur wonders how this prag-matism fits with the events in the early church surrounding Ananias and Sapphira. After all, “God’s judgment against Ananias and Sapphira had an effect beyond the fellowship of believers: ‘Great fear came upon…all who had heard of these things’ (Acts 5:11).” Verse 13 says that no one else dared to join them! “This is precisely the opposite of the user-friendly philosophy…” and the pragmatism that motivates it. “Instead of luring people to church by making them feel comfortable and secure, God used fear to keep unbelievers away.”8

Pragmatism is merciless though. It cannot accept what does not work. It must plunge ahead. It must get the job done. The end justifies the means—so whatever means are popular will do. But you cannot serve both God and mammon or in this case, God and pragmatism. We must either affirm the Scripture alone or no longer claim to be Protestants and evangelicals.

2. The Madness behind the Method.

The second area of concern I have I call “the madness behind the method.” No doubt user-friendly advocates would argue that there is a method to their madness. But what method? Can conversion be programmed? Can we orchestrate salvation? One wonders how Paul ever succeeded in his mission endeavors without George Barna’s spate of books on marketing the church. MacArthur is blunt and to the point: “The simple reality is that one cannot follow a market-driven strategy and remain faithful to Scripture.” Barna and friends seem to be of the mind that marketing is :a spiritually neutral enterprise, as if it simply collates data and offers insight, thus giving the church tools for doing ministry to outsiders. But in fact marketing distorts how Christians view nonbelievers and the gospel because it really stands theology on its head. Instead of allowing the Scriptures to define nonbelievers for us, what their needs are, what obstacles stand in the way of conversion, the marketing method offers a horizontalistic, merely humanistic analysis of people and suggests—indeed urges that the church try to address itself to their “felt needs” first and foremost. In this way the church and the gospel become products to be consumed. “Unchurched Harry” is left to think, “Well, I’ve tried everything else, why not try God?”

This is backwards. The consumer becomes sovereign instead of God; and as David Wells states, this “sanctions a bad habit,” for it “encourages us to indulge in constant internal inventory…, to ask, ourselves perpetually whether the ‘products’ we are being offered meet our present ‘felt needs.’”9 The problem is that if many “felt needs” are culturally created, and driven, and thus illegitimate. Needs may be likened to children. Some are legitimate; others are illegitimate. Why should illegitimate children have sovereign rights over the legitimate children, that is, why should felt needs take precedence over the genuine needs of human beings as revealed in Scripture? When the church markets itself as offering the products to meet the felt needs of unbelievers, she in effect falls into worldliness, for the church is not a product, and doesn’t market one. Rather, the church issues a proclamation. She declares the kingdom of God. She announces Christ’s sovereignty over all of life—including the life of “unchurched Harry.” She bids all to obediently surrender and submit to Him and to His Word. The church’s business is truth, not profit, as Wells points out.

The claims of Christ are radical and uncompromising. Those who were attracted to Jesus because He satisfied their empty stomachs (meeting their felt needs) were soon set straight. Jesus was unafraid to speak the hard truth, which brought this consequence: “From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him” (John 6:66). Jesus obviously didn’t know how to sell Himself. He lacked marketing savvy. But I then His theology affirmed that God was sovereign, not Harry; and Jesus knew that no one could come to Him, unless the Father draws him (v. 44). Indeed, those whom the Father had drawn did I not turn back; instead they said to Jesus: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).

The marketing approach to evangelism is madness. It forgets who God is. As Karl Barth once wrote: “The word of God is not for sale; and therefore it has no need of shrewd salesmen. The word of God is not seeking patrons; therefore it refuses price cutting and bargaining….It will…not stoop to overcome resistance with bargain counter methods. Promoters’ successes are sham victories; their crowded churches and the breathlessness of their audiences have nothing in common with the word of God.”10

I trust we know why? For the Word of God is not interested in making God useful to us! The Christian faith isn’t true because God can help us satisfy felt needs. Jesus Christ isn’t a means to an end, whether that end be self-fulfillment or self-esteem or some other self-centered redemption. As Pritchard boldly states: “The bottom line why individuals should repent and worship God is because God deserves it.”11

