Polemics, Seeker Sensitive Church & Emergent Church

You can even feel offended that you said Jesus Christ is the only way to be saved. You must believe in him. You can tell a story, and that's subjective. It's not a truth claim. It's just said, this is what happened to me. So what have they done at the secret sensitive Church Growth Church? They've also listed on here stories. So what they've done is they've molded the secret sensitive and the church growth and the emergent church model all into one.

So now you're not coming here telling Jesus Christ is the only way. You must believe in Jesus Christ and his death on the cross for you and his burial and resurrection for your toast. Instead, they just tell stories. And in keeping with modern marketing, they will sell the benefits. If you put your trust in Jesus, you will have peace. If you put your trust in Jesus, people will love you. If you put your trust in Jesus, life will be smooth after that. Sell the benefits, true or not. Truth is not the issue. In fact, it might even be offensive. The latest, actually it's not the latest, it's a year old.

Rick Warren was invited to speak at Synagogue 3000. The purpose-driven synagogue. Because what he has proposed in the purpose-driven church is not really strictly for the church. It's just good marketing and business principles. And so he spoke at a synagogue. It's a synagogue in Los Angeles that doesn't even believe the Bible is historically true. It's a synagogue that, of course, has no appetite for the message of Jesus Christ, but he can speak there, because what he's offering in the purpose-driven church and the purpose-driven life isn't specifically Christian. And as long as you filter that out, there you go. So anyway, if you want to look up Synagogue 3000, you can look it up and find it for yourself. Here is his press release. Rick Warren meets Synagogue 3000 called S3K. So that's the slide intro. Let's take a look at the handout that you've got there.

All right, so this is the second of the two we canned out, the Emergent Church and the Seeker Sensitive Church. We've talked about what some of the definitions are. I'd like to read from a quote on the top there from the Emergent Church so you get an idea. How do they present themselves? By the way, this website emergentvillage.com, if you ever want to find out what's the Emergent Church all about, that's the premier site for the Emergent Church. Here's how they define it, so I'm not accused of misquoting or anything. Emergent, and notice something, what do they call it? Just emergent. They don't use the word church. Why would they not use the word church? That's right. You don't call it a church, and therefore you don't have this word that might offend people.

So they just call it emergent. Emergent is a growing generative friendship among missional Christian leaders seeking to love our world in the spirit of Jesus Christ. Is there a problem there? What does John say? Love not the world? Hmm, okay. Well, this might be a little bit different from what John's warning is about, but we need to be careful.

Our dream is to join in the activity of God in the world, wherever we are able so that God's dreams for our world come true. God's dreams for our world come true. God is dreaming about our world. We studied some weeks ago about another religion in which God dreams. Hinduism. Okay? Hinduism. God has dreams. Okay. In the process, the world can be healed and changed, and so can we. Is the purpose of God's involvement to heal and change the world. First of all, are you going to change the world? Is that ever God's intent? No. As a matter of fact, because you have died with Jesus Christ, you are dead to the sin nature, you are dead to the law, and you are dead to the world. Dead to. You have died in relationship to.

What's wrong with this picture? The world can be healed and changed. Healing comes about how? How does healing come about? Do you go out and heal the world? No. No. Individual believers. The Lord can heal hearts. He can. There's no guarantee that the Lord will heal every disease in all bodies. The Lord can do that too. But by His stripes we are healed. Everybody? No, those who believe. Is the world healed? No. So you've got some things right at the outset. Pardon? That's right.

So you have these two, the emergent church and the seeker-sensitive church. They are different approaches in that the emergent church specifically looks at the approach to the world, but takes the view of post-modernism, that is, the idea that truth is subjective. It's oftentimes hard to tell that the emergent church has a view of truth that they are really proclaiming, or whether they are just sharing their subjective experience with no more validity than that. See the difference? They are different Christian movements, they have similarities, sometimes they are different in different churches, and sometimes, like I showed you with Carson Valley Christian Center there, they merge the ideas, put them together, so they can be different and the same.

Page 2, which was the page we wanted you to get repaired here, have last week's copy, is what is the purpose of the local church? This is not applicable at every single point of the emergent and seeker-sensitive churches, but it's valuable in this regard.

