Phil and John Discuss the Seeker Movement

Selected Scriptures

JOHN: Hi, this is John MacArthur.  You know that my commitment is to teach the Bible verse by verse to the congregation of our church every week.  And we've been doing that for 35 years.  Grace To You, our radio ministry, takes that teaching and transform it into radio programs and sometimes into books and articles and, of course, always those messages are on CD and tape and MP3.  Most of the time we're doing those expositions.  But sometimes, in fact seemingly more often now than not, there's a movement or a trend that comes along that is very high profile and very effective, it's sort of sweeping and influential and at the same time troubling.  And so I feel that when that happens that I need to address that issue in a way that I can't when I'm preaching in the pulpit.  And I know that many of these issues get to you, our listeners, and our family out there in Grace To You and I just feel like I have to take the opportunity from time to time to help you to perhaps have some insight into what's going on. 

And that's why I'm here today in the studio with my friend and colleague, and fellow pastor, Phil Johnson.  Phil is Executive Director here at Grace To You and a long time fellow preacher and teacher of mine and dear friend.  And we're going to talk about an issue that's critically important and an issue that is very clear to us, you, our ministry family, wants some help to understand.  So, Phil, thanks for sort of prompting my thinking on the subject and being here to help us clarify some of these things today.

PHIL: Thank you, John.  Today we want to talk about ministry philosophy, the way we do church.  And there's a growing movement actually for the past ten years or so it seems the largest growing, fasting growing segment of evangelicalism today is going after a philosophy of ministry that's variously called Market-Driven Churches, The Seeker Movement.  There's a famous book by Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Church that more or less outlines this philosophy of ministry.

Tell us exactly what this is.

JOHN: Well, I don't know if I can cover, you know, all that ground, but I would approach it this way.  This is a redefining of the leadership of the church, along lines that appear to me to be far more entrepreneurial than biblical.  This is importing into the church the cultural success patterns, looking at corporate America, looking at successful CEOs, looking at successful businesses, everything from Ben and Jerry's to Microsoft and trying to find the triggers, trying to find the avenues, trying to find the access, the hot buttons that allow them to sell their product to the degree that they do and to be so successful in corporation life.

And so, the church in those last ten or fifteen years has basically been in many ways co-opted or commandeered by the entrepreneurs.  And the guys who can really pull it off, the guys who are the clever guys, the glib guys, the smooth communicators, the guys who are really savvy to the marketing strategy, the guys who have a lot of money at their feet who can access a lot of money and pull this off are becoming the success models for the church.  And now they're getting all the kudos, they're selling books by the millions, they're creating massive websites and sucking up all kinds of other pastors and churches into the vortex of these entrepreneurial kind of culturally driven quasi churches.  It isn't that everything they say is wrong.  It isn't that everything they do is wrong.  It is that the church is being run by market savvy entrepreneurs.  That in itself has no connection to Scripture.

You know, the simple question is: what ever happened to the man of God?  What ever happened to the man of God who is known as a man of prayer, as a man of deep understanding of Scripture, who is known as a Bible teacher, who is known as a godly man whose life is a pattern to follow, who is a discipler of others, who's a builder of spiritual leaders?  And even going deeper into the issue, whatever happened to the understanding of the church as the body of Christ over which Christ is the head who Himself as the Lord of the church has already defined the ministry of the church and the content for that ministry and the leadership for that ministry and how that leadership is to function?  It just seems as if we've pushed aside the biblical model.  We've pushed aside the man of God.  And because some of these guys have been so successful, you know, beyond what has ever happened, certainly in the modern era in the church before, and because there is a seductive element in success and bigness, this thing has become a movement that has gained immense speed.  The fallout is that it's very hard for most people to pull off this kind of entrepreneurial church.  They don't have the cleverness, the creativity.  They don't have the resources financially and personnel wise.  They can't quite pull it off.  They don't have sort of a clean state...slate to start their deal in and so what they try to do is a vain attempt at this and it winds up fracturing a church, or splintering a church, or creating conflict in a church.  And very often a guy will try it, fail and leave.  And there's a congregation sitting there now divided with no idea of who their next leader should be and chaos very often ensues and the church is on a path of very difficult recovery. 

So, there's a lot of fallout to this movement.  And I think the bottom line is it redefines the church in cultural terms, in turns the church into a marketing agency that says what it thinks its supposed customers want to hear. 

PHIL: So you have a problem with the philosophy of the church that underlies this and the approach to leadership.  It seems to me as you describe it, too, there's a major problem with this idea that the gospel is a commodity to be peddled.

JOHN: Yeah, there's no question about that.  But that is the underlying idea.  The underlying idea is the gospel is a commodity.  We're selling this just like people sell magazines, just like they sell, you know, basketball shoes, just like they sell tires, cars, or whatever else they sell.

