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Mall Christianity
Seeker Sensitivity or Cultural Captivity?
By Dr. Gillis J. Harp

OCTOBER 1, 2002 -- Recently, I came across a booklet produced by a nearby congregation popular with some of my students. Inside the back cover are printed its "Founding Principles":

First, every person deserves the right to hear the true story about Jesus Christ.
It's a sin to bore people with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
You have to earn the right to be heard.

The logic behind the principles, and the "seeker sensitive" movement of which this church is a part, is persuasive on one level. If the unchurched are put off by the trappings of Christianity, dispense with the nonessentials: pews, hymns, even corporate prayer. If we live in an entertainment-focused culture, build sanctuaries to resemble the inside of the local Cineplex. If well-heeled suburbanites flock to shopping malls, make the local church like a mall, replete with food court....

...There is, in fact, no biblical warrant for turning Sunday worship into an evangelistic meeting (though there may well be evangelistic elements within the liturgy). This transformation of the main Sunday service actually began in the early nineteenth century. It was evangelists like Charles Grandison Finney and his successors who turned church worship into a revival meeting. In some respects, "seeker sensitive" advocates are simply extending the logic of this earlier innovation.

They are extending with considerable creativity and characteristic American energy this Arminian, market-driven model. Finney spoke about the need for what he termed "excitements." What many American Evangelicals have discovered is that the old excitements no longer work; they have acquired churchy associations in the wider culture, and thus new excitements are needed. The oral culture of the nineteenth century could accommodate long lectures, but postmodern seekers have notoriously short attention spans. Victorian folk wanted earnest Evangelical didacticism; contemporary seekers want entertainment.

The New Testament Church did not, however, show this confusion about either the nature of evangelism or its proper setting. It did not provide "excitements," other than the excitement of the Good News. In the New Testament, the ecclesia gathered together on the first day of the week to hear the Word of God, for corporate prayer ("the prayers"), and for the breaking of bread (Acts 2:42 and 20:7). Significantly, none of the evangelistic preaching in Acts occurs within the context of the church gathered for Sunday worship.

To be sure, the early Church was involved in aggressive evangelism, but it kept the gathering on Sunday for the edification of the faithful and for God's covenant people to praise their covenant God. In the fourth century, Gregory Nazianzus warned that if the preacher "would please the multitude, he must adapt himself to their taste, and entertain them amusingly in church." When this happened, he observed, "what belonged to the theatre was brought into the church."

Naturally, these sort of wrong-headed assumptions about the gospel and Christian worship are reflected in the preaching and teaching of such congregations. The church cited above is independent (like many such congregations, it carefully avoids any denominational identification), but its approach has had a wide influence even among mainline congregations seeking some escape from their declining numbers. This past Easter, I visited an Episcopal parish that has sought to implement some of this model. Although its worship service would have been dismissed as irredeemably churchy by many "seeker sensitive" leaders, it was clear that the kind of assumptions examined above were having a profound impact on the message heard on Sunday after Sunday from this parish's gothic pulpit.

Put simply, if one's focus is on generating "excitements," if one's primary concern is numerical growth, one will not preach as a traditional Evangelical. If one is primarily seeking to address the felt needs of attendees, one will not say a word about sin and the Cross. The Easter morning sermon we heard was clearly designed to appeal to Yuppie "seekers." The rector told his well-dressed congregation that they were obviously gifted and skilled at many things. Their manifest abilities had brought them success, but something was missing. They needed now to rise to the next level. They could experience greater personal fulfillment with Jesus.

Sin was mentioned only once (rather obliquely) at the end of the address. Despite the occasion (i.e., Easter Sunday), there was, notably, no mention of the Cross. ...