The Rev. Bob Pearle says a different kind of church has risen in America. In vast auditoriums and smaller places people listen to preachers who roam the stage and tickle the ears with feel-good messages.
Many of those churches follow "Wal-Mart" strategies of pleasing customers but often soft-soap hard biblical truths like hell, sin and salvation, Pearle declares in his recent book, The Vanishing Church: Searching for Significance in the 21st Century. (Hannibal Books, $14.95.)
Pearle is pastor of Fort Worth’s Birchman Baptist Church and president of the Grapevine-based Southern Baptists of Texas, a conservative state convention. He doesn’t hold that churches are literally "vanishing," since there are all kinds of churches, often filled to overflowing, in our neck of the woods.
"What I’m saying is that the biblical New Testament church is vanishing from society today," he said. "Anything and everything is acceptable as long as it builds a crowd. Jesus wasn’t as interested in building a crowd as he was in telling the truth."
Seeker-sensitive churches take surveys to find out what the unchurched want, then build their product to meet consumer demand, he said. "It’s a bankrupt philosophy. Our responsibility as pastors and leaders is not to give people what they want necessarily but what they need."
Also weakening the American church, he said, are what he calls unbiblical actions of the Episcopal Church and other denominations in tolerating same-sex marriage and gay and lesbian clergy.
Sociologist Wade Clark Roof, author of Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion and professor of religious studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, says Pearle is responding in "a literalistic fundamentalist context."
"The individualistic piety associated with fundamentalism is increasingly empty to people looking for religion to address social justice issues and that is why Warren’s and others like it are growing," Roof says. He was referring to the Rev. Rick Warren’s Saddleback Community Church in Lake Forest, Calif.
Roof acknowledges that there is danger in social gospel trends "if personal faith becomes weakened as liberal Protestantism shows."
Pearle — who rejects the label of fundamentalist — says declining membership in many mainline Protestant groups results from watering down core biblical teachings. He believes that evangelicals who do that will suffer the same fate.
"You have to hear the bad news that we are sinners, before your receive the good news of salvation," Pearle says.
Elaine Heath, author of The Mystic Way of Evangelism: A Contemplative Vision for Christian Outreach, says preaching about hell and damnation isn’t the best strategy to win converts.
"When missional, evangelistic Christians like me refuse to lead with threats of hell, preferring instead to lead with the good news of God’s love, it is not a move away from the tradition, but a move toward the ancient tradition," said Heath, assistant professor of evangelism at Southern Methodist University’s Perkins School of Theology. "And it is a move that touches people’s hearts and lives with hope and healing and an invitation to receive the transforming love of God."
Pearle says he’s all for preaching God’s love, as long as it includes biblical truth.
Pearle’s book also voices concerns about Baptist churches that establish "satellite campuses," where a minister presides over several campuses and his sermons are projected by satellite onto screens in different locations during worship services.
"That violates Baptist ecclesiology," he said. "The satellite campuses may have their own pastor but they are not totally autonomous from the mother church."
The Rev. Ed Young, a Southern Baptist and pastor of Fellowship Church in Grapevine, has five satellite campuses, in Fort Worth, Dallas, Plano, Hawkins and Miami. He’s considering satellites in Sao Paulo, Brazil; and Madrid.
"Our satellite locations are doing great," Young said. "The Fort Worth campus is already running 2,000. I can’t believe it myself.
"We’re not a perfect church. But I’m not as concerned about Baptist ecclesiology as I am about the New Testament. I know the Apostle Paul’s letters got circulated and read in the early churches. We think we are following the New Testament, but with new technology."
Pearle said there are many kinds of megachurches, some more biblical than others, when asked about the largest church in America, Lakewood Church in Houston, where Joel Osteen preaches to as many as 30,000 each Sunday.
"Let’s face it," Pearle said. "Joel Osteen, if he adheres to the same theology that his dad [John Osteen] did, you really can’t tell it by his preaching. His dad, although I disagreed with some of the theology he espoused, was much more biblical than his son."
In the past, Osteen has said he doesn’t mention sin and damnation much, because people attending already know they are sinners and need to be given a message of hope. He ends each of his television broadcasts with a short message inviting people to accept Jesus as their savior.
Even with his criticisms, Pearle doesn’t claim that many of the new styles of churches aren’t doing any good.
"I’m just saying churches need to get rid of historical amnesia and get back to being the church," he said. "We need to declare that we are all sinners, sin separates us from God, and that Jesus is our only Savior."
