Have you noticed that in Junior High if the latest fad is an iPhone, the skinny jeans and Converse gym shoes, all the kids have to have it? Not long age the fad was for kids to dress like gang bangers with a hoodie and pants low enough to show your underwear. (I won’t say what the fads were when I was in school because if I do you’ll know I’m not young or hip.) For a few years I’ve thought that some parts of the Church are like that. For example look around and you’ll see that some preachers and church goers in certain various social groups will have on the same uniform. For men in one group the uniform is acid washed jeans, shirt tails out and the gel hair thing in another it’s suit and ties. We believe that to be relevant we need to look like the rest of the herd. In many cases that’s true because there are those in our society that judge a church by the cloths the preacher and parishioners wear.
But style of dress isn’t what concerns me most as far as fads are concerned what’s bothered me is people will ignore well known facts and their own well established principles in order to conform to what the latest fad books, trends, and speakers are saying. As bothered as I was I often kept quiet because I feared I was being over critical. Also, I know that there are two kinds of people in the world, those that get it and those that don’t and I guess I always feared I was a guy who didn’t get it. Who wants to be the guy who tells the Emperor he has no cloths?
Today I read Todd Wilkin’s article named “The Fad-Driven Church” and realized that maybe I do get it. It’s an in depth look at the good and bad of the fad driven church and it can be found here or an audio version can be found here.
Some excerpts:
“We live in an age of pious distractions. We live in an age of church fads. The fad-driven church has structured its life around the trends and innovations of the day. Christian publishers and the mega-church gurus are ready to provide something new as often as the masses demand it. But St. Paul encourages and warns the Church:
In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead; and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge: Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage – with great patience and careful instruction. For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.”
“I am always surprised by how uncritically churches accept a fad, how enthusiastically churches embrace a fad and how carelessly churches abandon a fad. That is why this article isn’t about the fads themselves, but about the kind of churches that accept, embrace and abandon fads.”
“The cycle begins with acceptance. The fad-driven church is practiced at this. Too close an examination of the fad at the outset might raise too many questions. ‘After all, this book is a best-seller!” “Thousands of churches are doing it, how can we go wrong?’ Accept first, examine later, if at all. This acceptance may come through the pastor’s active promotion or through grassroots popularity. Either way, the fad spreads like wildfire in the congregation.”
“Some advocates of church fads take the ‘Eat the meat, spit out the bones’ approach to false teaching. They claim that practicing discernment means spitting the ‘bones’ of error while eating the ‘meat’ of truth. There are several problems with this approach. First, it assumes that a church fad contains only isolated false teachings, like so many bones in a fish. But many church fads don’t just contain false teaching; they are based on false teaching… Second, the ‘bone spitting’ approach assumes that the errors of the latest church fad will be obvious to everyone. Often they are not. In the 2nd century, Irenaeus battled the fad of Gnosticism. He observed:
Error, indeed, is never set forth in its naked deformity, lest, being thus exposed, it should at once be detected. But it is craftily decked out in an attractive dress, so as, by its outward form, to make it appear to the inexperienced (ridiculous as the expression may seem) more true than the truth itself.
The “inexperienced” are still infants in the faith. Would you give an infant a fish to eat knowing that there were bones in it?
Finally, the “bone spitting” approach fails to recognize that a continuous stream of fads will erode the church’s ability to discern truth from error. With every new fad, the fad-driven church grows less able to recognize the truth. In time, the fad-driven church is unable to discern the true Gospel.”
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