Pursuing Holiness

About three weeks ago, I posted Saddleback Body Count, in which I accused Rick Warren of being deceitful about how Saddleback’s member count. I did so based on the article, Body Count Evangelism. Here’s a quote from that article:

Here’s something Warren wrote for the Mar. 16, 2004, “Leadership Journal”:

“Three key responsibilities of every pastor are to discern where (and how) God’s Spirit is moving in our culture and time, prepare your congregation for that movement, and cooperate with it to reach people Jesus died for. I call it ’surfing spiritual waves’ in The Purpose Driven Church, and it’s the reason Saddleback has grown to 23,500 on weekends in 24 years.. You don’t criticize a wave; you just ride it as best you can. When Mel Gibson showed me his film, The Passion of The Christ, last year, I.knew a huge wave-a spiritual tsunami-would hit when the film debuted on February 25 [2004], and we began praying and preparing to surf it.”

When I read this passage, I was taken aback. The celebrity name dropping, the appeal to size as an indication of God’s blessing, the propagation of an extra-biblical theory (”spiritual waves”) as a sign of God’s working, the pre-emptive strike against critics - these are heresies and logical fallacies pervasive in the evangelical church today, all rolled into a single paragraph.

That passage really got me on board and made me receptive to the accusations that followed. I’ve attended, and was on staff, a church whose membership roll was in the thousands. I’ve experienced those “spiritual waves” at several large churches, and like waves in the ocean, there is a lot of surface activity and very little depth. For new Christians, that’s fine; but eventually you have to go deep and I don’t think these mega-churches are well suited to that. That’s my opinion, which along with $3.50 will get you a cafe au lait and some beignets. I relay it only to show that because of my personal experiences at other churches I was already predisposed to think the worst of both Saddleback and Rick Warren.

I don’t like some of the things Warren has done in a number of areas, but this is not the time to detail those things, if there is ever an appropriate time.

Mark Kelly, News and Editorial Director for Saddleback Church, responded on A Rick Warren Blog:

When Pastor Rick said 3,000 new people started attending Saddleback because of the Passion outreach, he was talking about the period of time in which the outreach was being conducted. He was not claiming average attendance for the year increased by 3,000. If a Christian journalist thinks he sees a discrepancy between the numbers, why does he leap to the conclusion that we are lying, rather than bring the discrepancy to us and ask for clarification? Even an unsaved secular reporter would do that much. He also accused Pastor Rick of misstating numbers regarding how many Gen-Xers are on the church rolls. What he didn’t understand is that Rick was talking about how many young adults are at least occasional attenders, not how many are official members. While Saddleback has about 22,800 active members, it has more than 112,000 names in the category of “unchurched occasional attenders.”

To my way of thinking, if someone is only an unchurched occasional attender, they have no business being counted as part of a church roll. Hence the word “unchurched” in that sentence. But again, that’s my opinion, and I am not the arbiter of How Churches Shall Count. The ironic thing is that a commenter in my post, Shane of Shiftless Mind, offered basically the same explanation as Mark Kelly:

I don’t know if this is a possibility or not, but often there is a significant difference between “members” and “adherents”. Perhaps they had a drop in adherents but a gain in members. It is possible I suppose. Another possibility is that at the time he did the big Passion thing, the surge did happen, but it ebbed away before the end of the year.

I may disagree with their accounting methods for the Saddleback church roll, but I was way out of line for suggesting that Rick Warren was being deceitful. I have absolutely no evidence that he was. The bottom line here is that I tossed a post out there, having done no research on either the topic at hand or Warren Smith, the article’s writer. I regurgitated Smith’s opinion with a total lack of skepticism because it fit with my world view. That “fake but accurate” nonsense is something for which I have repeatedly, and justifiably, criticized the mainstream media. I’m sorry that I did it. Aside from the fact that it was hypocritical of me to do the very thing I’ve criticized others for, I failed to give the benefit of the doubt when I should have given it. There’s no excuse for it, and in the future I will be a great deal more cautious in what I write. For whatever it’s worth, I apologize.

[Update: I wrote "Mark Kelly, News and Editorial Director for Saddleback Church, responded on A Rick Warren Blog:" which was unclear. Mark Kelly was not responding to my post at PH, he was responding to Warren Smith's article. Sorry for the confusion...]

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written by Laura