Why I Hate Seeker-Friendly Preachers
The seeker-friendly movement has been a scourge for several decades now with no end in sight. It has diluted biblical Christianity now to the point where it is unrecognizable. The preachers within this movement offer an ersatz brand of Christianity antithetical to biblical revelation – one that appeals to the flesh, maximizes the pleasures of this life by sacrificing rewards in the next, and puts on offer all of the indulgences and the lusts of this present evil age as allurements in a bait-and-switch approach to evangelism that is all bait with no switch. Sin and repentance, depth and precision in biblical exposition, and genuine discipleship with its concomitant suffering, persecution and pain are relegated to the margins of a movement that proffers a “Christianity-Lite” – tastes great, less filling.
I hate the seeker-friendly movement and I hate the purveyors of its trinkets who purport to speak for the Almighty. I hate them for two reasons primarily.
Seeker-Friendly Preachers Devalue the Word of God
The Bible contains the very words of God. 2 Timothy 3:16 declares, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God.” A literal translation from the Greek text would read, “All Scripture is God-breathed.” The Greek word there in the text is theopneustos and it is a compound word that combines the Greek word for God (Theos) and the Greek verb meaning “to breathe” (pneo). This speaks of what biblical scholars call “the creative breath of God.” Literally, the Bible was produced by God’s activity. B.B. Warfield notes that this is in accord with “the Hebraic conviction that God produces all that He would bring into being by a mere breath.” Consider that for a moment. The God who said, “Let there be light” and there was light, wrote a book. The One True and Living God who spoke heaven and earth into existence inspired the Scriptures. He breathed them out, every word of it, which means the Bible is not ink on paper. The Bible is a miracle. Hebrews 4:12 declares, “For the word of God is quick, and powerful and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” The Bible is the inspired word of God – all of it – and it is pure power. The word of God is not static or stale, impotent or irrelevant. The word of God is living and breathing and it is powerful beyond measure. The Bible contains devastating power that cannot be contained once it is unleashed. I know this to be true now, but this truth was hidden from me for far too long.
I grew up in a church with all the hallmarks of the seeker-friendly movement. I must have given my life or “recommitted” my life to Christ (whatever that means) at least a dozen or more times at various vacation Bible schools, at revivals and at numerous church retreats. But, I was an evil man, of this there can be no debate, and my life was marked by unrepentant sin and gross immorality. I was a Christian by name only, and that just barely, as there was no evidence that my profession of faith in Christ was real because my life bore no resemblance to the One to whom I claimed allegiance. And this was largely because the word of God was incidental to my purported Christian faith. I had never read the Bible and I was never taught the Bible because I attended a seeker-friendly church that placed only a nominal value on the word of God. Consequently, throughout my formative years in the church, I was fed a steady diet of superficial, topical sermons on a weekly basis (some of which were quite good by seeker-friendly standards, many of which were retreads) and so, needless to say, I saw no growth. No Christian maturity. No sanctification. No likeness to Jesus Christ.
This is the primary reason why I hate superficial, topical sermons with the fury of a thousand suns and why the sermons I hear in seeker-friendly churches nauseate me to no end. Because I know from personal experience, they are a waste of everyone’s time. And more importantly they are a cowardly abdication of the pastor’s primary responsibility which is to feed the flock of God. In John 21, Jesus asked Peter three times, “Do you love me?” Peter replied that he did. Jesus then told Peter three times to “Feed my sheep.” Our Lord did not command Peter to take the path of least resistance and tell people what they want to hear.
A wise person once said, “If a postal worker doesn’t pick and choose what mail he thinks you prefer, then a preacher shouldn’t either.” A pastor’s primary responsibility is not to sort the mail, it is to deliver it. And when a preacher takes it upon himself to pick and choose what he is going to talk about from the word of God, for the purpose of appealing to the flesh and building a following and a brand, he makes it so that his sermons are not in service to the word of God, but the Bible becomes a stage prop in service to a predetermined message of human origin and that doesn’t help anybody. And this will subtly and invariably indicate to the congregation that some of the Bible is helpful, some of it is not, when nothing could be further from the truth. All of Scripture is inspired or none of it is.
Seeker-friendly preachers pay lip service to the inerrancy and authority of Scripture for both faith and praxis within the church, but then turn around and prostitute themselves and their ministry for the sake of job security, money, influence and power and, in the process, devalue the precious word of God by watering it down into digestible, self-help soundbites for the sake of temporal satisfaction at the cost of denuding the Bible of its eternal value. A preacher who purports to speak for the Almighty yet refuses to use His words is no preacher at all.
