We are surrounded by seeker-friendly/purpose-driven gatherings that are called churches. They are named with names like Final Thrust Kingdom Community, Elevation Church, Link Church, and whatever combination of apostolic, kingdom, gospel, evangelical, healing that one can imagine up. There are not many Baptist or Presbyterian churches left who kept “Baptist” or “Presbyterian” in their names. And most of those who have are either not thriving or have stopped expositional preaching long ago.

Seeker-driven churches are an attractive model, and that is the whole purpose of the church. They want to attract people who are rebuffed by the word “Baptist” or “Presbyterian” in the church name. They believe that churches not associated with old denominational names are fresh and more hip to the modern audiences, and they are. The “worship music” part is a rock concert complete with strobe lights, smoke machines and complete darkness except the stage, with the volume to match a concert. They sing secular songs with the same enthusiasm (if not more) than the “worship” songs. (In the church I attended, they sang “Hotel California”, “Don’t Fear The Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult, an atheistic occult band, among others. I refused to stand when they played it.)

The sermon is part of a short three to five series about how to improve one part of your life. That sermon will have a biblical text that will springboard the message into the life lesson. There is no breakdown of the original Greek or Hebrew, unless that may help their original intent with a minor, alternate possible translation of that Greek or Hebrew word. But the issue is that the text is not read in context or is it really explained, only that it being used as a biblical support device.

The people in these churches believe they have are the real church, how church was meant to be. The focus of teaching is not what the bible says. The focus of the teaching is what the pastor says. The life group or small group outlines are a list of questions about how we feel about what the pastor said, about our life experiences in relation to what the pastor said and how what the pastor made us feel. It has bible verses to be read but it is not about the bible. It is about what the pastor said the bible said to him the past Sunday.

I was a small group leader. I saw these outlines. I was called before the executive pastor and the chief elder because I was being accused of targeting a person in my small group (their teenage daughter announced she was a lesbian and they supported her by going to gay pride parades and decorating their car with gay pride propaganda, I kid you not) by posting anti-LGTBQ alphabet soup group articles in my Facebook wall. I was told I could not longer lead a small group because I guess I wasn’t loving enough, so I left the church.

During that meeting, I brought up “The Shack” (the movie had just come out) and the heretical issues it contained. The leaders said they never heard of that book (I found it hard to believe). I said there are small groups planning movie nights to go see the movie. I asked who watches over what the people in the church get their teaching from. They answered that they believed that the people are mature enough to be fed by outside sources and it was not their responsibility to feed them spiritually. I was flabbergasted. I said it was their job to protect the flock.

(An interesting side note, not long after that conversation I had with the elders, the church started a weekly podcast with the pastor that would work through a book of the bible. I won’t take credit for it but I thought the timing was interesting.)

The point I am making is that these leaders of the seeker-driven don’t care about the spiritual health of their flock. They believe that their job is to be stationary crusades (think a Billy Graham Crusade that doesn’t travel). They care about how many people are in the church each service each weekend. They believe the larger numbers they have the more blessed they are by God. But what if God has judged them by actually giving them what they want: larger gatherings and larger bank accounts. They conflate those two items as blessings when it may actually be a judgment.

Most, not all, are vast wastelands of empty teaching. They attach excerpts of partial bible verses to a self-help doctrine. They are convinced that this is the gospel. There is little to no mention of sin (except during the “sinners prayer”), certainly no explanation of what a sin is, and what is said about sin is said with trepidation, not about offending God but offending the audience. There is no depth. (The pastor of the church I attended said he was convinced of theistic evolution and wouldn’t be swayed to think otherwise. That is a gospel issue in my opinion but a topic for another article.)

The seeker-driven movement is, in large point, devoid of meaningful biblical teaching, teaching that can grow a Christian’s understanding of who God is and to implement into their lives in order to live a life that is one of holiness.