Topic #11: The Danger of “Emerging” Churches

A few months ago several front-page articles appeared describing the popularity in our area of emerging churches.  One noted that in the last 50 years, more Americans have stopped caring about church altogether, while others have opted out of traditional church attendance in favor of modern seeker churches in the hopes of reinventing a more relevant faith.One of the people interviewed labeled declining memberships and dissatisfaction with mainline denominations as a crisis in the Christian church.To be sure, the rising infatuation with seeker churches over the last 50 years should lead us to scrutinize the shift that has occurred in many of our mainline denominations. A little leaven leavens the whole lump. These changes did not occur overnight.  Like the frog in our 9th grade biology experiment that didn’t know it was being slowly put to death in boiling water, so many of our congregations have had the true gospel of the Bible replaced with the leaven of false teachings.

The eternal truths proclaimed to our grandparents have been substituted by bland messages so impotent they couldn’t stir the wind in a tornado. These diluted gospels produce no fruit to those under their teaching.

I believe there is quite literally an eternity of difference between the numerous false gospels being touted in many churches today and the true gospel of the Bible.

The true gospel produces fruit because it delivers the entire counsel of God. Today’s watered down gospels muddy God’s truth to such an alarming degree that it’s virtually absent from many congregations.

Unsaved members might just as well carry their tombstones around their necks because the messages they hear are dead ones incapable of leading anyone to salvation.

An important question for us today is how can we know whether we might be in a church – emerging or otherwise – that isn’t faithfully preaching the true gospel of the Bible?

Here are a few indicators I believe can be used for gauging a church’s spiritual health:

• Do the messages contain very low doses of Scripture with little or no application to life?
• Do you find yourself today at the same spiritual plateau you were at one, two or three years ago?
• Are the messages merely entertaining anecdotes that never seem to challenge you spiritually?
• Do the sermons only touch upon the topic of God’s love to the exclusion of other equally important biblical truths, such as sin, God’s judgment or anything that might in any way upset the congregation?

If the answer to these questions is no, then give thanks to God and extend some much needed encouragement to your pastor this Sunday for faithfully proclaiming God’s unchanging truth.

On the other hand, if the answers are yes to more than one of these questions, then you might be among an escalating number of people coming under the hearing of a diluted, innocuous gospel.

Don’t let milk and water gospels deceive you; bland gospels are deadly gospels.

Do you think the growing number of “emerging” churches poses a danger to sound biblical teaching? 

To God Be The Glory!