I was having difficulty trying to work out how to take this passage and apply it. Fortunately, Alan Roebuck has written something at the Orthosphere that covers this. Now, before I get to the quote, I want to clarify. I see nothing wrong with franchise systems. McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Fitness centres etc take a system and leverage it — providing goods and services that are cheaper than if every town had to invent its own logistic system and training scheme.
But the church is not of this world, and business practices are: this has led to a dilution of the gospel.
Rick Warren’s vast work and influence are not easy to summarize, and the documentary correctly spends more time on him than any other individual. Warren, more than anyone else, has instigated and led a massively successful worldwide campaign to redefine (mostly Protestant) Christianity. In its place, Warren’s religious product offers, inwardly, self-esteem and self-improvement via Christian-sounding slogans and outwardly, a campaign of secular go-gooderism (fighting aids, poverty, “ignorance,” etc.) covered with a Christian veneer.
To implement his system, Warren has created and massively promoted what is in effect a “franchise” system for running outwardly successful Protestant churches. [“Outward” success meaning large numbers rather fidelity to the teachings of Christ and the Apostles.] The word “franchise” is appropriate because in a franchise, the owner of the business does not need to know very much either about general business practices or the product his business offers. The “Home Office” provides all of the information that the owner needs, and the owner / senior pastor only needs to be diligent in the application of a system that somebody else set up.
And in business, the customer is king. The heart of the “seeker-sensitive” church franchise method is to offer the religious customer just enough Christianity to attract him and keep him once he has made a commitment, but not so much Christianity that he is repelled by difficult or upsetting doctrines. Purpose-driven churches rarely mention sin, damnation, or the need for man to repent and have faith in Christ.
I want to compare this quote — Alan Roebuck is talking about how a businessman, Peter Drucker, influenced evangelicalism and tried to turn it into a franchise system — with Paul.
Paul was not pretending to have a system. Paul was not using the tools of rhetoric. Paul was saying what needed to be said and letting the spirit do the work.
13But we must always give thanks to God for you, brothers and sisters beloved by the Lord, because God chose you as the first fruits for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and through belief in the truth. 14For this purpose he called you through our proclamation of the good news, so that you may obtain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. 15So then, brothers and sisters, stand firm and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught by us, either by word of mouth or by our letter.
16Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and through grace gave us eternal comfort and good hope, 17comfort your hearts and strengthen them in every good work and word.
1Finally, brothers and sisters, pray for us, so that the word of the Lord may spread rapidly and be glorified everywhere, just as it is among you, 2and that we may be rescued from wicked and evil people; for not all have faith. 3But the Lord is faithful; he will strengthen you and guard you from the evil one. 4And we have confidence in the Lord concerning you, that you are doing and will go on doing the things that we command. 5May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ.
Well, you cannot have the gospel without discussing sin, for without sin there is no need for salvation and without the need for salvation the work of Christ becomes a nonsense. The church is not of this world, and it is not owned by this world. The church is not accountable to stakeholders or shareholders. It is accountable to Christ.
And if we lose the hard, difficult, uncomfortable, truthful basis of our faith, it dies, as Kristor described in a comment to this post.
It wasn’t just the Evangelical churches. My father was an Episcopal priest. Back in the early 70?s, he brought home some huge Drucker books that really impressed me (I still have a couple on my shelves). He and his friends – not just Anglicans, but a study group formed from all the denominations, including Orthodox and Catholic clergy – were reading Drucker, and had started to think in terms of results-based marketing, that measured things really possible and easy to measure. In other words, not catechetical adequacy or spiritual development, nor charitable works or evangelization (“outreach,” as Anglicans then began to call it), but attendance, collections, donations, planned gifts (bequests, gifts of life insurance policies, etc.), participation rates (in the various guilds and clubs), and that sort of thing. They looked up to Bob Schuller.
This was contemporaneous with the effort to make church “relevant to modern life,” so that it would have more sex appeal, and to make it less intellectually and morally demanding, and thus easier to market. It was then that all talk of sin, death, hell, miracles, the difficult bits of the Creed, or anything at all otherworldly or laborious vanished from the sermons. Everything in the Bible was interpreted in terms of “broken relationships” and “community.” It was also contemporaneous with the abandonment of ad orientem, the new Prayer Book and Hymnal, and the whole burlap and tambourine disaster.
By then I had already been exposed to the spooky old high religion, and this all struck me as a complete evisceration of the faith.
We have to deal with the hard parts of scripture. We are not allowed to spiritualize them or decide they do not matter: those are the errors of the Gnostics and the Cafeteria Christians. We need to deal with the hard reality of living for Christ.
This goes against our nature. Given a choice, I will be slothful and gluttonous lump of lard coveting many shiny things from the Internet. Other’s will spend their time gossiping on facebook or pinterest… etc. We all need to discipline ourselves to do good and not to fall into our individual besetting sins. God leads us through this — for by ourselves, we would stumble from acecis to indulgence.
And… we do not need to treat the church as some kind of corporate entity. Yes, we need accounts, and we need leaders with wisdom. But God brings the growth: be requires of us not a franchise but faithfulness.
