I had the weirdest experience when I joined a church back in 2021, freshly saved from witchcraft during the lockdowns. I was looking for a place to be baptised after my radical encounter with the Lord, and this one place was doing outdoor baptisms which I thought was kinda neat (if a little chilly). One of the junior pastors had been referred to my email and gave me a phone call to talk it over, asking why I was keen to be baptised. He seemed really encouraging so I started sharing my testimony, explaining that I had worked as a medium in the past. He interjected with the casual statement; “Oh, I went to a medium once.”

That stopped me dead in my tracks because I was horrified, but also praying for him to finish that sentence with something like and I never did it again, because that would have been bad… But apparently that was a complete sentence because I was met with silence for almost half a minute. We picked up the conversation again, but now I was wary of this dude. What kind of pastor tries to build rapport with a new church member by casually chatting about dabbling in the occult with no repentance? I thought maybe I had misunderstood his intentions, or maybe he was incredibly ignorant (which is a big enough red flag in itself), but ultimately I questioned whether this church was on the straight and narrow.

Fast-forward some time down the track and there was a disagreement between myself and another church member about whether continuous conversations are appropriate in the church service when some people want to worship God and other people want to catch up with each other. The girl decided to involve the lead pastor when I wasn’t convinced of her perspective, and the pastor seemed to think it was just a misunderstanding that didn’t need to be made into an issue. I thought it was strange to just ignore clear scriptural teachings regarding church order and talking during church. Apparently that’s not what they’re aiming for. The other pastor (the same one who had casually mentioned using divination to circumvent God) asked me to be more tolerant of the “unsaved” (despite the young woman being a worship leader), and that we must be more “seeker friendly” as a church. That last part really tipped me off as to what I was dealing with and suddenly all of his weird prior behaviour made sense. Far from smoothing things over as he seemingly intended, I was increasingly concerned. Surely they didn’t appoint ambivalent non-Christians to leadership positions? Does anyone here know or teach the bible?

I had noticed some questionable things in the past, but had overlooked them because of friends amongst the fellowship. Firstly, most of the “preaching” on a Sunday revolved around mental health and doing good in life, but very little of it actually taught the bible. Secondly, some of the music bordered on the genre known as “Jesus is my boyfriend” which could be pretty cringe at times and outright blasphemous at other times. I almost left on a previous occasion over one song which spoke about seeing our own reflection in God. And thirdly, I attended a small group which was ostensibly the venue for learning more about God and scripture, but most of the time it was just hanging out with friends (socially enjoyable, but not thought provoking or spiritually stimulating). I needed more because I was spiritually starving.

We need to be fed on the bread of life, not breadcrumbed.

That next Sunday I tried out a new church I had researched online. Thankfully, many churches put audio recordings of their teachings onto podcasts, so it was relatively simple to listen to what various different churches actually teach before setting foot inside their doors. Because new people are rare at this church, I didn’t pass unnoticed as I often did at the previous church, even after years of attendance. I was so accustomed to being ignored, that I was startled by being approached by the pastor before we began. He welcomed me and gave me a brief rundown of the format, then said he would have a longer chat afterwards.

During the service, a scripture was read out which had been read multiple times at the seeker church and promoted as their “motto” of sorts. It was a passage from Colossians chapter 3 which says “let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts…” and they essentially only ever read that part of the chapter at the seeker church. However, the bible-preaching church read the whole chapter, including the parts which said “put to death whatever belongs to your earthly nature… because of these the wrath of God is coming.” The seeker church never read that part. The seeker church preached all the time about the peace of God and failed to tell people that they would never know that peace unless they repented and were reconciled to God from their current status as children of Satan (John 8). Most of these seeker churches would probably have labelled the apostles “unloving” because of the brutally honest sections of the bible such as that Colossians passage, but how do they get past Jesus’ harsh words? The contrast between faithfulness to the gospel and being ashamed of the gospel at the seeker church was clearly evident in that one passage of scripture.

In Jeremiah chapter 6 the Lord has some particularly damning words for ministries who preach a man-centred message of comfort:

‘From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain; prophets and priests alike, all practise deceit. They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. “Peace, peace,” they say, when there is no peace. Are they ashamed of their detestable conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush. So they will fall among the fallen; they will be brought down when I punish them,’ says the Lord.

