The Terrible Danger of Drinking Old Wine
From the Structure-It Destroys the Taste for Jesus’ New Wine

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The Megachurch Phenomenon Has Nothing to Do With Christ and Discipleship

“Whatever influence for good as followers of Christ, as believers in the truth, they may have to improve, refine, and elevate the world in their association with it, and personal effort put forth, will depend upon their vital connection with the breadth and distinctness of the line of demarcation which characterizes them as separate from the world, and the perfection of contrast to the world which they reveal in spirit, in words, in works, from the world.” GCDB 2-4-93.

 

A Devastating Polemic Against the “Megachurch” Phenomenon

“Evangelicalism, now much absorbed by the arts and tricks of marketing, is simply not very serious anymore.’ That is the judgment of David F. Wells of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in a new book Above All earthy Pow’rs. This is a book of considerable interest. More than half of it is devoted to an overview of the last several decades of sociological writing about religion and modernity, with major attention to the work of Peter. L. Berger, and laced with a theological critique indebted chiefly to Karl Barth.  The last third of the book is a devastating polemic against the evangelical ‘megachurch’ phenomenon, with it pandering to ‘seekers’ in search of a vaguely spiritual uplift devoid of concern for truth or serious discipleship. The panderers, writes Wells, claim to be winning souls for Christ, but in fact the number of ‘born again’ Christians is static. They are really engaged in niche marketing by selling spiritual entertainment that, by comparison, makes Bonhoeffer’s ‘cheap grace’ look like the way of the Cross.” –First Things, May, 2006, p. 64. Quoted in The Journal, June 2005.

(A monthly publication of American Christian College d/b/a Summit Ministries, Manitou Springs, Co.) Emphasis mine.

 

Understanding What Has happened to the Structure

In order to understand why the Structure has become the way it is, it is necessary to understand what has happened in the world at large around us, for the Structure has become what it is because of its effort to adapt to the world around it using the policy of “cultural relativism.” Roman Catholicism calls it “missionary adaptation,” the effort to adapt the church to the surrounding world in order to increase the conversions from the world.

 

Structure Sucked Into a Much, Much Larger Phenomenon

Concisely, the Structure has become part of a much, much larger phenomenon that has taken place in the evangelical world. In short, the principles that drive the consumer-oriented postmodern world have become the principles that drive the “Church Growth” movement that seeks to market the church to a godless postmodern society.

Unless we understand the deeper threat spiritually of what has transpired in Babylon, we will never understand what has hit the youth ministries, and the Structures at large of evangelicalism and the Structure of the professes people of God.

The New Gnosticism: “Seeker” Churches – Reinventing and Reengineering the Church

 

“ ‘For Gnostics,’ Elaine Pagels explains, ‘exploring the psyche became explicitly what it is for many people today implicitly – a religious quest,’ not least because Gnostics believed that a fragment of divinity was lodged somewhere in their interior world.” – Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979, 123, quoted in Wells, 141.

 

“Jung’s most famous ideas-the collective unconscious…would not have been possible without guidance from Philemon [an evil spirit]. It is from this Gnostic-Mithraic guru, who lives in a timeless space that Jung called the Land of the Dead, that Jung received instruction in ‘the Law,’ the esoteric key to the secrets of the ages. Jung inscribed these lessons in his ‘Red Book.’ –Richard Noll, The Arian Christ: The Secret Life of Carl Jung. (New York: Random House, 1997), pp. 3,4.

 

“[Jung’s] ‘Seven Sermons’ is written in an oracular style, under the pseudonym of a famous Hellenistic Gnostic by the name of Basilides of Alexandria….” Ibid., 161. 

 

“By 1916 he [Jung] began to link his self-identity and personal destiny with the Gnostic heresies and even took on the pseudonym (and literary voice) of the second-century Gnostic leader Basilides of Alexandria….” –Ibid., 139.

 

‘Gnosticism may be defined as a system which taught the cosmic redemption of the spirit through knowledge… One Gnostic teacher counseled, ‘Abandon the search for God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the starting point. Learn who it is who within you makes everything his own… you will find him in yourself.”’ –Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol, 1 “The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971, pp. 82-87.