What you see on the left-hand column is that the church is primarily a soul-winning station. That viewpoint, that understanding is what both the seeker-sensitive and the emergent church embrace. the church is primarily a soul winning station. What the right hand column presents, and you notice there's a lot of scriptural references behind those, is that the church is a soul building station. What are you looking for? So the church is primarily a soul building station. It is not that people might be saved, period, end of sentence, but that people might live by Christ's life. That's what the church is about. It is not just how do I get in the front door and not addressing just that question.

When you look at, you may remember if you were here four or five years ago, it's coming up on four and a half, we studied through the seven churches of Revelation. And a number of the churches had a problem that the world was in the church. So what does the emergent church and the seeker-sensitive church do to resolve that problem or address that risk? There's the problem. You basically make a friendly environment for the world and leave aside the need to build up the body of Christ, which is the intended purpose of the Church. So it is a major difference in an understanding of the purpose of the church. And that's why when we're reading the characteristics there of the emergent church's own claims, we immediately start seeing trouble.

Because they've looked at, how do we make this church world-friendly? How do we make this church unbeliever-friendly? And they're not asking the question, how do we build up the body of Christ? I had a conversation via email this last week with somebody who has been involved with an emergent church, this particular one that's about a block from us.

And some of the ideas that were presented there was that Christianity and Communism were comparable. That I am going about trying to imitate Christ, so you should always give money to those people at the freeway exits. with the science. So this mentality is what's going on there because there's a lack of discernment. You're not taught discernment. You're taught, how do I get friendly with the world? How do I be kind of Jesus-like and mix in with the world while I'm doing so?

All right. So let's look on page three. So what's the problem? Evangelizing the unsaved is a good thing, right? So let's design the whole church around it. Well, we come to the question of what is the purpose of the local church? We've addressed that with our chart on page two. But once we make evangelism the end goal and the ultimate priority, what happens to the church?

Yeah, it stagnates, disappears. Basically, you don't have the function of the church taking place. And that's what happens. You put so much resource and energy into, here is my target, the world, that the true biblical purpose of the church gets displaced and the church is not built up.

Do you have maturing Christians in those environments? No. You do not have maturing Christians because The church is not designed to build up the body of Christ. The church is designed to be friendly to the world. Let's see. Unbelievers in the church.

Is it a goal or an incidental? Do you find lots of passages in the New Testament that describe the church having meetings in which the openness and exposure to the world is the primary goal. Do you find that in the New Testament? No, I couldn't either. I looked, and in fact I found one here. It's 1 Corinthians 14, 23 through 25.

Therefore, if the whole church assembles together, and the whole church is what? Christians? Right? If the whole church assembles together, and all speak in tongues, and ungifted men, or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are mad? What about the unbelievers? What's the word? Two-letter word? When they enter? If. If.

The purpose is to gather the whole church together. He's addressing a question, the if the unbeliever comes in. Not when the unbelievers come in because you've targeted them. When the unbelievers come in because you've made it a warm, friendly place for the world to gather. He says if. If. And then he addresses the if question. And he says, if a large group of unbelievers comes in, no. What did he say? If, and. Single.

Yeah, Art? or is it the responsibility of you and I as Christians here at Folly Hills and the other churches like this where the purpose of a church is to feed the believers? Art asks a question that needs to have been answered decades ago, and that ultimately, while Scripture doesn't come up with some prohibition to having some sort of evangelistic meeting or the various things that people do, that Scripture doesn't support turning the church meeting into your evangelistic gathering. And what you see as a model is when the church gathers, it's the whole church, and unbelievers come as an if. And Paul's example here is even single.

So it's not by design that you get the world to be friendly. It is an incidental, they are permitted to come in, but that's not the goal. That's not the intent is to, you know, let's make sure we get every one of them we can and make it nice for them.

As a matter of fact, if you look at the rest of that passage, how did the unbeliever that happened to come in respond? He is convicted. Convicted, not feeling warm and friendly and fuzzy, not feeling like, boy, these Christians are a lot like me, but he is convicted and comes to a place of repentance. That's what he describes when the unbeliever comes in.

