Condescending and Disrespectful

"Seeker Friendly" Churches

Many Christians take very seriously our Lord's command to preach the Gospel to all the nations.  So seriously they risk making an idol of the responsibility, elevating it above all other duties and responsibilities equally given us by our God.

Reaching people for Christ can become more important than faithfulness to Him in all things.  One manifestation is the attempt to engineer public worship into being "seeker friendly".  The idea is that worship must be so organised and conducted that when a non-Christian enters, he or she immediately feels at home.  As much as possible, everything must be made to be familiar, ordinary, and usual.  The inevitable result is that the Word of God and the Gospel is dumbed down, and worship itself becomes profane--that is, simply a replication of life "outside the temple".


Marilynne Robinson reflects upon this shortsighted foolishness, arguing that it is found not just within the Church, but within modern culture and academia:

At a certain point I decided that everything I took from studying and reading anthropology, psychology, economics, cultural history, and so on did not square at all with my sense of things, and that the tendency of much of it was to posit or assume a human simplicity within a simple reality and to marginalize the sense of the sacred, the beautiful, everything in any way lofty.

I do not meant to suggest, and I underline this, that there was any sort of plot against religion, since religion in many instances abetted these tendencies and does still, not least by retreating from the cultivation and celebration of learning and of beauty, by dumbing down, as if people were less than God made them and in need of nothing so much as condescension.  Who among us wishes that songs we sing, the sermons we hear, were just a little dumber?  People today--television--video games--diminished things.  This is always the pretext. [Marilynne Robinson, When I Was A Child I Read Books (New York: Farrar, Staus and Giroux, 2012), p.5.]

Often the rationale for dumbing things down in the Church is precisely that pretext: we are reaching a generation raised on a steady diet of TV and video games and the internet.  People today have a lust for instant gratification: entertaining, high powered, intense, blood-racing excitement is the order of the day.  Therefore, let's keep Christian worship and activity short, sharp, racy, engaging, and exciting.  Only then will we have any hope of attracting Unbelievers into our circles.  How foolish--and condescendingly arrogant.

If we think we have done this voiding of content for the sake of other people, those whom we suspect God may have given a somewhat lesser brilliance than our won, we are presumptuous and also irreverent.  William Tyndale, who was burned at the stake for his translation of the Bible, who provided much of the most beautiful language in what is called by us the King James Bible, wrote, he said, in the language a plow-boy could understand. He wrote to the comprehension of the profoundly poor, those who would be, and would have lived among, the utterly unlettered.  And he created one of the undoubted masterpieces of the English language.

Now we seem to feel beauty is an affectation of some sort.  And this notion is as influential in the churches as it is anywhere.  The Bible, Christianity, should have inoculated us against this kind of disrespect for ourselves and one another.  Clearly it has not. 

Equally clear--from the example of Tyndale--is that there is a way to communicate the truth to others that is powerful, and beautiful, and sound.  Dumbing down God and His Word is not being "seeker friendly"--it is the exact opposite.