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Body-Count Evangelism
Livingwalk.com
- Warren
Smith - Charlotte World
Reprinted with
permission from here - http://www.worldnewspaperpublishing.com/news/Editorials.asp?loc=TCW
COMMENTARY--- Rick
Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church, in Lake Forest, Calif., and
author of "The Purpose Driven Life," which has sold
25-million copies, is perhaps the most famous evangelical pastor in
America. He writes often about church growth, leadership, and related
issues. Here's something Warren wrote for the Mar. 16, 2004,
"Leadership Journal":
"Three key
responsibilities of every pastor are to discern where (and how) God's
Spirit is moving in our culture and time, prepare your congregation
for that movement, and cooperate with it to reach people Jesus died
for. I call it 'surfing spiritual waves' in The Purpose Driven
Church, and it's the reason Saddleback has grown to 23,500 on
weekends in 24 years.. You don't criticize a wave; you just ride it
as best you can. When Mel Gibson showed me his film, The Passion of
The Christ, last year, I.knew a huge wave-a spiritual tsunami-would
hit when the film debuted on February 25 [2004], and we began praying
and preparing to surf it."
When I read this
passage, I was taken aback. The celebrity name dropping, the appeal
to size as an indication of God's blessing, the propagation of an
extra-biblical theory ("spiritual waves") as a sign of
God's working, the pre-emptive strike against critics - these are
heresies and logical fallacies pervasive in the evangelical church
today, all rolled into a single paragraph.
Warren continues:
"We booked
47 theater screens for members to take their lost friends to. Kay
[Warren, Rick's wife] and I personally invited over a thousand lost
community leaders of Orange County to a VIP premiere showing,
including every mayor, congressman, superintendent of schools, other
community leaders, and four billionaires. The results? Over 600
unchurched community leaders attended our VIP showing; 892 friends of
members were saved during the two-week sermon series. Over 600 new
small groups were formed, and our average attendance increased by
3,000. That's catching a wave!"
When I read this,
I wondered: Even setting aside the theological and philosophical
problems, how could these numbers possibly be true? There was
something about them that just didn't make sense. So I turned to
"Outreach" magazine, which each year publishes lists of the
largest and fastest growing churches. The 2005 list (which covered
the period about which Warren writes) had Saddleback's weekly
attendance at 23,194. The 2006 "Outreach" list had
Saddleback at 20,595. That's a drop of nearly 3000. And - at least
according to these numbers, which were reported to
"Outreach" by the church itself - at no time did Saddleback
have the 23,500 that Warren asserted.
"Outreach"
reports the largest churches and the fastest growing churches on
adjacent pages in the magazine. So I flipped the page and discovered
something even more puzzling. Even though Saddleback's weekly
attendance fell by 3000, it reported a "gain" of 1,149 for
the year! How does a church that loses 3000 report a gain of over
1,000? Maybe they planted a new church. That's an admirable thing,
but even if true why should Saddleback be reporting the numbers of
another church as its own?
In the
"Leadership Journal" article, Warren also touted his
church's ability to attract young people, saying that "the
largest Gen-X church in America is Saddleback with over 20,000 names
under 29 on our church roll." Again, how could a church with
only 21,000 members have more than 20,000 under the age of 30? And
even if that is true, is it a good thing to have so thoroughly
"shut out" those over 30? How could such a congregation
possibly represent the true community - or "koininia" -
spoken of in the New Testament?
Some pastors are
growing wise to these self-aggrandizing perversions of truth. Dan
Burrell is the pastor of Northside Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C.
Burrell says he has grown disillusioned with the efforts of what I
and others are calling the Christian-Industrial Complex to get him to
participate in Body-Count Evangelism. Interestingly, the movie
"The Passion," which provided the context for Rick Warren's
comments, provided the context for Burrell's epiphany.
"I will admit
that I got seduced with Mel Gibson's 'The Passion of the
Christ,'" Burrell writes. "I was convinced enough that it
had evangelistic value that I bought out five screens at a local
theatre before its public release and we invited scores of
non-believers to join us in watching the movie and discussing it
afterwards. I recall one 'decision,' but no conversions, after all
the effort and I learned my lesson. From that point forward, I've
been pretty much immunized against 'partnering' with Hollywood. Upon
further reflection, I've reached the decision that pastors are
actually being asked not to partner with, but to pimp for Hollywood."
Burrell makes the
important distinction between "decisions" and
"conversions." If that distinction seems a false one,
consider this: The American Church Research Project reports that in
2000, only 18.7 percent of the U.S. population attended a Christian
church on an average Sunday. Ten years earlier, in 1990, that
percentage was 20.4. In other words, the percentage of churchgoers in
America is going down, not up.
Of course, Warren
is not alone in making outrageous claims. The Billy Graham
Evangelistic Association claimed in its 2005 annual report that
3.2-million people had made "decisions" for Christ as a
result of its ministries. Emergent church leaders, Willow Creekers,
and others constantly propagate the claim that they are reaching
unchurched people. I'm not saying that some of them are not doing
good work, but the most basic demographic analysis suggests strongly
that many of their claims cannot possibly be true. Indeed, it reminds
me of the one-liner going around during the church-roll padding
scandal of the Southern Baptist Convention a few years ago:
"There are more Southern Baptists than there are people."
The Southern
Baptists took steps to clean up their scandal. I can only hope that
Rick Warren and other megachurch and parachurch ministries choose to
exercise more care and integrity in the assessment of and reporting
of their impact. Because the inescapable conclusion is this: the Body
of Christ in America is not growing - either numerically or
spiritually. It is, relatively speaking, shrinking -- burdened by
crass commercialism, a lack of integrity, and the quest for power and
glory of celebrity preachers. An all but inescapable second
conclusion is this: the rest of us, if we do not speak out against
the lies of those who practice "body-count evangelism," are
standing by just as Paul stood by when he guarded the cloaks of those
who stoned Stephen. We, likewise, are guarding this cloak of
falsehood - subjecting the Body of Christ to a modern stoning of its own.
----
Warren Smith is
the publisher of The Charlotte World. He can be reached at warren.smith@thecharlotteworld.com
(2/10/2007)
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