To get back to Art's question, though, Christians have in recent decades relied upon everything from church meetings turned upside down where all of a sudden the church gathering is evangelistic instead of building up the body of Christ. We've relied upon media, public television and radio and things of that sort and kind of leaned on that. We've looked upon various mass programs and basically the seeker-sensitive and emergent church approaches are just the latest in a series of what do we rely on that in the end scripture doesn't prescribe. And so what we have here is various people's concoctions and then Christians becoming complacent because they think, oh, I've got to get that guy, you know, to come to this church meeting.

Or I'll invite him to the secret sensitive church because it's so warm and friendly, he won't feel uncomfortable at all. Is that what Paul describes? I'll get this guy to come in and we'll all talk with him and we'll talk so much like him that he won't notice any difference. No, that's not what he describes.

In truth, scripture describes evangelism is out there. And in truth, through the early centuries of the church, there was no mass evangelism. It was believers talking to another unbeliever, usually one at a time or in very small groups. Every record we have is like that. There were no great evangelists once you get out of about the time with Philip there in Acts. It was believers who had been built up within the church going out and telling Not with that as a means and an end in itself, but with the idea that, all right, now here's a person who will become a believer and join us in being built up in the body of Christ.

Unfortunately, a lot of our mass meetings, which can be very impressive, the evidence and studies have shown that often 90 to 95% of those people who come down to the floor area in a mass meeting, and I've been one of the counselors at one about 10 years ago, 90 to 95% of them turn away. Many of them have no follow through. Or the other thing is they'll oftentimes be turned after that event back into a church that you and I would be rather shocked to see them going into. So Art brings up a real good point that missing the biblical picture here on evangelism and trying to make the church into something that it shouldn't be, trying to make individual believers into something that they're not called to be, is a serious mistake and has been going on for way too long.

And we need to get the picture here as to what the proper point is. Of the various gifts, there is evangelism as one of the spiritual gifts. It's one of them. It's there. Out of 19 or 20 gifts, spiritual gifts, Half of those, of course, ended with the apostolic era. Out of all those gifts, evangelism is the one that reaches out. The others are all for building up the body of Christ. What is the gospel and what is the truth? Scripture makes claims regarding the character of truth, and in fact it could be offensive. But it's important that it be stated as truth.

I'm not saying that we must state it offensively. I'm not saying that we need to be abrasive. I wouldn't want to have us have practice sessions on that. Let's do some role play and make sure we're abrasive when we present the gospel. No. But in fact, the truth may be something that people feel a bit uncomfortable about. I can remember sitting down because I had sat down in my college years with people of all kinds of persuasions, all kinds of religious and philosophical persuasions, and some of them pretty bizarre. Some people responded and some did not.

And one guy even says, you know, you mean to tell me this is the single only way to be saved? I said, yep, that's what it says. And he just shook his head, couldn't handle that. That's what it says, that's what God says, that's what Jesus claimed. Who gets impacted by whom?

Scripture says we have died to the world, Colossians 2.20, and we ought not to be conformed to it, Romans 12.2. We've died to it, ought not to be conformed to it, so let's make real friendly with it, right? Hmm, what's wrong with this picture? Who's impacting whom?

Is it our place to go out and heal the world, or is it our place to bring people into the church by every member evangelism, and that they be built up in the body of Christ, not to fix the world? Where is evangelism to happen? Scriptures, examples of evangelism, and we have a number of them in the Book of Acts here. I list some in chapter 8, chapter 10, chapter 13, and that's just a starting point.

Should it take place in the public arena and not in the church? Not in the church. Paul describes in that 1 Corinthians 14 passage there in the middle of page 3 an if situation. In fact, when we look through the Book of Acts, what we find is In great part, what takes place is a public arena evangelism, then you bring them into the church, and there they're built up. There they gather, but not bring the world into the church. All right, now, page four.

How are the spiritual gifts distributed? The scripture lists 19 spiritual gifts as listed below. Some would add another one ruling to that, which is something that elders always have, but I don't have a problem with that, I suppose. But the point is that half the gifts ended with the apostolic era, that those had a particular purpose during that time, a purpose which has ended, and that the remaining gifts just to give a round number, roughly one in ten, have evangelism as one of those gifts.

