This Christian Life

New Breed of Church

This article touches on some points that I’ve been struggling with our church for a couple years now. It does a good job of outlining some of the major points I think many churches fall down on.

A church in my hometown, Mars Hill Bible Church, is leading the way to forge new ground in this area. I still question why God wants me at our church when I could be getting what I want at Mars Hill.

Turned off by the programmatic thinking and watered-down preaching of many boomer churches, a new generation of evangelicals is forging a new breed of church.

Younger evangelicals sensed they needed new ministry methods. “Pragmatic evangelical churches develop programs based on a target group and felt needs,” says Bill Clem, 48, a church planter with Doxa in Seattle, Wash. “This really means a church is at the mercy of trends for programming, and that there is an extreme urgency to be tragically hip.”

These pastors lament that commercialism and consumerism now dominate evangelicalism. It has become common, they say, for churches to engage in intensive marketing and targeting of people, in an attempt to act as vendors of religious goods and services, much like a Wal-Mart or Target. “We’re just peddling spiritual goods and services instead,” says The Gathering’s Mr. Wheeler.

“DOUBT NIGHT” AT MARS HILL Bible Church in Grandville, Mich., promises an evening of brutal honesty and searching. Rob Bell, the church’s 33-year-old teaching pastor, fields questions about anything related to Christianity and life.

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