A marketed gospel is a truncated gospel at best! In trying to appeal to “unchurched Harry and Mary,” where is there room for the message: “In this world you will have trouble,” (John 16:33)? Or Peter’s call to rejoice that we share in Christ’s sufferings (1 Pet. 4:13)? Or Jesus’ beatitude about being persecuted for righteousness sake (Matt. 5:10)? “The Lord did not promise fulfillment, or even relief, in this world, but only the next.” Even Jesus suffered. “The goal of a Christian’s life is faithfulness, not fulfillment.”12 A gospel that is marketed, however, can never be the gospel of Jesus Christ. By its very nature, it must mute the message in order to befriend an audience. This is the madness behind the method.

3. Image Isn’t Everything.

Closely related to that is the question of image, our third concern. The church, obviously, never should give undue offense. But we need to say in the face of the user-friendly movement: Image isn’t everything! For Hybels, and for churches like his, image is a “real big deal” (his words). Indeed, when you drive onto the campus of Willow Creek, you are driving into the lap of luxury. It is big and it is the best. Why? Because “unchurched Harry” cares a lot about appearance.

As intimated before, the services at Willow Creek are staged and choreographed. Image is important, very important. My question is simply this: Whose image? The image of Christ? Or, the image of upscale, fat-wallet, white corporate America? In other words, when you talk about image, whose image are you trying to emulate and attract? Willow Creek and other mega-churches all conform to the same image: white, affluent, suburban baby boomers. Hybels himself has no qualms about this. His retort is simple and angular to suggest that there might be something suspect in this is to accuse pastors of being deceived (unthinkable) and to blame God for the way He is leading those peoples.13

But Pritchard argues that two temptations lie embedded in the managing of mages. The first danger is manipulation; in other words, in attempting to identify with “unchurched Harry,” isn’t the entire show a kind of grand manipulation from the pop rock music, to the drama, to the choreographed message? Isn’t it all to produce a certain kind of effect on Harry to get him where you want him? Stated crassly, isn’t it the old bait and switch—Harry is baited with images he likes in order that you can slip him a message he resists? What does any of that have to do with the Biblical model of evangelism?

iThe second danger is outright pretense, that is, to fake it, to perform. This is especially a temptation for highly skilled orators like Hybels. “In any setting of self-conscious image management,” writes Pritchard, “there is a sociological pressure to perform.” Thus, what seems more real because of highly skilled communicators and a professionally orchestrated production, may in fact be pre14 tense.One may well ask, how does all i this fit with what Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 2:4: “We are not trying to please men but God”?

4. The Idolatry of God.

My fourth concern with user-friendly evangelism is what I call the idolatry of God. The doctrine of God that functions in much of this movement is lopsided at best and idolatrous at worst. David Wells has called attention to this better than anyone else I have read. In his superb book God in the Wasteland, Wells explains that the wasteland is evangelical theology, or we might say, the evangelical church, especially the user-friendly church. An enfeebled doctrine of God touches all theology. Writes Wells: “The I fundamental problem…is that God rests too inconsequentially upon the church. His truth is too distant, his grace is too ordinary, his judgment is too benign, his gospel is too easy, and his Christ is too common.” God is marginalized. He has become weightless.15

No doubt user-friendly advocates would issue a disclaimer that they have not marginalized God. But God in His sovereignty and holiness hardly counts for any significant theme in its approach to “unchurched Harry” or in the preaching it offers to Harry. In Pritchard’s analysis of Hybels’ weekend seeker messages, he discovered, over the course of a year, “only four messages in which God’s holiness was presented clearly….”16 The moral law was never explicated or used! The sermons themselves were topical, not expositional. The messages were upbeat and positive, emphasizing God’s love and immanence. What is rather strange about all this is that, according to surveys, “unchurched Harrys and Marys” generally believe that they are on good terms with God already. A full eight out of ten Americans believe that God loves them. 80 percent feel that God is close to them. George Gallup Jr. states that Americans believe in God “but this God is often only an affirming one, not a demanding one.”17

In that light, what “unchurched Harrys and Marys” need, even if it offends them, is to hear heart-searching messages on the strictness and severity of the law of God. The law’s “function is to call the conscience into judgment and wound it with fear.”18 The law sets us up for gospel. Fearing condemnation we desire justification. We must fall into the Savior’s arms in repentance. As Calvin said: “The law is like a mirror. In it we contemplate our weakness, then the iniquity arising from this, and finally the curse coming from both—just as a mirror”(Institutes 2.7.7). Or in J.I. Packer’s words: “Nobody can see what sin is till he has learned what God is.’”19 The law must be preached to unbelievers.