The other gifts are all given to build up the body of Christ within the church body. Believer to believer. That's the giftedness of the body of Christ. What does that tell us? Why do we take a look at this? The uses that we have are indicated by the number of gifts in each category.

If evangelism is one, and that's the one that brings people in, then the remaining Eight or nine gifts are all for building up the body of Christ believer to believer. And if we then say the church is all about evangelism, what happens to the people's use of the gifts that are designed for building up the body of Christ?

Atrophy. It doesn't happen. Here you have the body of Christ given gifts, but you've basically washed out the context for believers ministering to other believers and building up the body of Christ, the very purpose that most of the gifts are given for. So, should there be evangelism? Yes, most certainly. Is that to take over the church? No. Not by gift count. There's one other point. Yes, Marilyn. Okay. Yes.

One of the counters will be that, oh yes, but we've got small groups where this takes place, and so that makes this other thing, you know, counterbalanced because we've got the small groups where people are taught. Still, all these things still apply because still what happens, you've got the general church gathering and what you've done is shove the purpose for building up believers out of that larger gathering. And so the fact that they have the small groups doesn't get rid of the problem. The other thing is you're still friendly with the world. You still, as they've expressed themselves, you have this purpose, I'm going to go out and have a friendly place with the world, a friendly face with the world, and go out and heal the world.

The approach and the whole intent is still out of whack. The other point that I would have is as you're putting resources into making the church a world-friendly place, then what's not happening is the teaching. What's not happening is the equipping. What's not happening is the building up.

Ephesians 4.14 says that no longer children And then it describes the thrashing around of different doctrine, being subject to trickery, cubeia, loaded dice. Essentially, as the church is inadequately fed, because that's what you're doing, you're giving a subsistence diet. As the church is inadequately fed, you have Christians that do not grow as they ought. That do not grow as they ought. If you're a shepherd, shepherding a flock, How cozy do you want to get with the wolves? You want to get the wolves and the sheep in there friendly because they're so cute, right? This is a problem.

It's not recognizing what God has in mind. What's God's program? What's God doing? What is to be the character of the church? So having something that supposedly counterbalances it, and so Marilyn brings up a good point, Laryngitis and all. Having something that supposedly counterbalances it doesn't excuse the fact that you've got your main gathering of believers in the church body and you've now made it just friendly for the world and you have failed to feed the flock.

When Paul gathers with the elders from Ephesus in Acts chapter 20, He tells them, I gave you, over a period of three years, day and night, the whole counsel of God. He says, be on guard. He says, savage wolves are going to come in. Be on the alert. And now I commend you to the word of His grace. Do you think you need to be friendly and cozy up to the world?

What happened to the whole purpose of God? What happened to the flock and the wolves and knowing the difference? So some key points of scripture have been lost here, haven't they? The last point we'll bring up there is our present culture all postmodern. The emergent church has focused on the postmodern thinking.

The idea that you can't know the truth, that everything is all subjective, that I just tell stories. Is the understanding that the whole culture is postmodern a good assessment? of our culture. Does everybody that you talk to believe that truth is all subjective? Yeah, there's a significant number of people that will think that way. But does everybody think that way? So one of the things that the emergent church approach does by assuming that everyone is postmodern is it excludes those who aren't thinking that way.

The other thing is, think about this, in the New Testament era, there was both religious belief and skepticism. The skepticism would come from people like, you know, out of the Greek philosophers, Plato. And even, you know, what's Pilate's question to Jesus? Skeptical question. What's truth? Doubting that there is such a thing.

Even if you went into Ephesus, so far as we have any record, there are about 50 gods. And the Romans, as long as you acknowledge the emperor is one of them, they didn't care how many you added to that. Isn't that fairly mix-and-match subjectivism? You pick. Which one's a god? Which ones do you want to work with? Pick your own. Make your own selection. Nobody cares.

It's all subjective. In truth, the New Testament era had characteristics of truth that are not radically different from our own. And concepts of morality that are increasingly not radically different from our own culture. So, what you find is The apostles, as they step into that, they preach a subjective truth, right? They just share stories? They just talk about life stories?

No. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved. There is no other name. You've got lots of gods to choose from, but there's none other name. A name that is above every name. Isn't that what Paul said? A name above every name. There is one mediator between God and man. See the message? Here is a subjective culture with some skepticism on top of that. And what do they do? They tell it like it is. This is the truth. I'm not beating around the bush or shading this thing. I'm telling you the truth.

Here's the Philippian jailer. Paul comes up. The Philippian jailer says, what must I do to be saved? And Paul comes up and kind of tells him a story. No. He gives him the straight answer. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. Straight out. He gives him the truth. Tells him straight out, this is what you must believe.

So being warm and friendly with the world is not the answer. Now there can be points of contact. You look at Paul addressing the philosophers in Athens in Acts 17. He had points of contact with them, things that they could relate to. So he didn't just come off speaking an entirely different language and talking about things they couldn't understand.

But he ended up presenting the truth, presenting the gospel. The philosophers that Paul spoke to believed in an eternal material universe and spiritual things were limited by and within that eternal material universe. So what does Paul start off with? I'm here to tell you about the God who created all that stuff and was here before it.

He didn't bow down to their philosophies. He didn't bow down to their teaching, but instead laid out the biblical truth. He had points of contact, issues that were relevant to them, but he didn't cut the edges off. He didn't take the sharp corners and hone them down. He told it like it was.

Okay, questions? Yes, Jack. So many times you run into folks in the real world that subscribe to some of this different stuff, you know? And instead of me trying to be contentious with them, I just sometimes get the feeling it's hopeless for me to do anything for you, fella. Unless the Lord changes your heart. Why shouldn't I sit here and try to do something for you? And I just tend to...

Well, you know, it's interesting. I think the two errors that we can fall into is one, to have this legalistic compulsion. You know, you may have run across Christians who will go and beat other Christians over the head with this thing, you know. Boy, if you don't tell them the truth, you're, you know, sending them to hell and, you know, shame on you and God's going to hold you accountable and they go and beat people over the head with it on the one hand. That would be an error because that makes evangelism law. And guess what? Christ died. We died with him. We died to the law. So that approach isn't going to work.

The other extreme would be to say, well, look, they're going to do what they're going to do. God's going to do whatever he's going to do with them. So what does it matter what I do? So in truth, Both those extremes could be a problem, isn't it? Aren't they? We could fall into either one. Neither one is quite correct. The truth is that we're going to find people who are willing to talk and are responsive, and we're going to find other people who aren't. And it's up to us to, at that moment, say, what does the Lord want me to do here? And it's amazing. I've run into both people who absolutely don't want to hear it, And I remember one gal, her name was Annette.

She happened to, you know, get a hold of our phone number. She was in Atlanta and said, you know, don't go anywhere. I'll be there right away. And she got on the next plane out of Atlanta, landed in San Francisco, drove up to my folks' place, which was way out in the boonies. And says, I've been looking for how to be saved my whole life. And she even had an Episcopal priest for her uncle or something, and he couldn't tell her. And so that very night, we stayed up until the wee hours of the night, telling her about the Lord. She was desperate for the truth.

And you'll find other people that are desperate the other way. They are absolutely aghast that you would tell them something so highly offensive as Jesus is the only way. Yeah, and now what's interesting is you may have somebody who is resistant and yet still interested.

I think I pulled some weeks back about my friend Vince that I had a philosophy class with and at the very end of the philosophy class he found out that I was a Christian and came up to me after the class and Vince said, you know, well I'm an atheist.

I said that's great, let's talk about it. So I invited him over for dinner and he and I talked for several hours and then he left and nothing seemed to happen and then a year later I looked over there and across the church he was sitting there. And I couldn't wait for the church service to be over. I ran over there and I said, Vince, what are you doing here? He says, I'm a former atheist.

And you can find someone, they may have a frozen position to the opposite, and yet the Lord will work there. Craig Case would be an example we've had speak to us here. Someone who was quite opposed until he came to a position of knowing the Lord. So I would say the Lord may in fact put people before you that are just screaming for the gospel. Other people may appear resistant and yet still have a willingness to interact, like my friend Vince. Or there may be people who just absolutely don't want to hear it, plug the ears, and that's it.

