6 Destructive Trends Happening in Your

Church
Brothers and sisters, we ought to recover the roots of real Christianity before those who care are too
few to do anything useful about it. Part of that recovery will involve identifying some of the factors
that contribute to the problem. Some of these will be difficult to consider, but we ought to consider
them anyway. Some of the problems we might explore are these:

1. Pastors are increasingly hired for their management skills

or rhetorical ability over and above their biblical wisdom or
their meeting of the biblical qualifications for eldership.
Our shepherds are increasingly hired for their dynamic speaking or catalytic leadership rather than
their commitment to and exposition of the Scriptures, and for their laboring in the increase in
attendance rather than the increase of gospel proclamation.
Now, of course, none of those contrasted qualities are mutually exclusive. Pastors can be both skillful
managers and biblically wise; they can be both great speakers and great students of Scripture; and
they can both attract crowds and proclaim the gospel. The problem is that, while they are not
mutually exclusive, the latter qualities in each contrast have lost priority and consequently have lost
favor. We have not prospered theologically or spiritually when we emphasize the professionalization
of the pastorate.

2. The equating of “worship” with just one creative portion

of the weekly worship service.
The dilution of the understanding of worship is a direct result of the dilution of theology in the
church. The applicational, topical approach to Bible understanding has the consequence of making us
think (and live) in segmented ways. The music leader takes the stage to say, “We’re gonna start with
a time of worship.” Is the whole service not a time of worship? Isn’t the sermon an act of worship?
Isn’t all of life meant to be an act of worship?
One reason we have struggled to develop fully devoted followers of Jesus is that we incorrectly
assign our terminology (equating worship with music only) and thereby train our people to think in
truncated, reductionistic ways.

3. The prevalent eisegesis in Bible study classes and small

groups.
“Eisegesis” basically means “reading into the Bible.” It is the opposite of “exegesis,” the process of
examining the text and “drawing out” its true meaning. Many leaders today either don’t have the
spiritual gift of teaching or haven’t received adequate training, and the unfortunate result is that most
of our Bible studies are rife with phrases like, “What does this text mean to you?” as opposed to,
“What does this text mean?” Application supplants interpretation in the work of Bible study, so it has
become less important to see what the Bible means and more important to make sure the Bible is
meaningful to us.

4. The vast gulf between the work of theology and the life of
the church.
We have this notion that theology is something that takes place somewhere “out there” in the
seminaries or libraries while we here at home are doing the real work of the Christian faith with our
church programs. In many churches, theology is seen as purely academic, the lifeless intellectual
work for the nerds in the church or, worse, the Pharisees.

5. Biblical illiteracy.
Our people don’t know their Bible very well, and this is in large part the fault of a generation of
wispy preaching and teaching (in the church and in the home). Connected to this factor is the
church’s accommodation and assimilation of the culture’s rapid shifting from text-based knowledge
to image-based knowledge. I’ll say more about that in the next chapter, but when it comes to the text
itself, I suspect that a lot of the superficial faith out there results from teaching that treats the Bible
like Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Fortune-cookie preaching will make brittle, hollow, syrupy
Christians.

6. A theologically lazy and methodologically

consumeristic/sensationalistic approach to the sacraments.
The rise of the “scoreboard” approach to attendance reporting, some of the extreme examples of
spontaneous baptism services, the neglect of the Lord’s Supper or the abuse of it through fancifulness
with the elements or lack of clear directives in presenting it—these are all the result of
evangelicalism’s theological bankruptcy. We don’t think biblically about these matters, because
we’re think- ing largely along the lines of “what works?” and consequently we might make a big
splash with our productions but not produce much faith.
The source of all of these factors, if they may be reckoned accurate, is a fundamental misuse of the
Bible by the leaders entrusted with preaching and teaching it. And the grand result of all of these
factors is that as our churches get larger, our message keeps shrinking. We fill our buildings with
scores and scores of people, but we’ve reduced the basic message to fit the size of an individualistic
faith.