The obvious rebut is that nonbelievers won’t listen to such preaching. Perhaps! But God makes “believers” out of such preaching! And when that fails, then somewhere in our evangelistic efforts there needs to be a place for kicking the dust from our sandals in testimony against those who will not listen, and we move on. If that seems harsh to user-friendly ears, then we need to read the Gospels again (Matt. 10:14; Mk. 6:11; and Acts 13:51). But then again, John the Baptist’s preaching doesn’t exactly fit the upbeat, user-friendly, model either—calling Pharisees a “brood of vipers” and all (Lk. 3:7). Peter preached a sermon on Pentacost that fails the user-friendly test too, saying to his hearers about Jesus, “you with wicked hands slew him” (Acts 2:23, KJV).

Until God is recognized as Sovereign Creator and Lord who is holy, righteous and true, seekers will never seek him as sinners; God will remain a God of therapy, domesticated and harmless. And that God is an idol. It’s the idolatry of God.

5. No Place For Truth.

Finally, my last concern with the user-friendly method of evangelism zeros in on the role of theology in the life of the “church, what Well’s calls No place for Truth. The user-friendly movement is mostly, if not altogether, disinterested in theology. This goes back to its commitment to both pragmatist and the modern psychological worldview, so indicative of modernity. Pritchard found that Willow Creek staff are basically unable to “think critically with the categories and content of Christian theology.”20 The end result is that Christian truth gets abridged. Theology’s tail is bobbed, with only a pathetic stump showing. We cannot help but ask, “What fills the void? What is an abridged Christian gospel anyway?”

I do not question Hybels’ considerable talents as a communicator or an evangelist. In hearing him speak, he clearly evidences supreme gifts of oratory. He can communicate with nonbelievers. “Unchurched Harrys” obviously need the simple gospel, the milk of the Word. But even the milk of the Word must remain the Word, and as milk we must present the whole gospel. Gospels of therapy do not qualify. If we bait unbelievers with gospels of self-fulfillment, then we betray our lack of confidence in the Word of God itself—that is, we demonstrate that we do not really believe that it is a means of grace, that it is the power of God unto salvation, that it is a hammer that crushes stony hearts, that it is God’s own living voice!21 When unchurched Homers and Hiliarys find the bait so appealing, why should they ever switch to a gospel that is “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Cor. 1:23)?

The irony about the Willow Creek strategy is that most of the people who attend the weekend services need edification, not evangelism. Pritchard points out that “the majority of Willow Creek” weekend attendees [about 85 % to 90%] are “churched Larrys” who have already made a commitment to Christ. Even if it is granted that most of these “churched Larrys” are only “superficially churched,” still, how are they going to grow up to maturity on a diet of Willow Creek’s weekend fare? And I might add, the situation is worse at other user-friendly, seeker-sensitive, churches. At least Willow Creek offers mid-week worship services of edification that have substance, (though the attendance is only about, one-third the weekend size). Most user-friendly churches try to be seeker-sensitive at their regular Sunday worship services. Consequently, they end up doing neither the ministry of edification nor the ministry of evangelism very well. “Churched Larrys” are doomed to remain spiritual babies.22 Without the meat of the Word, without theology, how can they mature, and why should they be anything but comfortable with their minimalist Christianity?23

In his book, Dining with the Devil, Os Guinness likewise bemoans the theological superficiality and lack of historical awareness in the user-friendly movement. Concerning the latter he writes, “This movement is particularly unaware of comparisons with earlier periods that could throw light on the possibilities and pitfalls we face today. Two periods, for example, would give fruitful parallels: the late eighteenth century and the story of European liberalism’s engagement with the ‘cultured despisers’ and the early nineteenth century and the story of American Evangelicalism’s fateful sea-change…[not only from Calvinism to Arminianism, but from]…theology to experience, from truth to technique, from elites to populism, and from an emphasis on ‘serving God’ to an emphasis on ‘serving the self’ in serving God.”24 Anyone who has studied the revivalism of Charles Finney knows how true this is.

