When a man grows older, obstinance often increases. I suppose there are reasons for this. However, experience is a great teacher. Also, perhaps the accumulated knowledge one can build over time by simply having more time to read, see and think adds to certitude. This can be perceived by those with less experience as obstinance.
In the current ideological paradigm that holds sway in the minds of many millennials ‘lived experience’ is very important, often more important than knowledge gained through study and observation. Their PowerPoint slides, articles and mantras say ‘believe lived experiences’. Many of these folks accept this, as a rule, a form of Gnostic higher knowledge.
They do not apply the same template to the experience of older folks that synthesize knowledge from observation, fact, and what folks that came before learned. All of those ‘lived experiences’ are of much less value. There is irony in this duplicity.
This is not surprising, because most of this knowledge directly opposes the ideas of young folks held captive to a belief in secret knowledge obtained through empathy, feelings, and the stories of select groups (their mystics).
It is easy to take any human, examine their life and find the flaws and then compare those flaws to words and principles they may espouse later in life. “How can this old man believe he is speaking truth now if he did not always live truth”. This is a fair objection, unless and until one accepts that all humans are flawed, even those that would teach that empathy, feelings, and secret knowledge are superior to conventional wisdom. To dismiss such a person out of hand and the conventional wisdom they proclaim is to dismiss the lived experience that is so important to the ideology that infects so many millennials – it is a paradox they cannot resolve.
Another common objection is that folks that hold to conventional wisdom ‘always want to be right.’ This is a strawman argument, but let’s take it at face value. If someone is certain that a particular path leads to a cliff face, a fall, and death, and they say this to others, with great passion, can we accuse the speaker of ‘wanting to be right’ or is it perhaps more just to say ‘they firmly believe they are right based upon knowledge they have or believe they have.’ Clearly, the latter fits best if the speaker is operating from goodwill, honesty, and firm belief, the first claim is dismissive, and frankly intellectually dishonest.
I recant nothing I have said of the Drukerite megachurch movement. It was started for a very specific sociological goal, that goal was based upon a very flawed philosophy that denies the individual and turns the focus away from God and man to a notion of a god and community (not fully now, but that is where the philosophy points). Ultimately that last statement is true and will manifest as true more and more over time. The focus on being seeker-sensitive and embracing the world, combined with the idea of ultimately finding authority and truth in ‘conversations within community’ can only lead to predictable ends. Conventional wisdom and long-accepted doctrine tell us this is so.
This movement is a harlot, and ultimately, bit by bit will lead many into confusion, darkness, and servitude. I do not want to be right about this. I did not simply come up with this on my own. These are not merely my words and thoughts. There is a greater truth that tells us that this is so, revealed in the Word if one parses is it honestly, and articulated across the centuries by men that did just that as they shaped doctrines that opposed movements and ideas of this sort many times.
“For the time is coming when people will not endure sound [a] teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.” 2 Timothy 4 2-4
I recant none of it. I have great sadness that I did not always live in such a way that my voice could have been stronger and more relevant when it could have made a difference. I have great anger toward the people that walked for moments in my life that aided and abetted some that I love being captured by lies and deceit. My soul is pained that I am now and perhaps always will be powerless to help those I love to escape the grasp of these terrible errors.
I did not want to be right, I am obstinate, I am hard-headed, I do speak words plainly and directly when things are important, but I certainly did not want to be right about this – but I was.
With each passing day this world becomes less my home. I do not fit in. I have but the hope of my salvation, faith in my prayers for the discernment and wisdom of those I love, a responsibility to provide and protect those that will draw near and hear sound truth, and a knowledge that what happens in this physical existence is not always understandable by us, but God has a plan.
I have spoken truth to you insofar as I am capable, from the limited understanding I have. I have prayed for you and I will do so until I draw my last breath. In times that I failed you I apologize. In times I protected you that you do not yet understand I was honored. In the times that I was too direct or pointed in my words to you, I am sorry if my method caused you hurt or confusion. But I have said you only the truth as I know it, in love and concern.
“I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen.”
To the narcissist and manipulators that run these places (you false teachers, deceivers, and charlatans), most from my generation, I say to you that you should be shamed and rebuked publically. You must repent and change your ways, and cease pretending to be ‘spiritual leaders’. You know what you do is wrong, even the lies you tell others cannot still that quiet voice in your soul that screams otherwise.
“But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction. And many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed. And in their greed they will exploit you with false words. Their condemnation from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep.” 2 Peter 2 (ESV)
“But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction. And many shall follow their pernicious ways; by reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of. And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you: whose judgment now of a long time lingereth not, and their damnation slumbereth not.” 2 Peter 2 (KJV)
Be wary friends. Every church that calls itself Christian has errors, churches that were built on the Drukerite model are no different. The primary difference is the Druckerite churches have a refined methodology of control and indoctrination; they will embed the error in the very fabric of your being if you submit to them. They were designed for the ideological social change they have now made part of doctrine. Stay away.
I have written about the megachurch movement often. I have family members that attend one, therefore I tried to mute my words to some degree. However, I have been watching this movement since at least 2011. I sensed something was wrong about it from my first encounter. With each fact and observation, I have come to know that my original observation was correct.
