The Church of What’s Happenin’ Now

The biggest fad of all has come with its own built-in expiration date: “Forty Days of Purpose.” The Purpose-Driven Life had sold more than twenty million copies, making it the best-selling non-fiction book of all time, surpassing The Diary of Anne Franke within a few months of its release. According to a news release I read in December, spin-off Purpose-Driven merchandize has generated nearly five million units of additional sales, and that’s nothing to sneeze at. “Forty Days of Purpose” is already the most successful evangelical fad in the history of the world, making a lot of people rich and guaranteeing that we’re going to see a lot of similar marketing plans and 40-day programs in the months to come. Rick Warren has already announced his next one: “Forty Days of Community.” It starts in April, and you can get your church on the bandwagon now. The cost for a ticket to ride this fad is tailored to fit the size of your church. If you have a church of 100 people, it will only cost you $700. Now, I’m not going to try to squeeze a critique of The Purpose Driven Life into this article. There are plenty of helpful critiques available on-line, and one by Nathan Busenitz in the book from Crossway titled Fool’s Gold?.

Even if we had no bone to pick with the content or the underlying philosophy of The Purpose Driven Life is this really the kind of book that deserves to be the best-selling evangelical work of all time? Is there anything profound or original or exceptionally brilliant about the content of this book? Is it great literature, or especially superb Bible teaching, or excellent theology made understandable in simple terms? It’s none of those things. The extraordinary success of this book stems from a very clever marketing scheme that targeted a specific market at the most opportune time. It hit the shelves at a moment when the evangelical culture was ripe for fads and stampedes.The evangelical movement is filled with people who have been trained and conditioned and encouraged to respond to every wind of doctrine. Rick Warren thinks it’s a good thing, and he compares it to surfing. You just ride wave after wave, and that, he says, is the means God uses to bring about church growth. In The Purpose Driven Church, he says this: "At Saddleback Church we’ve . . . tried to recognize the waves God was sending our way, and we’ve learned to catch them. We’ve learned to use the right equipment to ride those waves, and we’ve learned the importance of balance. We’ve also learned to get off dying waves whenever we sensed God wanted to do something new. The amazing thing is this: The more skilled we become in riding waves of growth, the more God sends!" Ah! so that’s why we have this proliferation of fads. Evangelicals have gotten so skilled at surfing the latest fashions that God just sends more and more of them. And they get bigger every time. I always think of my favorite Flip Wilson character, Reverend Leroy. Remember him? You surely remember his best-known parishioner, Geraldine Jones, whose signature catch-phrase was “The Devil made me do it.” Reverend Leroy was the esteemed pastor of “The Church of What’s Happenin’ Now.” In the ’60s, that was funny. These days it’s no joke. It seems like every church wants to be “The Church of What’s Happenin’ Now.”And that is an extremely dangerous position for the evangelical movement to be in. Today’s fad may seem benign enough if you don’t care much about biblical discernment. Rick Warren says he just wants to meet people’s “felt needs” and insists he wants to remain biblical at the same time. Where’s the harm in that? But that philosophy is wrong and unbiblical, because it’s contrary to Paul’s clear command in 2 Timothy 4, to preach the word and refuse to cater to the itch of people’s “felt needs.” Meanwhile, all these fads are moving us further from our evangelical commitment to the principles of sola fide and sola Scriptura.

Excerpt is from a message that was delivered at the 2005 Shepherd’s Conference by Phil Johnson titled "Programs, Get Your Programs:Exposing the Flaws of a Fad-Driven Church" a copy of this message can be obtained at the Shepherd's Conference official website