Introduction-

With the apparent success of the Saddleback Church (Lake Forest, California) and the Purpose Drive Life, its worth taking a look to see if the seeker friendly church (sensitive movement) approach is Biblically sound. The seeker friendly approach tries to avoid mentioning of sins and judgment that may turn people off. By only stressing the love and mercy of God, the approach seems to attract a large number of people who either join the Saddleback Church or bought Mr. Rick Warrens book, Purpose Drive Life.

Lets take a look at how Christ dealt with the issue. Christ never tried to attract or lure people to follow Him, in contrast, He was blatantly straightforward to them how to follow Him as shown in the following table.

After attracted a large crowd with the miracle of five bread and two fish, Jesus did not perform more miracles to attract more crowds, nor did He use the seeker friendly church (sensitive movement) approach to say what the crowd would like to hear. But instead, He told them bluntly, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last days (John 6:53, 54). Many of His disciples said, This is hard saying; who can understand it? and from that time, many of His disciples went back and walked with Him no more (John 6:60, 6:66). Jesus explained, saying Therefore I have said to you that no one can come to Me unless it has been granted to him by My Father (John 6:65). From this we can see that we should not be afraid of offending people with the contents of the Gospel (in contrary to the seeker friendly church (sensitive movement) approach). It is the Father who gives people to Christ (John 6:65) and it is the Holy Spirit that convicts people of sins (John 16:8-11). We are simply asked to convey the message across to them.

The Saddleback Church-

David Hocking of the radio program Hope for Today, admired the Saddleback Church and paid them a visit with his wife. After the service, they greeted the attendants at the door. To their surprise, out of thousands of people, only three brought their Bibles. Mr. Hocking inquired why the message of the worship lacked Biblical teachings and that most people dont bring their Bibles. He was told that the messages were deliberately planned not to offend people with the Biblical teaching. As we have shown in the previous section, we do not agree that one should compromise the teaching of the Bible in fear that we may offend people. Sadly, the failure of the seeker friendly (sensitive) approach is reflected by the small percentage of people at Saddleback who have interest in the Word of God.

Purpose Driven Life-

Similar to the approach of the Saddleback church, the book Purpose Drive Life tends to shy away from sins and the judgment of God, but emphasizes on Gods love and mercy. The adversative impact of this book on mature Christians who truly repented their sins and accepted Christ is not as big as on new believers. However, the book reaches out to Christians as well as the secular world alike. It is utterly dangerous to convey the message to would-be believers that one can be saved without confessing our sins and truly repenting. Jesus said that the gate to the Kingdom of heaven is a narrow one (Matthew 7:13), thus we should be careful about books that the secular world embraces and loves (best sellers). In contrast, Jesus said that we will be hated for His names sake, and that many will be offended (Matthew 24:9, 10). Even for mature believer, one should be careful in reading Purpose Drive Life, for the book is loaded with factual errors, misquotations, and verses that are taken out of contexts.

Conclusions-

The seeker friendly church (sensitive movement) approach tries to avoid mentioning of sins and judgment that may turn people off, hoping to attract more people. However, as proven in this article, this approach is simply unbiblical. Not only did Jesus stressed the importance of repentance, He talked freely of the judgment of hell. Jesus was straightforward to people about what it took to follow Him, and He was not afraid of turning people off, unlike the seeker friendly church (sensitive movement) approach. The biggest issue with the seeker friendly church (sensitive movement) approach is that it makes people believe that they can be saved without confessing and repentance of sins which can mislead people down the deadly path (Matthew 7:22). May God bless His own Word and have mercy on His people. Amen