Biblical Church Vanishing From America

Jim Jones at The Star-Telegram

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."

Read the rest here and ask yourself if your church has taken the "build it and they will come" bait of the consumer-driven church profiteers & marketeers.

Listen to this Crosstalk America interview with Bob Pearle here.