Jung’s Gnosticism Invades Evangelicalism

The psychologist Carl Jung, deeply immersed in Gnosticism, would create a phenomenon that would invade the evangelical churches known as “seeker” churches-churches based on Jung’s concepts of the exploration of the self. The exploration of the self would replace true discipleship of Christ.

 

Consumerism

“The merchants of the earth shall weep and mourn over her…” Revelation 18:11.

The Gnostic/pagan psychology of Carl Jung has been welded together with the consumerism of our culture in the “Seeker spirituality.” Consumerism is a major part of Babylon. Consumerism has merged with religion, has fused with religion. The religion of exploring the self is merging with a consumerism that would appeal to the “spirituality” of the self-driven soul.

 

Reinventing and Reengineering the Church

The new approach in reinventing and reengineering the church is considered to be the most important effort of evangelicalism to engage the postmodern world.

Seduction by Consumerist, Postmodern Culture’s Temptation to Negotiate the Gospel in the Interest of Ephemeral Relevance

David F. Wells, the Andre Murch Distinguished Professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, an ordained Congregational minister, writes of this ‘seduction by consumerist, postmodern (read ultramodern) culture, and its temptation to negotiate the gospel in the interest of an ephemeral relevance,” writes Timothy George, dean, of the Beeson Divinity School, Stanford University, and executive editor of Christianity Today. 

 

“Useful” Religion: A New Kind of Distinction

“The gods and goddesses have gone in the Western world today but so, too, has the single God who alone exists and Who has uniquely revealed Himself. In the postmodern world, truth is now relative, not to the multitude of gods and goddesses, but to the multitude of human knowers.  The categories of true and false, right and wrong, therefore fall away and are replaced by a different kind of distinction: religion which is useful as opposed to that which is therapeutically helpful. And the need to discern between what is true and what is false, we have come to think, is a bad habit which needs to be abandoned.” – Wells, 149, 150.

 

Willow Creek Pioneers the New Approach

Wells writes, “This new approach was, of course, pioneered by Willow Creek Community Church…. There is, however, a common thread that ties Willow Creek not only to its copycat followers, but also to those who were inspired initially by its success but have gone on to develop their own mutations. That common element lies in the fact that they are all operating off methodologies for succeeding in which that success requires little or no theology.

It is an attempt to respond to the spiritual yearnings of Boomers and Xers while creating an experience of the church which is compatible with their habits, likes, dislikes, wants, expectations, and sounds. [In 1992 the Willow Creek Association was formed to link ‘likeminded, action-oriented churches’ worldwide. The association in 2001 had swelled to over 5,000 churches and 65,000 leaders were attending ‘how to’ conferences annually… In the year 2001, 865,000 people attended Willow Creek services…]. It produces an evangelism which is modest in its attempts at persuasion about truth, but energetic in its retailing of spiritual and psychological benefits. So successful, so alluring, has this experiment become that it would not be an exaggeration to say that it is transforming what evangelicalism looks like.” –David F. Wells, Above All Earthy Pow’rs, 265, 266.

Seeker Churches Intuitively Drawn to The “Shadow Culture” of Spiritual Seekers   

“This changed cultural context is producing spiritual seekers. It is to this ‘shadow culture,’ this parallel market of spiritual desire, that seeker churches have been intuitively drawn.  Their methodology is peculiarly adapted to this movement because to those who seek spirituality without religion, as so many in the postmodern world do, these churches are offering spirituality without theology. It is most often, spirituality of therapeutic kind, which assumes that the most pressing issues that should be addressed in church are those with which most people are preoccupied: how to sustain relationships, how to handle stress, what to do about recurring financial problems, how to handle conflicts in the workplace, and how to raise children… they really have not come into church to find the kind of truth by which the Church has historically been defined, and by which it has lived, across the generations and centuries…

 

Seeker Churches: A Buyer’s Market

“The seeker churches have recognized that, for good or ill, they are operating in a marketplace. Just as there is choice in the mall so there is choice in religion. Moreover, what we find there is that it is increasingly a buyer’s not a seller’s market.

 

 

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