There is no place for truth (the full jagged-edged truth of Scritpure) in the user-friendly philosophy. Theology is disdained while “contextualization” becomes the be-all and end-all. As they say: Penny loafers for Penny loafers. Wingtips for Wingtips. Air Jordans for Air Jordans. But, notes Guinness, “the very reason why Penny Loafers speak better to other Penny Loafers than to Air Jordans and Wingtips is the reason why Penny-Loafer gospel will never be the whole counsel of God.”25 Contextualization thus becomes a recipe for compromise and capitulation when “joining people where they are” is not just a first step in the process of bringing the gospel but also the last one. When the seeker-sensitive movement is done using all the insights and tools of modernity, all with great effect and success, is God any longer necessary? What happens when these new gods of modernity fail to work the magic of success in successive generations, do we invent new ones again? Guinness believes that many super-churches are simply artificially inflating themselves through technique and personality, but not with a message that converts, that is, not with the truth of the gospel.26

User-friendly evangelism is defective in its fundamental pretense, namely, its notion that lost sinners are actually seeking God, that unbelievers are seekers of the way, the truth and the life. What about Romans 3:11? With its flawed doctrine of humanity, user-friendly evangelism misrepresents the enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent, and therefore minimizes the antithesis between church and world.This leads to the false idea that unbelievers can be coaxed, persuaded ,wooed ,or otherwise wheedled into the kingdom of God. I believe church leaders and pastors must look elsewhere for a “model” approach for evangelism today. Next time, the Lord willing, we will examine some strengths of the seeker-sensitive movement, and offer some observations for doing Reformed evangelism today.

FOOTNOTES

1. Bill Hybels in Christianity Today, July 18, 1994, p. 22.

2. G.A. Pritchard, Willow Creek Seeker Services Evaluating a New Way of Doing Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1996), p. 21.

3. G.A. Pritchard, op. cit., pp. 26–27.

4. Christianity Today, July 18, 1994, pp. 21–25. G. A. Pritchard, op. cit.

5. G.A. Pritchard, op. cit., p. 280.

6. J.I. Packer, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1961) , pp. 27–28.

7. G.A. Pritchard, op. cit., p. 231.

8. MacArthur, J., Ashamed of the Gospel (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1993), p. 63. 

9. David Wells, God in the Wasteland, p. 75.

10. David Wells, op. cit., p. 60.

11. G.A. Pritchard, op. cit., p. 256.

12. G.A. Pritchard, op. cit., p. 256.

13. Christianity Today, July 18, 1994, p. 24.

14. G.A. Pritchard, op. cit., p. 218.

15. David Wells, op. cit., pp. 88-117.

16. G.A. Pritchard, op. cit., p. 261.

17. G.A. Pritchard, op. cit., p. 261.

18. Will Metzger, Tell the Truth: The Whole Gospel to the Whole Person by Whole People, 2nd edition (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1984), p. 56.

19. G.A. Pritchard, op. cit., p. 26 .

20. G.A. Pritchard, op. cit., p. 272.

21. C. Veenhof, The Word of God and Preaching (Mid-America Reformed Seminary, 1987), pp.10f

22. G.A. Pritchard, op. cit., pp. 275, 268–269.

23. G. A. Pritchard, op. cit., pp. 286.

24. Os Guinness, Dining with the Devil: The Megachurch Movement Flirts with Modernity (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1993), p. 27.

25. Os Guinness, op. cit., p. 28.

26. Os Guinness, op. cit., p. 29.

Rev. Beach currently serves as pastor of the First Pella CRC. He has accepted the appointment to teach Practical Theology at Mid-America Reformed Seminary in Dyer, IN.