Reading many blogs that I have links to or are in my aggregator, I am seeing an interesting trend of people who leave churches due to forsaking sound Biblical theology for the Christian megatrend of the day. What is interesting to me is that many of these same people are becoming more frustrated because the church they fled to in the name of perserving sound Biblical theology is now embracing and implementing the abhorrent latest and greatest Christian megatrend of the day that sold out their last church. It raises up a question that many people will possibly have to ask themselves one day when they had come to the dead end road of the Christian walk.

When all the churches in my area have sold out Biblically sound theology for the Christian megatrend of the day, where will I go for my next church?

I am seeing this more and more in the blogosphere. I am seeing this more and more as readers privately e-mail me with their concerns, frustrations, and wondering of a sense of direction. I see the genuine concern as these people fear selecting their next church because they think that the next church will eventually repeat the pattern described in the first paragraph or their next church will be already ‘out-there’ theologically and will not be discovered until they are too entrenched with the activities, programs, surroundings, and comforts of the next church.

The vast majority of these readers have very similar backgrounds. Many were raised, evangelized into, or ended up attending Pentecostal / Charismatic fellowships that went off into such teachings as Word of Faith, Toronto /Brownsville, The River, The New Apostolic Reformation, Stragetic Level Spiritual Warfare and other movements. It was due to these churches going off into the extreme elements of these teachings that these people left and found a new home in a different church. Many of these readers ended up finding fellowships that blended in a ‘delicate balance’ (because these fellowships are striving to find the balance) of God’s Word and the Holy Spirit with many of these fellowships being a combination of Reformed and Charismatic (that I will now call ‘Reformatic’).

These readers went (and many joined) these churches and finally felt as if they were ‘home’ until these churches started listening to and eventually implemented some or a combination of these concepts:

Church Growth Movement, Seeker-Sensitive, Willow Creek, Saddleback / Purpose-Driven, Theo-politics (a.k.a. Republican Jesus)

It was at the shifting of the focus from the Word in a congregation of the some and financially struggling to the seminars and techniques of the many and megarich, that many felt their ‘refuge’ had suddenly lost their original New Testament intent to raise disciples, evangelize the lost, fulfill a Great Commission, and care for the poor, orphans, and widowed and exchanged it for numbers, money, power, influence, and glory. Many of these people who have e-mailed have told me of hearing their pastor give a sermon and keeping their notes in the provided outline to only discover later on while doing research that the ‘pastor’s sermon’ (later becoming sermons) were actually told almost verbatim from the books authored by the leaders of the four movements mentioned above byt customized to the environment of their church.

I hear stories of how everything with a name experienced a name change with the same old stuff to make it appear ‘fresh’, ‘anointed’, ‘different’, and ‘a new thing’. Church was renamed to Worship Center. Service was named to Celebration Time. Local missions was changed to Community Care. Worldwide Missions changed to Global Concern. Senior Pastor was changed to Chief Executive Pastor, Visitors called newfound friends, etc. It appears that the church who loved to bash the Democrats for bringing in political correctiveness implemented a spiritual form of the came concept and called it ’sanitized and holy’.

I hear stories of new programs introduced into the church with intriguing titles that were literally using the verbatim materials written by the founders of the movements listed above rebadged and customized to fit the scope of the group. I heard stories where church membership based on your word promising to uphold the scriptures changed to a printed and signed ‘covenant contract’ that may have legal implications if someone speaks out when error occurs.

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