Preaching: Let’s talk—let’s kind of move to a little wider scope. You’ve really got your finger on what’s happening in churches across the country through your writing, through your reading and speaking. Give me some idea of what you see as some of the major trends taking place in church life and church growth across the country. Some may be positive. Some may be negative. But what do you see happening?
Stetzer: That’s a good question. I was actually just working on a project to kind of look at the shape of the church. We’ve really got this like this weird season right now—this frenetic pace of change and innovation. You think back—we were sharing a little bit of our journey—you think back 20 years ago, and you had innovative churches. It was the whole “Willowback World”—you know, the whole Willow Creek/Saddleback I like to throw together there. And that was sort of it. And now—that’s first generation innovation. Now you’ve got second, third, fourth. Your recent issue on the house church. You know, according to a study we did at the Center for Missional Research about 1.4 percent of Americans as we looked at it are involved in some sort of small group of 20 or less people who gather weekly to study Scriptures but they don’t go to any church, synagogue or mosque. And there’s a cultural phenomenon that’s there. And so it’s funny, too, because the number of modifiers now that we put before the church—if I were to ask a friend, “Well, what kind of church do you pastor?” They might say Presbyterian or Methodist or Baptist—20 years ago they might say that. Or they might say it’s a Methodist church, but it’s contemporary. Now there’s like six modifiers before everything. “Well, you know, we’re a contemporary, seeker-sensitive, cell-based, moderately reformed, emerging Presbyterian church.” So what’s happened is we find it necessary to put all those modifiers because the way we do church is so changed. Elmer Towns wrote a book decades ago—of course Elmer Towns writes a book every year. There are 130 published books. The man has no unpublished thought. And Elmer’s one of my heroes. He wrote a book a couple of decades ago called
Ten Innovative Churches. He looked at churches you and I would know like Skyline Wesleyan where John Maxwell is. I think Saddleback was in there, and First Baptist Jacksonville was in there. Those were the model churches of innovation 20 years ago. Well, he revisited the topic last year and asked me and Warren Bird to help him. We wrote a book called
Eleven Innovations in the Local Church. And the huge difference between what an innovative church looked like 20 years ago and now is just bizarre! I mean, churches from house from missional to incarnational. We talked about one churched called The Scum of the Earth Church. You’ve got actors church. You’ve got online church. I was sort of the stick in the mud, I think, in the book. I was like, “Guys, theologically ecclesiologically what is a church?” And so that was kind of my role. I evaluated each of these things through an ecclesiological or church-focused and missiological or mission-focused lens. So I think the state of the church is diverse to the point of—I don’t know how to categorize it together. I think we see the decline of the seeker movement that has really been accelerated in the last few years. Even seeker churches are now saying that they are distancing themselves from the seeker movement. And I think we don’t want to throw all that out. I think there are some good things. I’m not a big fan of the seeker-driven language. I get what they’re trying to do just not theologically where I am. Seeker-sensitive—hey, I’m OK—I think it’s good to be sensitive. I like to use language that’s seeker-comprehensible. I think seekers need to understand and comprehend, but it’s hard to be sensitive with the stumbling block of the cross. It’s always an offense—a bloody cross, an empty tomb. So I think we’re seeing the decline of the seeker movement. I think the emerging church has really become an issue that now Evangelicals are having to struggle with which is odd because so many emerging people have left Evangelicalism with great rapidity and have become post-Evangelicals, post-conservatives. And I think there are some real theological problems that are there, but there’s also some very much theologically grounded wings in what would be called the Emerging Church. So you’ve got all of these different things going on at the same time. And I think really, Mike, I think it really boils down to is people have lost confidence in the church. They’re trying everything and anything to redo it. Some of these new contemporary churches, you know, again I’m very pro “let’s find new ways to do church”—but just the in-your-face, the advertising that some built around sex that’s been offensive in some communities. But again it’s just -we’re not—people are saying there’s something wrong with the church, and so they’re trying to change it in any way they can to come up with, I think, something with good motives. They want to reach people for Jesus. So I don’t know how we come out on the other side. I think ultimately we need to regain a confidence in the church. I know the church is a mess. You know the church is a mess. We go to ‘em. But you can’t love Jesus and hate his wife. The church is the bride of Christ. We need to figure out how though she’s imperfect, compromised, fallen that we need to see the church regain its biblical mission and a biblical vision. And I think what will happen is people will do things in innovative ways, but they will do things in more Biblically informed, innovative ways. And that’s kind of what I’m praying for, and I try to be kind of an encourager in that direction. You know, biblically informed, innovative—God uses all kinds of Scripturally sound churches. We just want to make sure that they’re Scripturally sound in the way that we do it. So to me as an observer of the scene I’m not encouraged in Evangelicalism. I think we’re going to see a great die off of churches in the next 20 years, but I think on the other side we may see a more faithful church. You know, we’re living in you know, Europe 50 years ago, and the question is, “How will the church respond?” The European church chose to respond by basically losing its witness and whoring itself out to both Nazism and then to consumerism then everything and then to liberalism and has pretty much ceased to be a major player. The Evangelical church there is kind of coming back. But I would say that we need to make some hard decisions, and I hope the decisions we make are driven by biblical fidelity, missional commitment and a desire to be a biblical church.
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