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Young, male and married
Churches seeking a new pastor tend to want a man under 40, preferably married to a nonworking woman who volunteers on church committees. It's a caricature, but only slightly so, says sociologist Adair Lummis, who is describing not congregations from the 1950s, but those today. This preference exists "even in those denominations which have ordained women to full ministerial status for 50 years or more," according to her little-publicized nationwide study. ...

...If I send out a profile of a pastor who is mediocre along with a picture of him with his family, and he is 35 years old, has a cute wife and two beautiful children, I guarantee he will be interviewed if not called....

Re-purposed
...Warren describes God's call to him in the late 1970s to start a church in a fast-growing, major metropolitan area. That call led him to Orange County, California. He suggests that the best church growth is possible with a new congregation which has no building to outgrow, and which can be intentional in its description of church membership before people start joining.

Two concerns arise. First, this approach doesn't fit with many denominations' vision of ministry. As a Methodist, I go where the bishop sends me, not where I see the best potential for growth. If I am sent to a church that is hundreds of years old and set in a dying post-manufacturing community, in a South so saturated with churches almost every family has its own chapel, then my goals for ministry will necessarily be quite different from Warren's in Orange County in 1979.

Further, it is not even clear that Warren's model for ministry is the best one for a community like Warren's. A friend of mine is a nondenominational pastor in a similar setting, and he says his church cannot open its doors without growing. It grows one upper-middle class, SUV-driving family of four at a time. He has become frustrated with this vision of ministry to the affluent and wants to start a church in a run-down inner-city neighborhood where relationships can be built among downwardly mobile people of a variety of ethnic backgrounds. It is at least worth considering whether this latter is a more appropriate--scripturally and christologically--vision of the church.

A third question concerns the church's handling of interpersonal difficulties. Warren describes his unpleasant experience in a "family-reunion" style church in Texas. The church was located in a rural community that was not growing, which made for a church without growth. Warren celebrates Saddleback's ability to travel light, to dismiss members who do not share the "purpose-driven" vision....

...I worry also about Warren's insistence that people want to be in church with people who are like them. I worry about a definition of faithfulness that delivers on this "felt need." What of the inevitable difficulty that arises when a church insists on inviting ethnically or economically different people into its fellowship? People may leave--but will God not be glorified?

Peter Storey, the former Methodist bishop in South Africa, once told an American church growth expert that his country had tried "homogenous living units" (the expert's phrase, not Warren's) and decided they were a bad idea. In South Africa, these had been known under the term "apartheid." I am not accusing Warren or the "purpose-driven" movement of racism. I am only pointing out that our "felt needs" can turn out to be highly problematic....

...I have spent much time reassuring the kind of church Warren left behind in rural Texas that Jesus has words of comfort for those who are least, last, hurting, tired and suffering. These words are less clearly applicable to the "fastest growing Baptist church in the history of America," and one of the "most effective churches on the North American continent," to cite the description in the foreword to The Purpose-Driven Church (Warren himself adopts a much more modest tone). But they are applicable to most churches. God's purposes for our common life are not so transparent as the "purpose-driven" movement pretends, and the criteria for successful ministry are not so obvious.