The Biblical Bankruptcy of the Seeker-Sensitive Church Model

The Bible is full of passages that deal with the mission of the church, but none is as clear and simple as what we refer to as the Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-19, where Jesus commands his followers to go into all the world to make disciples of all nations. In other words, believers are supposed to go out and gain converts, and then train them to be disciples. Logically, if you are going to have new disciples you first need new converts. So, evangelism is fundamental and foundational for discipleship. But, the goal of the church isn't to amass converts. It is to make disciples.

Why do so many churches optimize their church programs for evangelism but completely neglect their responsibility to train and equip disciples?

Gregory Koukl has posted an excellent article addressing this issue on the Stand To Reason website. I will quote this article extensively throughout, mostly because he's much smarter than I am. Greg writes:

Many seeker-sensitive churches use the church for evangelism rather than making disciples. They all get together for a service and they preach the Gospel. No wonder the Christians are dropping by the wayside. They are not getting taught. There is nothing more complicated or deep out of the Scriptures in the Saturday evening service than that which a non-regenerate person can understand. That is shallow. That?s not milk, that?s not even skim milk. That's water. Nothing wrong with water when you are evangelizing, but evangelization is not the Great Commission and it doesn?t happen in the church.

Notice Greg's observation: "There is nothing more complicated… than that which a non-regenerate person can understand." Therein lies the problem. A church following this model spends the majority of their time, money, and energy addressing the needs of "the lost" in their community. Church "members" are expected to bring friends, neighbors, co-workers, and family to the service so they can hear the gospel. The unintentional but common result of this model is that the believer comes to a service that is virtually the same every week and that isn't really meant for him in the first place. If it's the same exact message he'll hear 51 other times that year, why bother showing up?

I spent some time in a church like this when I was in college. I was basically the assistant youth pastor there for two years. The reason I started going there in the first place was that it was exciting, it was vibrant, and it seemed like a great church for someone like me who had a zeal for evangelism. However, after two years there I realized I had seen students "accepting Jesus into their hearts" left and right, but no evidence of growth in their faith or the lordship of Christ in their lives, even after a couple of years. Once a kid "got saved" we didn't have much else to offer.

The problem was we made the gospel easy to accept, and once these kids made a profession of faith we were on to the next "seeker." The result was a bunch of "Christians" in name only who, having accepted a watered down version of the Gospel, had very little opportunity to grow and become disciples of Christ.

In other words, our ministry (and church) was seeker-centered, not just seeker-sensitive.

When you read through Acts, you see that the primary purpose of the church was the building up of Christ-followers, and the primary purpose of the believers was to go out into Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8) to preach the good AND bad news of the gospel. They didn't get together in an effort to draw "seekers" to their large group meetings in order for them to hear the gospel. The action word in the Great Commission is "GO" and they did.

As Greg put it,

The church is the place where the Christians are discipled so they can go out and do the works of ministry and go into the marketplace and have an impact for Christ. That?s what Jesus taught, that?s what He modeled. That?s what the early disciples taught, that?s what they modeled.

?

They met together to pray, to hear the apostles preach, and to meet one another's needs. Then, they went out into the streets and preached Jesus.

If you look at the kind of message they preached, it wasn't exactly "seeker-sensitive" either. If you study the evangelistic efforts of the early church, you'll find that the love of God isn't preached once. Not even once. The emphasis of nearly every gospel proclamation is the wickedness of man and the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, the Messiah. The apostles directly charged their hearers with the murder of Jesus on more than one occasion. The crowds were encouraged to repent of their wickedness that they might be forgiven. They don't mention a "personal relationship" with God or the tenderness of his love a single time.

The most obvious of these episodes is in Acts 2:14-41, where Peter speaks of OT prophesies about the messiah, how Jesus fulfilled them, and how they are the ones that crucified them. Again, not exactly "sensitive" preaching. Their response? The Bible says they were "cut to the heart" and asked what they must do to be saved. In all about 3,000 people believed that day.

Our evangelism today doesn't look anything like that. Have we improved evangelism since then? Not likely. The reason the apostles didn't employ a more seeker-sensitive model is simple. According to the Bible, there is no such thing as a seeker! Man, by virtue of his fallen nature, is not just morally neutral toward God until he's saved. Rather, he is vehemently opposed to God. He is not righteous and he does not seek God (Romans 3:9-12). He is actually hostile toward God and not able to please God (Romans 8:7-8). He is spiritually dead because of his sin (not just kind of sick), and he is an obedient follower of the devil who cannot understand God's truth (John 8:44-47, Ephesians 2:1-2). In other words, his entire being is rebellious toward God and so fallen that he will never seek God, no matter how "free" his will is.

So why do churches spend so much time, money, and energy trying to adapt their church to the perceived needs and comforts of seekers? It reminds me of the sign in the picture at the beginning of this post. The person or people who put this sign up probably had very good intentions. But, their means of trying to help the illiterate completely ignores the problem the illiterate faces by definition. When we try to reach the lost by making the church of God more hospitable to them, we completely gloss over the very problem we are trying to solve; namely that they are rebellious toward God and in need of the regenerative work of the Holy Spirit. As Greg put it, "Frankly, non-Christians shouldn't feel comfortable in a church because they aren't right with God yet; and if they are, it's probably because we've changed the message."

Even still, the church today seems to think that it needs to do everything it can to get people in the seats, even if it is contrary to the model for evangelism presented in the Bible. Why is this? My guess is because Christians aren't obedient in living out the great commission in their lives, evangelism goes undone. I won't take the time to pile up stats here, but it is no secret that most believers aren't active in sharing the gospel with the world around them. So, I would guess that the church feels compelled to take up the slack and make it easier for a Christian to evangelize. The church takes on the responsibility of sharing the gospel, and all the believer has to do is bring the seeker in the door and his job is over. Of course, doing someone's job for them only perpetuates the laziness.

The solution isn't for the church to do the evangelism and the Christians to get better at asking people to come to church with them (although even that would be a big step for many Christians in today's church). The church needs to get back to its job description: making disciples. If we would spend our time building up believers toward balanced maturity, the church would be filled with evangelists eager and prepared to go out and preach the gospel to the lost. Or, as Greg put it:

Here is the solution to the church's problem. We have to abandon the seeker model and we have to adopt the Biblical model. Ooh, that sounds so arrogant. You are saying what they are doing is not Biblical? Yes! This is not rocket science. Find me anywhere in the Scriptures where the church gathers as Christians for the purpose of watering down the Gospel message and getting people to come into their church congregation. The church gathered for training and edification of believers, then they went out with the message of sin and salvation so people could get right with God before they could even begin to think about whatever purpose God had for their lives. First things first. That is the consistent model in every single time in the book of Acts where the Gospel is preached.