PHIL: And there's lots of people though that would say, "You can't argue with success."  I mean, you know it yourself that a lot of these churches are huge and...

JOHN: Yeah, and that's the seduction.  That's the draw.  If they weren't, there wouldn't be anybody listening.  If they weren't, there wouldn't be buying into the website.  The question is not "can they get a crowd?"  You want to get a crowd?  There's a lot of ways to get a crowd.  They have figured out how to get a crowd and call it church.  There's a big difference between a crowd and a church...big difference.  And if the truth is known in these seeker-friendly environments, one would have to ask the question: is there in here somewhere a true church in the midst of the crowd?  I mean, Jesus drew crowds, massive crowds. 

I'm right now teaching through Luke 12 and the crowds based upon the language there in chapter 12 verse 1 could have numbered in the tens of thousands.  He could draw the crowd, but it says there that He was talking to the disciples.  And eventually what He said to the disciples caused the crowd to turn on Him, it caused some of the disciples, so-called disciples, to leave Him very early in His ministry, those who were disciples wouldn't walk with Him anymore.  But eventually the crowd not only left, the crowd came back with a roar and forced the crucifixion.  So the point is this, the idea is not to draw a crowd and then to somehow redefine the crowd as a church.  If you want to draw a crowd, preach...figure out how to draw a crowd, that's fine, but make sure you preach the clear, pure, unadulterated, unmixed gospel of Jesus Christ and trust the Holy Spirit to do His work.  After all, salvation is the work of the Spirit.  It doesn't come by the cleverness of the preacher.  That's why Paul said he did not speak in clever words of human wisdom.

PHIL: You've been writing and dealing with this subject for at least 15 years and I've read or edited practically everything you've said on it.  It seems to me that one of your main complaints about this whole movement is what you just said, that it tends to diminish preaching.  It tends to push the pulpit off to the side and replace the preaching of God's Word with other things.

JOHN: Phil, you know because you know me and because you're the same way, I'm driven by the truth.  I'm compelled by the truth.  I'm obligated to the truth.  The truth is what matters.  I'm never concerned...and this is Pauline...Paul says, "You know, I'm going to preach the gospel."  It's going to be the foolishness of the preaching, you can't replace preaching.  I was just asked a question on the radio: Can contemporary music replace preaching?  And I answered it this way, nothing can replace preaching, nothing.  It is by the foolishness of preaching that those who believe are being saved, 1 Corinthians.  So has the church come to the conclusion where it doesn't believe that anymore?  We've got to get the preaching out and turn it into cool talk, or cool speak, or contemporary vernacular.  It is the preaching that does the work and Paul would not be intimidated by the Corinthian expectation of clever speech because it existed in their day as well,   and oratory and all of that.  He continually goes back to the fact that he must be faithful to the preaching and that the content of that preaching is to be the Word of God, nothing more and nothing less.  And I think that's where this thing goes astray.

It goes astray at its view of biblical authority and the power of the Word of God.  It questions...it has to question the authority of Scripture.  It has to question the power of Scripture because it replaces it.

PHIL: Yeah, now, of course, many...many of the men who promote this would say they don't question the authority of Scripture or the power of Scripture.

JOHN: Yeah, easy to say, hard to prove.  I mean, you can say you believe in the authority of Scripture, so you tell me what's most powerful?  Your cleverness or the Bible, you tell me what's the most powerful.  I'll tell you when you stand up and speak what you believe.  If you tell me the Bible is far more powerful, you get up in a pulpit and preach a little sermonette on a coffee machine, as I've seen them do, or on a TV sitcom, what you're telling me that you believe the Bible is the most powerful and what you're doing is contradicting what you're telling me.  You don't have any integrity and I'm going to opt out for the fact that when you get up there in front of those people that you care to reach, you're going to use what you think is best.  And if you use you and not God's Word, then it doesn't matter what you tell me about the Bible, I know by what you do what your real conviction is.

PHIL: Well, in fact, you were just reading me an excerpt from one of the books that came out of this movement where he said that sometimes a personal testimony or a personal story will penetrate a heart where the Word of God could not.  Do you believe that?

JOHN: No.  What's it going to penetrate a heart with?  Emotion?  Oh, I could tell...I could tell stories, I mean, I'm a speaker, I'm a preacher, I could tell stories that make people cry, sometimes I do that.  You know, at our church, sometimes people weep when you tell them a heart-warming...that's not hard to do.  You can...you can move people around emotionally.  You can jerk them all over the place emotionally.  That isn't how people get saved.  That same book, and you're talking about The Purpose-Driven Life book, that same book says the great thing about telling stories is it bypasses intellectual defenses. 

