How Seeker-Driven Churches Create Anemic Christians

Imagine sitting in a doctor's office after months of wondering why you are exhausted.

You're sleeping, but you never feel rested, a flight of stairs leaves you winded, and your heart races after simple activity. Your concentration is slipping at work, and you look in the mirror and notice that your face seems pale.

You finally get the bloodwork back and discover you're anemic.

Your body doesn't have enough healthy red blood cells or enough hemoglobin within them to carry the oxygen your tissues need. Your lungs are breathing and your heart is beating, and you’re doing normal things like eating, walking, and working, but your body is being deprived of something essential and eventually, the deficiency manifests itself everywhere. 

That's a picture of what can happen when you are anchoring yourself to a seeker-driven church. This may shock people to think about, but there are many churches producing Christians who are anemic. 

These anemic souls attend many Sundays and their children love the youth program. They know the worship songs and attend a small group periodically. They volunteer on a team, and even describe their church as “alive,” “exciting,” or “relevant.”  But if you ask them to explain the gospel or how to battle sin, they give you shallow one-liners more common to K-Love commercials than faithful pulpits. If you ask them to explain how they are making disciples in their home, loving their wife like Christ, or submitting to their husband as unto the Lord, they look at you like you’re a legalistic bully. If you ask them how often they soak in the Scriptures to hear the voice of God, they may even respond with a condescending remark like, “I don’t need to read the Bible to be saved.” If you ask them what the attributes of God are, or to defend the deity of Christ, they look at you like your meddling in religious weeds not necessary for relevant faith. But if you ask them to describe the ultimate church, they’ll give you a list that sounds like a country club membership or Carnival Cruise more than a thriving life as the bride of Christ. 

This is one of the great dangers of the seeker-driven church model. In its desire to make Christianity accessible to unbelievers, it can gradually make biblical Christianity unnecessary for believers and turn the church into a consumer-driven show. 

The church should be friendly, welcoming, excellent, and make the truth plain for everyone to understand (like our slogan: Sound Doctrine for Everyday People), but the problem comes when the preferences of the unconverted begin determining the priorities of the church. When that happens, churches may become crowded while Christians become anemic.

Here are five ways it happens.

1. Seeker-Driven Churches Can Replace Feeding the Sheep with Attracting the Crowd

Many modern pastors think Jesus said, "Attract My sheep." But the Lord said, "Feed My sheep." (John 21:17)

The gathered church certainly proclaims the gospel to reach unbelievers, but the New Testament's dominant picture of the gathered church is not a weekly evangelistic attraction designed primarily around outsiders. It is the people of God gathering to worship God and be equipped by His Word.

In the book of Acts, "They were continually devoting themselves to the apostles' teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer" (Acts 2:42). This is what the church should be focusing on when it gathers. Pastors are given not to be entertainers and TEDtalkers, but "for the equipping of the saints" so that believers mature and are no longer "children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine" (Eph. 4:11–14).

Seeker-driven churches are good at attracting people and terrible at growing them.

We need to remember that attendance is not maturity, and hype (or excitement) is not sanctification. A packed auditorium is not proof that sheep are being fed.

2. Seeker-Driven Churches Can Make the Sermon Safe Enough to Leave Sinners Comfortable

Paul's charge to Timothy could hardly sound less seeker-driven when he wrote, "Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction" (2 Tim. 4:2). The Apostle knew that "the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires" (vv. 3–4).

The danger was (and is) that people naturally prefer teaching that accommodates their desires. Therefore, the preacher's responsibility is precisely not to allow people's desires to determine his message. Yet that temptation is embedded in the seeker-driven philosophy. 

Seeker-driven pastors are most concerned about what will offend people, what will bring them back, what topics test well in the survey, and what makes people feel more comfortable. 

Faithful pastors are concerned with the truth the congregation needs to hear. Biblical preaching will comfort the afflicted, but it will also afflict the comfortable.