To all seeker-friendly preachers and to all those who imbibe their message and support their ministries: Do you honestly believe the Bible contains the very words of the One True and Living God? If you do, then you should act like it.
Seeker-Friendly Preachers Diminish the Almighty
I don’t know exactly when this happened, but somewhere along the line the mainstream church came to the conclusion that its duty was not just to preach the word of God, but to modify the word of God. The Bible had to be not just edifying to the faithful, but palatable to pagans. The intentions were no doubt good, but the church created a monster. This new age approach to Christianity spawned the seeker friendly movement and its close cousin the prosperity gospel, both of which produce nothing but false converts who are fruitless and yet still consider themselves to be Christian. And what these two perversions of biblical Christianity have done is to set the church, not in opposition to its worldly context, but rather squarely within its confines and limitations.
We are mired in a Western, consumer driven economy where idiosyncratic preferences are of paramount importance and where products and services are tailored to exact specifications. The distinction between the secular and the holy is tolerable in every aspect save one – personal preference. But, instead of churches condemning such narcissistic, crass consumerism, mainstream Christianity now caters to it. Seeker-friendly megachurches offer style over substance because that is precisely what the unconverted want and the customer is always right. Seeker-friendly preachers offer sentiment – “feelings without commitment” – and total anonymity with absolutely no accountability or commitment required for genuine discipleship. Mainstream churches are now crowd-funded, for-profit organizations and in order to fill the coffers one must fill the pews. And packing stadiums requires that you tell people what they want to hear.
“You don’t want to hear about sin and repentance? We won’t talk about that. You don’t like trials and tribulations? You find persecution for the cause of Christ distasteful? We’ll promise you a brand of Christianity free from all of that. You love this world? You want to be rich? You lust after the things of this present evil age? We can promise you a God created in your own image – a milquetoast deity who obsequiously responds to every infantile tantrum, one who exists solely for the purpose of providing for you all that your fallen heart desires and more. Jesus will make your life here better, more fulfilled, and free from all pain. Jesus will bless your business, your health, and your family. Health, wealth, and prosperity is your birthright after all."
What is perhaps the most distressing aspect of where mainstream Christianity is now is that by pandering to the unconverted, it has turned the non-Christian into the consumer and God into the product and Christians are then obligated to overcome consumer resistance no matter what it costs. And even non-Christians have bought into this nonsense. I don’t know how many nonbelievers I have run into who actually think of God as begging for their allegiance – who have actually deluded themselves into thinking that they are in the right for sitting in judgment of God.
“I can’t believe in a God who would do this. I can’t believe in a God who would allow that. I don’t believe in God because He did this or didn’t do this in my life. I’ll believe in God if you tell me something I agree with or if you tell me something about God I like.”
And so many Christians find themselves in the ridiculous position of trying to defend God as though He needs a defense. So many Christians try to sell God to those who want nothing to do with Him, to those who have no interest in genuine discipleship, and to those for whom unalloyed allegiance to the Lordship of Jesus Christ holds absolutely no appeal. They ultimately pander to those who are under the delusion that the Almighty actually owes them something and, in the process, Christians lower themselves and diminish the Almighty in the minds of the deluded by effectively becoming used car salesmen. “You don’t like this aspect about God, well how about this aspect? You don’t like this color, we just got this car in this morning. Check out these leather seats. What do I have to do to get you into this car today?” The seeker-friendly movement and the preachers at its forefront have turned the non-Christian into the customer who is always right and they have made God out to be a used Chevy. And I’m sick of it.
I wish churches would have the guts to say to the non-believer who is of this disposition: “Who do you think you are? You have absolutely no leverage here. You are in no position to dictate terms to God. God does not need you. You desperately need God. You, a created being, have sinned against your holy Creator, do you have any idea the gravity and the magnitude of what that means? You have rebelled against God, the Maker of heaven and earth, and the day of reckoning is coming and that right soon. And on that day, you will stand before Him and you will be absolutely wrecked by His incandescent glory as He is clothed in unapproachable light, surrounded by His innumerable heavenly host. And on that day, you will give an account for the life that you led and please do not think for a second that God sending you to hell will make Him eternally and inconsolably sad. Romans 9:22-23 declares, ‘22 What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction: 23 And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory.’ God is going to be glorified in you either way – in your destruction or in your salvation. God does not grovel to you. You have it exactly backwards. You as an unbeliever, as a sinner before a holy God must throw yourself prostrate, facedown upon the mercy and the grace of the King.”