Let me tell you something.  No one was ever converted who didn't go through the intellect.  Nobody was ever converted who didn't have their intellectual defenses shot down.  You can't bypass how people think and make them feel their way into salvation.  That's an illusion.  So what you've got is a false conversion.  This is a battle for the mind.  This is a battle for how people think.  And if you've got intellectual defenses, they've got to come down and the only thing that's going to bring them down is not your emotional clever little cute story.  What's going to tear them down is the truth and now that puts you right in 2 Corinthians 10 where Paul says, "You know, these people are in these fortresses, these fortresses are nothing more than their belief systems with all the intellectual defenses."  So, he says, you can't...you know, you can't bring them down with carnal weapons.  The weapons of our warfare are not carnal.  You can't use human cleverness and your, you know, your little insights and your little practicalities and your cute little things to smash these defenses.  And he says these fortresses are logismos in the Greek, they are ideologies.  They're systems of thinking.

How do you smash a system of thinking?  You can't go around it.  That's absurd.  You can't evade the intellectual defense.  You've got to hit it head on with divine truth which energized by the Holy Spirit crushes those defenses.  Paul says, "We bring down those fortresses and bring every thought captive to Christ."  This is a battle for the mind.  And any ministry that avoids the mind and all of the possible and real defenses that people have in the mind is going to live with false conversions.

PHIL: How did this movement get started?

JOHN: Robert Schuller started it.

PHIL: Really!

JOHN: I mean, in the modern sort of form.  Yeah, Robert Schuller said, "If you want to know how to build a church, ask the people in your neighborhood."  Don't ask Christ who is the head of the church, ask the people in the neighborhood.  So he did a survey when he came to Orange County, you know, he's a transplanted Michigan guy who came out of a liberal background and belonged to the Reformed church, but told me personally he could sign the statement of the Reformed church and not believe what they meant by it.  This is classic neoorthodoxy.  He said I could make those words mean anything I want.  So he starts a church and since he doesn't have any commitment to biblical authority, everything for him is psychological, he's going to figure out a way to build a church by using psychology.  And psychology says, I go to the community, tell them I want to have a church that you want to come to, so what would you like your church to be like?  They then tell him what they want the church to be like.  Now they've obligated them...he's obligated them to come to the church that they themselves have shaped.  And that's what happened.  And so he built this, he calls it a church, it's a crowd, it's a group of people who come under the title of church, one would certainly agree that based upon the theology, it in itself is not a church.  There perhaps are believers there.  And Bill Hybels then was drawn to the success pattern of this.  He was drawn to the numbers and, of course, the wealth that came with it.  And these are always planted, by the way, whether you're talking about Schuller, or Hybels, or whether you're talking about Rick Warren, those churches are all planted in highly affluent societies, in places where there's a great amount of affluence to fund this kind of thing.  And they're all cultural niche churches, they can only appeal to a certain type of person in terms of sociology and economics.

So, you know, Bill says his guru is Robert Schuller.  And so he was going to do the same kind of thing only with a different generation.  And then Rick Warren comes along and does a similar kind of thing in a similarly isolated community of affluent people with another kind of generation.  But it all really goes back to the methodology of Robert Schuller that says if you want to know what to do in the church, find out what people want and give them what they want.

PHIL: That's basically the felt-needs philosophy.  You know, find out somebody's felt needs, what need to they feel and address that.

Now do you reject that completely?

JOHN: I reject that as a motivation for the message.  In other words, when I come to church on a Sunday morning and there are six thousand people there, I really...it really is not important to me what each and every one of those people think they need at the moment.  You know, maybe somebody needs relief from his nagging wife, maybe somebody needs relief from his rebellious teenager.  Maybe somebody needs to have his mother-in-law go back to Cincinnati.  I mean, maybe somebody else is struggling with cancer.  I mean, I can't sort through all of that.  This is not about psychology, this is not about putting band-aids on people's problems.  In fact, I've been so bold as to say to people, "You know, we know you have severe problems, but just be patient, they'll go away and worse ones will come."  I mean, what are we talking about here?  This is life.  Man is born into trouble as the sparks fly upward.  Sooner or later you start living with a heavenly mind set and you see these earthly issues in perspective as very temporary and not the way you define either the blessing of God on your life, or the purpose of your life.  So...

PHIL: So what you're really saying is that there is a dangerous man-centered focus in that whole felt-needs idea, right?  It drives you to a man-centered theology.

JOHN: That's right.  I mean, you're talking in terms of the big picture.  And it goes back to what I said before.  Christ is the head of the church.  It is His mind that informs the church.  We have the mind of Christ.  And the mind of Christ is revealed in the Scripture, this is what we preach, this is what we teach.  We don't ask the world what they want to hear.  Jesus never did.  The prophets never did.  The Apostles never did.  That's why they all kept getting killed.  You know, when people go pouring in, when the general public goes pouring in to the secular bookstore to buy your Christian book, there's something missing there.