Faithful churches tell the sexually immoral to repent, the greedy that money is their god, that husbands should sacrifice, that wives should submit, that children should obey, that self-righteousness can’t save, that comfort is a liar, and that church is not about you! Faithful churches tell homosexuals, adulterers, drunkards, idolaters, and thieves that their sin excludes them from God's Kingdom, and then announces the magnificent news that Christ came to save such sinners and "Such were some of you" (1 Cor. 6:9–11)!

That is Christianity. That is what the church ought to proclaim. 

3. Seeker-Driven Churches Can Entertain Children Without Evangelizing Them

This may be the most sobering consequence of all that ignites my righteous anger. I’ve sat with too many parents who spent twenty years in a church that left their kids entertained but not evangelized. They gave, served, showed up, and assumed the church was doing its job. Are the parents responsible? Of course! But the church is on the hook for creating a system that produces malnourished souls and under-served families. For too many parents, their kids ended up loving the fun games at church without ever faithfully loving Christ.

And we wonder why so many adults continue to treat church like a glorified kid’s ministry meant for their own coddling and entertainment? 

In the pursuit of making childhood memories associated with Christianity, ask these important questions about your church’s ministry to kids and teens: 

• Are they told they are sinners under the righteous judgment of a holy God?

• Are they taught substitutionary atonement?

• What gets said about repentance?

• Do they understand regeneration?

• Is justification by works or faith? 

• Is Jesus being held high as Lord of their life and the authority over all decisions? 

• Do they read the Bible or just do Bible-themed entertainment? 

Paul told Timothy that "from childhood" he had known "the sacred writings which are able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus" (2 Tim. 3:15). God's design is not merely that children enjoy being around Christians. We want them to know the Scriptures that make them wise unto salvation. A children's ministry can be enormous and spiritually hollow. A youth ministry can be growing numerically while teenagers are starving doctrinally.

4. Seeker-Driven Churches Can Train Christians to Consume Instead of Carry a Cross

The seeker-driven model can unintentionally catechize Christians in consumerism by enabling them to ask questions about church like: 

• Did I enjoy it?

• Did it meet my needs?

• Was it convenient?

• Did my children like it?

• Was the music good?

• Did the speaker keep my attention?

In steps Jesus declaring, "If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me" (Luke 9:23). Those are radically different visions of Christianity.

Consumer Christianity asks, "What does this church offer me?" Biblical Christianity asks, "How can my life be offered to Christ?" 

This matters because the methods used to attract people eventually teach people what church is for. If people are won by entertainment, they will demand entertainment. If they are won by convenience, they will resist sacrifice. If they are won by constant novelty, ordinary faithfulness will eventually bore them. But if they are taught Christ, Scripture, worship, fellowship, prayer, service, sacrifice, holiness, and mission, they begin to understand that the church does not exist to merely satisfy them, but that they exist to glorify God! 

5. Seeker-Driven Churches Can Give People Enough Christianity to Feel Safe Without Enough Truth to Make Them Holy

This may be the most frightening possibility of all. Weak churches don’t necessarily produce atheists. Instead, they produce deeply confident yet alarmingly shallow Christians who think they have strong faith when, in reality, all they have are religious labels.

Seeker-driven churches have people who pray to a god, but is it the God of the Bible? They have people who attend a gathering, but are they worshipping Jesus Christ? They have someone called a “pastor,” but is he a faithful one? They sing music, but is it the truth? Their children have fun, but are they encountering God? 

For an entire generation, Christianity has become part of their identity without Christ ever becoming Lord of their life. Jesus warned about precisely this kind of false assurance when He said, "Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 7:21). The sobering words of Jesus remind us there will be people at the judgment who are surprised they are lost and that truth should make every pastor tremble, and every professing Christian take inventory of what kind of church they are entrusting with their soul care (Hebrews 13:17). 

Jesus will not one day grade us on how much fun we had, or how attractive we were as a church. He will judge our faithfulness to what He called us to be and what He commanded us to do. The church belongs to Jesus and is to operate under His headship in all things for the good of His people, and the glory of His name! 

Feed the sheep. Evangelize the lost. Teach the children. Preach the Word. And trust the Holy Spirit with the results.