PREACHER SAYS BIBLICAL CHURCH VANISHING FROM AMERICA

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."

ON SUNDAY , A FIFTH GRADER TAKES TO PULPIT

MIAMI — The first time Terry Durham preached, he was not in front of a group of people or even inside a church. He was in the bathroom of his grandmother’s home in Fort Lauderdale, delivering his first sermon surrounded by toothbrushes, soap and towels. He was 6 years old.
Five years later, Terry is an ordained minister who preaches almost every Sunday at True Gospel Deliverance Ministry, a 20-seat nondenominational storefront church that his grandmother founded in 2000.
“They say, ‘How can you be a preacher when you’re so young?’ ” said Terry, now 11. “But when they listen to me, they’re shocked.”
“God just put his Spirit upon me,” said Terry, who wore a baby blue suit with matching snakeskin shoes, the kind of outfit he usually wears on Sundays. “He said, ‘I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.’ But he didn’t say how old you had to be or anything like that.”
During the week, Terry attends fifth grade at Liberty Elementary School, plays Uno with his friends and attends choir practice. Terry, who said he earns A’s and B’s in school, reads the Bible every day in addition to studying theology through classes offered by an online university.
But Terry said he was happiest when preaching.
“When I’m in the pulpit, it’s like something turns over me,” he said, “and I just turn into a man of God. And when I’m out of the pulpit, I just turn into a speechless kid.”
Terry sat in a living room decorated with three posters of him in his Sunday clothes and bearing the words “Little Man of God.” Sitting on a large red and gold couch, he tapped his shoes against the floor and explained how he prepared for his sermons.
He does not write anything down, he said. He simply reads the Bible the day before the service and waits for the Spirit to move him. “I don’t plan to say those things,” he said, “but when God gives them to me, I say them right away to be obedient.”
Turning the pulpit over to a youthful minister like Terry is not unusual in black churches not overseen by a central body, said Prof. Christine Gudorf, chairwoman of the religion department at Florida International University.
In these churches, she said, age is not an issue, and seminary training is not necessary.
“It’s God who chooses the minister, and the Holy Spirit gives charismatic gifts, especially gifts of preaching,” Professor Gudorf said. “The community recognizes that gift and confirms the person in a ministerial role.”
Terry and his twin brother, Todd, who plays drums in the choir, were born prematurely on Nov. 19, 1997; their grandmother, Sharon Monroe, recalled that as a newborn Terry had to be connected to a heart monitor. After their parents broke up, the boys were raised by their father and grandmother.
Ms. Monroe said that when Terry was a baby, she would sometimes give sermons while carrying him in her arms. One day, when he was older, she recalled, Terry climbed into her seat on the pulpit and chanted, “Go, Grandma, go!”
After Ms. Monroe heard Terry preaching in her bathroom, he told her he wanted to be a minister. She decided to give him the chance. He gave a test sermon at her church, and then she ordained him.
Ms. Monroe said she had had a vision in which a child joined her at the pulpit. “I never thought it would be Terry because he was so sickly,” she said. “But Terry has a certain thing about him.”
Cynthia Spokes, a Bible studies teacher at Terry’s church, said she had been instructing him for two years and was impressed with his questions and his insistence on taking adult classes.
“It’s just amazing to watch this child give a sermon,” Ms. Spokes said. “He moves me. He just lifts me up.”
The most powerful experience Terry has had as a minister came during a sermon when, he said, he healed a young man who had an injured foot. As he prayed for him to be healed, the man stood up and walked without the aid of his crutches.
“That was the first time I healed someone, and from then on I asked God to give me the power to heal people,” Terry said, adding that laying hands on worshipers with ailments was something he did regularly.
Terry has traveled beyond Florida to deliver sermons, including twice at Tiaise Temple Ministry in Allentown, Pa. The pastor there, Donna Morgan, said Terry appealed to adults because he inspired them to transcend their perceived limitations.
“People listen to him and say, ‘My God, look at what the Lord can do when we are willing to be used by God to speak his message,’ ” Ms. Morgan said.