PHIL: John, I've read a few of these books and the advice they give preachers and so on and it seems to me that your preaching breaks all the rules of seeker-sensitivity.  You don't use the personal illustrations, or the cute little stories, you don't use Power Point.

JOHN: (Laugh) That's because I don't use the computer.  But no, I don't need Power Point.  Look, Power Point is one means of communication.  And the world has done fine for millennia without Power Point.  It's a means of communication.  And it's very efficient and a very good means of communication in some environments.  You know, there are a lot of means of communication, television, radio, all of that.  Preaching is in itself a means of communication.  Preaching...I mean, look, you still have, I mean, just we're a television generation, it still amazes me that we still have standup comics.  None of them are funny and none of them will I listen to because they're all crude.  But you still have standup comics, people who stand up in front of an audience with a microphone, don't have anything other than their mouth and they talk and people listen.  You still have political speeches.  You have guys get up and give speeches, most of them are somewhat painful to endure because they're just endless sound bytes designed for further media, you know, play.  But don't underestimate people.  Preaching is in itself a means of communication.  It is a form of communication.  And when the preacher is gifted with the Holy Spirit when he's enriched with the content of Scripture, and when he's well prepared, it can be a very dramatic and dynamic means of communication.

PHIL: Do you think all this emphasis on illustrations and jokes and Power Point and all that has actually diminished the effectiveness of preachers in our generation?  Maybe there aren't as many good preachers because they're being trained to do stuff that is frankly detrimental to good preaching.

JOHN: Yeah, first of all, it takes up a lot of time.  Secondly, it's in a sense a concession to people that...it's condescending.  It's like saying, "I know you can't take serious talk for 45 minutes, so let me entertain you for a little bit here, a little bit there, a little bit here."  I think you really underestimate...I mean, even in our church situation, it's amazing, but our guys in the junior-high ministry sit the kids down, I'm talking Junior-High kids, and they do a Bible exposition with them for an hour.

PHIL: I know, I used to teach in junior high.

JOHN: Yeah...yeah.  And you know what?  Those kids are trained to dig into the Word of God, to open their Bibles and to follow the flow.  Now you can't just turn anybody loose in that environment, it has to be somebody who's skilled, you know, and gifted at communication at that level.

PHIL: It's actually harder to do it at that level than it is adults.

JOHN: Yeah, well the thing that's good about kids, and why I like to speak to kids is if they're not interested, they have the courtesy to talk.

PHIL: I have this theory about Power Point that if you can't preach it's not going to help you anyway.  So it's like a broken crutch, it doesn't do you much good.

JOHN: That's exactly right .  If you can't preach, nothing's going to help you.  If you can't preach, don't.  You know, if that's not your gift, and I'm not being harsh, if that's not your gift, don't.  I think there's a power and a flow in preaching.  There's a...you're dealing with the minds of people.  And I think there's a logical flow in good preaching.  There's a power that just carries a person along.  I know when I hear good preaching, that's how I am, I'm involved in this, this is an experience for me, this is an event.  It's a mental event, first of all, and draws my emotion into it.  But I think there's a flow in that and it shouldn't be chopped up with, "Okay, well let's stop and have a skit, or let's stop and have a Power Point."  You know, I encourage people to take notes, not to store them forever, but as you jot things down as you listen, it kind of keeps you on track and it emphasizes and sort of imbeds something that was said a little more firmly in your mind.

PHIL: There's something unprecedented about this whole seeker-sensitive movement.  If you look back through church history, all the major movements like the Protestant Reformation, sparked by preaching and the men who led were all great preachers, Calvin and Luther were renowned for their preaching.  The Puritan Movement cranked out more great preachers than any other era.  The first Great Awakening was sparked by preaching.  The big mega churches in history, Spurgeon's tabernacle in London, all built around great preaching.  Now for the first time in church history we have a major movement and massive churches built on something other than preaching.

JOHN: Right, definitely something other than preaching.  Yeah, in fact you wonder...well, the one thing they could eliminate and nobody would care would be the preaching.  That's true, that's a very important observation.  If...the trend started coming with music.  Churches began to be...I can think back to the seventies when the biggest church in this area, that I knew of really started the move toward music, big music.  At least in a west coast experience.  And I think music has continued to be the thing.  And as music has come to literally dominate our culture, it is the...it is the front runner.

PHIL: It's an interesting thing because it's probably THE most controversial thing in evangelical churches across America, the thing that most churches would have internal strife over would be music style and things like that.  And yet at Grace Church it's never been the case.  It's never been a controversy.  You're not someone who is hostile to music, or big music, as you say.  We have big music at Grace Church and even contemporary music. 

JOHN: Yeah, but...

PHIL: But it's not the focus.