While catching with news events for the day, I stumbled across a news article titled “Face to faith” by H E Baber in the Guardian UK today. It states
Evangelical US megachurches like Saddleback are market-driven, with transcendence not on the menu.
A very strong statement indeed.
Rick Warren at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images
You can read the original article yourselves but I’ve taken the liberty of reproducing the majority of it here with a number of minor snips for brevity
Last Sunday we drove up to Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church in Orange County, a collection of affluent, politically conservative suburbs south of LA. The model of a modern megachurch, Saddleback boasts over 112,000 “unchurched occasional attenders” as well as 22,800 active members – many initiated in the temperature-controlled baptismal pools on its 120-acre campus.
Megachurches are market-driven. They study demographic data and plan marketing schemes tailored to their local target audiences. The oft-cited example of a target profile, developed by Warren, is Saddleback Sam: “A well-educated young urban professional … [he] is interested in health and fitness … but is overextended in time and money, and is stressed out. He carries a lot of debt, especially due to the price of his home. He is married to Samantha, and they have two kids, Steve and Sally.”
<snipped for brevity>
We entered the Worship Centre, an immense auditorium shell, where Warren was preaching from a stage at the front, where an altar might have been. Saddleback assiduously avoided traditionally churchy architecture, costume and decor. Its campus was relentlessly quotidian, designed to suggest the shopping malls and office parks where members spent their time during the week.
Warren described Saddleback’s programme for “spiritual growth”, with numbered headings. Spiritual growth, he explained, was
- a lifelong process,
- measured by obedience,
- based on God’s word and
- would set me free.
Free from what? From habits, hurts and hang-ups, from painful memories, worry, bitterness and guilt. How would I achieve that?
According to Warren, Jesus had the plan. At Saddleback, he assured us, we would learn to follow his plan “systematically, sequentially and in a process” through the classes Saddleback offered.
This is the future of middle-class US Christianity, according to the latest American Religious Identification Survey (Aris). If the trend identified in the Aris study continues, we will see a country divided between conservative evangelical Christians and secular liberals – the latter hostile to religious belief, identified with evangelical Christianity. This is bad news because popular evangelical Christianity is religiously vacuous. It is directed to secular ends which, arguably, should be promoted by secular means. Saddleback is religion for people who don’t like religion: transcendence is not on the menu.
Although almost half of Americans say they have had a religious experience, mysticism is likely a recondite taste. For the minority who have that taste – who seek God as an object of contemplation – Saddleback has nothing. Evangelical and mainline churches promote activism and are contemptuous of navel-gazing.
As a navel-gazer, I was depressed by Saddleback. It seemed the butt end of Christianity: stripped of history and iconography, wholly immersed in its secular surroundings, constructed according to a business model and promoted by motivational speakers – bland, cheerful, dull.
We drove away, past immaculate housing estates and strip malls iterating chain restaurants and shops, replicated in every suburb from coast to coast. I wondered why anyone would want to live in that charmless place, much less to get more of the same at church.
I believe the journalist is non-Christian but her religion is not the point.
The real point is that the article does contain some element of truth.. IMHO.
Take a look around you this Sun. Look at the people in the congregation after the service in Cana Hall, look at the activities happening around church.. because we live in a fast-paced world where the attention span of the individual is generally several seconds short, everything’s a sound-byte.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating a return to the ways of long and sonorous sermons, speakers raining down hail and brimstone or even staid hymn-singing designed to send you to sleep. But we do need to take a look at the things that we do in our church, how we conduct those actitivities, and ask ourselves the questions “Why are we doing this?”, “Does this edify God?”.
If you can come up with an answer that you feel comfortable with, continue what it is you were doing, by all means. But if it raises further questions, perhaps we need to think this through.
Are megachurches in Singapore the same? Looking at the context of our church and its members/visitors, do you agree with the article? What do you think?
.
- adrian t