Jeremiah 6:13-15 (NIV)

True to his word, the pastor at the new church did catch up before everyone left and asked about my faith journey. I went out on a limb and gave him the abridged version of my testimony and his response was encouraging, but he did say: “so you don’t do that stuff anymore?” It was such a refreshing change in attitude after the weird reaction from the seeker-pastor that I felt a wave of relief wash over me. Finally, a place where they got it.

What is the Purpose of Church?

Should people leave a seeker-friendly church? Sometimes it’s easy to leave a church, like when the members are openly hostile and antagonistic, or if the teachings are so obviously heretical that no sensible people would believe half of them. But sometimes, the situation isn’t quite as clear, like in the case of seeker churches. Are they delivering “wrong” teachings? Technically no, but they are delivering incomplete teachings and failing to disclose the truth about what they’re trying to sell people on (which is following Jesus, just in case that part wasn’t clear). Are they abusing people? Again, technically, no. However, they are manipulating people into giving them money for a sub-par service or product that doesn’t deliver what it ostensibly promises: redemption.

A lot of “church-hurt” stems from these unconscionable practices of luring people into an environment where they feel “safe” to be messy and problematic, but then eventually encounter a boundary or a standard. They are reassured that no sin is too great for God to overlook, but that is a damnable lie and the preachers know it. Was the pastor planning on letting me continue to practice witchcraft in their church? Was he ever going to hold me accountable, or would he have been friendly all the way to my damnation? Would someone with a similar background have cried “bigotry” if elders dared to tell them those practices are detestable to the Lord?

Apparently I was wrong about church being for Christians. According to Rick Warren, who spearheaded much of the seeker sensitive mega-church model, “it’s not about you” aka Christians, it’s about unbelievers. It’s about what unbelievers want, what they feel comfortable with, and what they find offensive.

As C.H. Spurgeon once said; “A time will come when instead of shepherds feeding the sheep, the church will have clowns entertaining the goats.”

Church shouldn’t be a venue for coddling disobedience. The purpose of church is to gather together the saints for their edification, learning, and discipleship. The church (as a corporate body of believers) gathers to worship God together in a way which builds their individual faith and creates nurturing relationships within their faith community. Evangelism happens out in the world where believers encounter lots of different people and have conversations with them about spiritual matters. If those people become believers, then they join the church and become disciples.

That’s the original template for growing the church outlined in the New Testament, before the days of church buildings, paid staff, and copywriting music. Obviously we can’t return to the original model, but we can maintain the inherent principles and apply them to our modern context. Specifically, we can preserve the sanctity of the worship gathering and hold different events for evangelism, such as the Alpha series, which is an excellent programme designed to engage non-believers with useful insights into Christianity. Events like Alpha allow non-believers to examine what Christianity teaches about who God is and what following Jesus entails before they commit to a lifelong journey. In psychology, this process is referred to as informed consent and it forms an essential part of engaging with therapy.

The seeker-sensitive strategy attempts to evangelise on a larger scale by cutting corners such as the process of informed consent: truthfully disclosing everything which is entailed in following Jesus. Instead, the aim is to transform the worship of God and the discipleship of the saints into something which gratifies the short-term emotional desires of unbelievers in a shallow attempt at evangelism. Most of the pastors who engage with this model are not cynically exploiting people’s ignorance, but rather they believe that the bible is too harsh for most people to accept, but if they can accept a “softer” version of the gospel then they will somehow be saved anyway. They live in perpetual fear of alienating people from God because they don’t realise that Jesus Himself did exactly that in John chapter 6 when he rebuked the crowd for following Him for free food rather than spiritual sustenance.

Unfortunately, the seeker-church’s soft version of the gospel has no ability to save anyone. Instead, it keeps people in a delusional limbo where they think they are saved without having been born-again, and they have no idea that they have not accepted the true Jesus as their Lord. It’s a bait-and-switch where the switch is never actually made because the pastors know their congregation would leave, so nobody ever hears about impending judgement, only about how “loved” they are. Even their version of “love” is shallow because it never challenges people to do better for their own good, just leaves them floundering in confusion.

I know I would never have joined a church if I hadn’t encountered God, but since I had… I was never going to be satisfied with a shell of a church for very long. I don’t believe that true converts stay in seeker churches in the long term, not unless the church changes their model and risks losing a large portion of their paying customers. So inevitably, the faithful move on and the seeker church is left with the nominal believers who have been duped by a system which isn’t designed to challenge their preconceived notions of the world revolving around their desires, instead of their desires being deferential to the will of God.

Does a church like that ever really reach the lost without losing its own soul?