As I was talking about this newspaper article in my blogpost from yesterday, there was something else that really caught my attention….

The portion of the article that stated…

The church is also planning to change its name…..

How is the name going to change? If you read the article, one will begin to see that the word ‘Baptist’ is going to be removed from the church’s name.

Why?

According to a member of the church’s “public relations committee”

“We are trying to remove any boundaries that people have associated with Baptists and making it known that we are contemporary and nonjudgmental,”

Is the reasoning really due to what was stated above?

Or could the real reasoning be either a ‘bait and switch’ tactic where we appear ‘non-denominational’, ‘contemporary’, and ‘nonjudgmental’ and then ’sneak in’ the “Baptistese” consisting of the same doctrine with different ‘buzzwords’ once a person is deeply ingrained or indoctrinated.

If the reasoning is really due to what was stated by the church, then can we assume that what is really being displayed is a ‘fence-walking’ mentality of wanting the side of Baptist affiliation / resources behind the scenes while at the same time trying to imply in public an independent non-affiliated mentality.

By removing the key identity of the denomination from the church name, what we have here is really in one sense ‘identity theft’.

Wikipedia defines the term Identity theft in reference to financial matters as:

…a term used to refer to fraud that involves pretending to be someone else in order to steal money or get other benefits.

In pretending to be someone else, there is a hidden desire to deny who the identity thief really is because of shame, reputation, or lacking the skills, knowledge, and resources to do things the legal way.

Isn’t this what seeker-sensitive churches that are sucked in the vortex of the church growth movement are doing spiritually?

frauding the ’seekers’ by pretending to be someone else (that they are really not) in order to gain influence, affluence, fatten the bank account, or grow the membership count.

A church’s denominational affiliation is the church’s identity. When removing the church’s denominational affiliation from the church name, isn’t the church trying their best to pretend to be some other church (that got famous) in a hidden desire to suppress who the church really is because of a shame, past reputation, or lacking the true power of God to see miracles and growth the Bible way in an attempt to to gain influence, affluence, fatten the bank account, or grow the membership count?

Go drive down the streets where churches are located and look at the names and denominational affiliation on the church signs. When you see ‘Reformed’ and/or ‘Presbyterian’ in a church name, you expect to see Reformed doctrine, the Protestant Reformation, and Calvanism. When you see ‘Baptist’ in a church name, you expect to see an emphasis on the Word of God, evangelism, and less move of the Holy Spirit. When you see “Pentecostal’, ‘Charismatic’, and/or ‘Word of Faith’ in a church name, you expect to see an emphasis on the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues.

It comes across to me that what is the root of all of this is the love of money fueled by a mentality of fraud / dishonesty trying to ‘market’ yourselves as being “contemporary and nonjudgmental” while the world laughs at all the Jesus Junk, cut-rate “Christian Hannah Montana” entertainment, Sunday School teachers who ran Enron, televangelists who commit adultery, and canned cliches.

What happens when this church growth movement fails? You ‘re-invent’ yourself and you ‘re-identity theft’ yourself denying that you were a part of the last church growth movement while trying to emulate another successful church’s techniques in the name of being ‘contemporary’ and fall into a vicious cycle that becomes cyclic and repetitive. Do we really think that doing these church growth programs to become ‘culturally relevant’ and ‘contemporary’ (while raging the ‘culture war’ in our voter activism and our ten minute two part sermonette) that one day the world will no longer scoff, persecute, and ridicule us to one day eventually join us?

It seems that the end result of a new contemporary ’seeker-sensitive’ church is to create a perfect world on the inside with hip services and great tasting coffee coffee and to create a perfect world on the outside with no enemies of God within our cities (because we have either become hip with them to save them but really sell out to them or we have voted ‘God’s candidates’ into office who eliminated temptation and our enemies). Doesn’t this sound way too much like the same common thread that runs prevalent within the religious right movement, the word of faith movement, the charismatic movement, the apostolic / prophetic movement, the Lakeland Revival, and the third-wave spiritual-mapping movement?

A common thread of a Kingdom Now / Christian Reconstructionalism / Dominionism mentality where we must somehow re-establish the kingdom of God on Earth ‘by any means necessary’ thus preparing the way for or enabling the Second Coming of Christ.

Where postmodernism is ‘all roads lead to heaven’, what we have here (via the common thread that runs through the Kingdom Now / Christian Reconstructionalism / Dominionism / triumphalism mentality) is really ‘Christian Predominionalism’ where…

all roads will lead to a culture and society ruled exclusively by God’s Law per the Bible, to the exclusion of secular law (when their own God stated in Titus 3:1 to “Remind them to be subject to rulers and authorities, to obey, to be ready for every good work…..)

No matter what is done, the world is still going to scoff, sneer, and snicker and still remain outside our four walled ‘corporation’. They are not going to ‘just come’ to our buildings and our imitation “ST. Arbucks” because we ‘built it’. Instead of ‘church growth’ seminars, why doesn’t the church go back to the ‘growing church Bible’ and follow the example in the Book of Acts and go out to fulfill the Great Commission, testify of salvation, pray without ceasing for miracles, and boldly proclaiming the faith?

The early church did not war against culture. They warred against principalities and spiritual wickedness in high places. The early church didn’t need a perfect world to remain a church. They died daily and crucified their imperfect flesh to become a powerful and perfecting church in the midst of an imperfect world.

We see the history and the result of a church that is still existent to this day. And we want to replace history with story and a ‘growing church’ with ‘church growth’. All of this without realizing that the identity theft is taking place. It starts with removing the name of a denomination from a church name to ‘remove stereotypes’. Where will it end, removing the word Christian and calling yourself fellowship to ‘remove persecution’? We have allowed identity theft to take place within the church and it stole more than just our identity and our name.

Like what takes place within the financial realm of identity theft, it also stole power, authority, credit, and reputation. The person who is the unfortunate victim of identity theft within the financial realm has to go through a lengthy and painful process to attempt to restore the name, identity, power, authority, credit, and reputation to what it once was.

The church who is the willing participant of spiritual identity theft usually never repents and turns away from their deeds to get their name, identity, power, authority, credit, and reputation restored. Usually they try another ’scheme’ of pragmatics and get further sucked in the vortex, further seared in their conscience, and / or gets further ‘desperate’ for the program to work to the point of throwing more money and resources eventually going spiritually bankrupt.

And someone usually ‘bails them out’ to repeat the same mistake again……

Sounds like the US economy doesn’t it? And I am afraid that both the US economy and the seeker sensitive church may have to hit ‘rock bottom’ before change and reform can be made.