Art. Yes, Art says we're all evangelists, we pray for the souls of individuals. I would add to that one more point, Art, and that is Paul asked for that he be bold in proclaiming the gospel. So that is another point. We can pray for each other to be bold in the presentation of the gospel. Each of us has different situations that the Lord has placed us in. Nancy and I are kind of amazed, you know, we've got two different single Jewish ladies on our you know, one floor, and there's people that are of all sorts of persuasions, you know, that live around us, and the Lord's put us in contact with a number of different folks. It says the Lord sees fit to open those things up, and we can pray for the people who are receiving it, we can pray for the people that are giving it. And both of those are biblically valid. Yes, Beth? My son-in-law works in California, Excuse me, what? Okay. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Right.

Bev asked a question about, you know, how can somebody think the Saddleback Church is wonderful? I think there's probably a lot of Christians there. The problem is that when you look at what does Scripture say, and that's the difficulty. If you look at the purpose-driven life, purpose-driven church, there's a lot of Scripture in it, but ultimately it's a lot of law. It's a lot of worldly principles with Christian pixie dust sprinkled over the top. And the reality is what people oftentimes don't have is they don't have an understanding of Scripture to measure things by. And so if you don't have the discernment, it's easy to think anything's wonderful.

It sounds good. I mean, lots of people are coming. That seems like a good thing. You have people that are going through divorce recovery because they did have an awful time. So that sounds real good. And they have a really big program for that. So you've got lots of different things there that sound good. If the measure is it makes people feel good, then you're going to come to one conclusion.

If the measure is how to square up with scripture, you're going to come up with quite a different conclusion. There are people who have been through Buddhist things that feel quite blessed. There are people who go through Hindu things that feel quite blessed. There are people who take drugs and alcohol at various points that feel quite blessed. The point is, if you use the measure Do I feel blessed?

You can arrive at a great many conclusions, and church things can be among them. If I use the measure of what does scripture say, you're going to end up with a very much narrower conclusion. And it's the lack of discernment which is hard to convey to people. If they don't have the discernment, then they're going to use their subjective response.

Oh, I like this. I feel blessed. Lots of people are coming. That's good. Things like that end up being the measure instead of Scripture. And about the only thing that we can do, and we may be stuck to, in some cases, only asking questions, what does Scripture say about that? Are people being built up?

Or take them to Ephesians 4.14, no longer children being thrashed around with winded doctrine and that kind of thing. Is that happening there? Are people getting solidly founded in what's true? So those kinds of things may be our best opportunity to get people thinking, Christians that are in situations where they're not discerning. So those might be our best opportunities. Yeah. Other thoughts, questions?

Yes. Casting your pearls before a swine. Do a lot of people hide behind that? Casting your pearls before a swine. Yeah. You know the... Yeah, no. People can use various excuses not to evangelize. And one of those could be that, well, I don't want to cast my pearls before a swine. Therefore, keeping my zipper shut, you know, seems like the safe thing to do. Yeah, and I think that we have to be careful about using excuses.

Another one that comes out of the Calvinistic realm is God's already picked who he's going to pick. He has elected his elect, and I can't change that, so why bother evangelizing? Sometimes that'll come out of an evangelistic thought in the Calvinistic area, where it really doesn't matter who I tell the gospel to because God's picked who he's picked. In other words, with the Calvinists, hardline Calvinists, they cannot come up to a person and say, Christ died for your sins, because you don't know. God may not elect them, and so you can't tell them Christ died for your sins. See? That's the hardline Calvinist mentality.

Let's pray. We've run way out of time. There's actually people getting near the back door. Let's pray. Lord, as we look at these things, oh boy, the issues are big. Among the church, the misunderstanding is huge. And Lord, this is an area where we ask for discernment amongst ourselves. We ask for wisdom as we encounter both Christians who are caught up in mile-wide and inch-deep shallowness, and also as we encounter unbelievers, that we may have wisdom as to what to say and when to say it. We thank you, Lord, for your word and for your Holy Spirit indwelling us until we meet you face to face. In Jesus' name, Amen.