“Structuring Worship to Accommodate Unbelievers is Misguided” — R.C. Sproul
R.C. Sproul,
Many have found the life of the church to be irrelevant and boring, and so an effort to meet the needs of these people has driven some radical changes in how we worship God.
Perhaps the most evident model developed over the last half century is that model defined as the “seeker-sensitive model.” Seekers are defined as those people who are unbelievers and are outside of the church but who are searching for meaning and significance to their lives. The good intention of reaching such people with evangelistic techniques that include the reshaping of Sunday morning worship fails to understand some significant truths set forth in Scripture.
In Romans 3, Paul makes abundantly clear that unconverted people do not seek after God….so structuring worship to accommodate unbelievers is misguided because these unbelievers are not seeking after God. Seeking after God begins at conversion, and if we are to structure our worship with a view to seekers, then we must structure it for believers, since only believers are seekers.
When we look at the early church, we see that the Christians of the first century gathered on the Lord’s day, devoting themselves to the study of the apostles’ doctrine, to fellowship, to prayer, and to the breaking of bread (Acts 2:42). This was not an assembly of unbelievers. It was an assembling together of believers. Of course, as our Lord warned, there are always present among believers people who have made false professions of faith. There are always the tares that grow alongside of the wheat (Matt. 13:36–43). But one does not structure the church to meet the felt needs and desires of the tares. The purpose of corporate assembly, which has its roots in the Old Testament, is for the people of God to come together corporately to offer their sacrifices of praise and worship to God. So the first rule of worship is that it be designed for believers to worship God in a way that pleases God. . .
. . .Another erroneous assumption made in the attempt to restructure the nature of worship is that the modern generation has been so changed by cultural and contextual influences — such as the impact of the electronic age upon their lives — that they are no longer susceptible to traditional attempts of being reached by expository preaching. Early in the twentieth century, the liberal preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick pointed out that people were no longer interested in coming to church to hear what some apostle or prophet wrote a couple thousand years ago. Such words and messages were completely irrelevant according to Fosdick, and so the focus of preaching has moved in many cases away from an exposition of the Word of God. We assume this alteration is necessary if we’re to reach the people who have been trapped within the changes of our current culture. The erroneous assumption is that in the last fifty years, the constituent nature of humanity has changed, as if the heart can no longer be reached via the mind. It also assumes that the power of the Word of God has lost its potency, so that we must look elsewhere if we are to find powerful and moving experiences of worship in our church. Though the intentions may be marvelous, the results, I believe, are and will continue to be catastrophic.
taken from: Good Intentions Gone Bad, Tabletalk, October 1st, 2007.
Seems we both had this on our minds today. I posted a message by Archibald Brown from the 1800′s entitled <a href="http://wp.me/pu1hR-bM" title="The Devil's Mission of Amusement". The "seeker-sensitive model" seems to have started long ago, but is becoming more prominent in our age.
As one who was involved with two different "seeker" churches but has now come away from them, I look back on my life, and the lives of others and see the damage that was done. There is very little maturity and depth in the lives of attenders. One friend of mine, who still attends one of these churches admitted to me that he feels like it is an "entry-level" church in that it gets your foot in the door, like our first job helps set us up for a better job down the road. The problem, as I see it, is that very few people seem to graduate from that "entry-level" church. I fear that this will lead to some serious issues, such as major doctrinal and theological error, in the very near future.
Amen, Thom.