How are they wrong you ask, in one important way they twist and pervert the scriptural meaning of the community of believers and keeping one another accountable into social control communitarianism, there are more but that is their first and primary form of error, it was intended by Drucker when he helped start the movement.
I hold two things to be undeniable at this point. 1) America is in the midst of a revolution and 2) the megachurch movement has had and is having some impact on making that possible. There are many other factors of course. However, what is happening and is about to happen would simply be impossible if there were not hundreds of thousands of middle-class Americans, and importantly their kids, sitting in communitarian churches. If that offends you or seems too far fetched I suggest you are simply not paying attention.
I spent a portion of yesterday drilling down into the social media accounts of a leader at one of these churches. I had seen the edges of the 'ally' movement but I had not looked closely. The individual in question is one of this church's 'middle-manager' leaders, they have led and shepherded others since they were a pre-teen (she is about 25 yo now). Here online actions are straight-up social justice warrior (SJW) tactics, the softer gentler sort.
find a conversation where one of her followers are "talking about the issues"
Subtly correct others when they misuse words
Call in (tag) black folks into conversations with folks that are not willing to give ground on the meanings of words - to shame them into seeing a different perspective
Shutting down conversations that are not going her way after calling for help and almost shaming fellow Christians
Actively engaging with and encouraging others that repost her narrative, especially those that include hashtags and "confess and repent"
That is all a kind and gentle version of a struggle session, it ends with people accepting new truth about definitions and confessing their 'sins'. All of this from a person a mega-church that I track has entrusted over and over to 'shepherd' others just a few years younger than her.
All the available evidence suggests she is not just a lone wolf - people like here never are. She is executing the will and intent of this church.
Yes, I have a problem with the megachurch, and it has nothing to do with worship style.
Summary of why I know this movement is a problem (very short version): The big brain (Peter Drucker) behind the megachurch movement was a man that grew up in Austria exposed to thinkers and philosophers of or influenced by a the branch of philosophy that gave the world nihilism, fascism, communism, nihilism, and socialism. In his own writing, he expressed his belief that mankind needed a new way, that both communism and capitalism were insufficient. His concept to achieve this was communities of communities, lead by a leader and who lead leaders, all following a plan. He believed the community was more important than the individual. He believed essentially that fascism went wrong when it failed to account for the spiritual.
After attempting to implement his plan in American industry through ‘plant communities’ he focused his efforts on the churches. Drucker was key in the formation and growth of the dominant organization that helps megachurches grow and provides templates and plans to megachurch pastors.
At the heart of all of this is the notion that the individual is less important than the community, that leaders must be followed, that the community must be served. (Read the full version here)
Many of those megachurches you see around all started in the mid-1990s yet they use the same lexicon and new words (intentional, relational, authentic) have the same sorts of services and the same vibe. This is because no matter what 'origin' story they publish on their website they all started with a few folks that attended some Leadership Conference events, bought the material and the mailing list and used the plan; Peter Drucker's plan. None of this is authentic no matter what they and the marketing material tell you.
Watch Chris Rosebrough's video (long but worth it) - open the PowerPont presentation here. This lays out the Druckerite foundations of the megachurch movement and its alignment with failed ideology.
The megachurches encouraged and nurtured by Drucker and the Leadership Network acquiesce to bad ideology. Social gospel has infiltrated all the mainline denominations. See Founder's Ministries presentation on Critical Theory.
Most that attend these sorts of churches have no idea of how deeply Marxist and communitarian ideology has entered their church - most Americans are not aware of the lexicon (do you know what intersectionality really means and where it comes from). Most of their sermons do not tell the whole story - the real focus of these churches is in the small group - that is where the real indoctrination and social control occurs - see the example of the communistista small group leader above.
Obviously, churches are not the primary cause of the cultural zeitgeist and the increase in ideological absurdity. Universities and schools have been usurped for years. Tucker Carlson did a recent piece on how this cult of communitarianism has become normal.
https://youtu.be/UcBeFM_267k
We, middle-class Americans, have made this possible. The notion that America, a land that has made more progress than any other nation at any other time, is simply wrong and evil is absurd. Every group that has arrived here, up until the late 20th century, has progressed and improved. Repeating a narrative continually that we oppress and commit genocide is wrong, it can only lead to division and hate. Building a communitarian organization that indoctrinates and controls the thoughts of it members and then peddling such nonsense is evil; it is not Christ-like.
https://youtu.be/OEvmmBYNE3k
Bad ideology has replaced faith and reason
The megachurch, in order to be relevant, cool and hip, is now fully bought into. I watched a video tonight of the senior pastor of the church the SJW communista mentioned above. He "preached" for almost 30 minutes without referencing the Bible. Finally, he referred to Ephesians 2:14-16 English Standard Version (ESV)
14 For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility 15 by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, 16 and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.
A church with leaders that are actively, and in coordination, promoting 'blackness' have significantly misread and misinterpreted this verse. Christ creates a new man among Christians, a new creation in Christ. Quoting this verse, while promoting divisiveness is hypocrisy. Twisting the notion of a new creation into the support of division is simply wrong. (preaching a sermon without really using the Bible is also the sign of a false teacher)
This from a Church that has been fairly silent on the issue of abortion, the sanctity of the family and other sins that are tearing the culture apart. Picking a sin that is 'relevant' to champion is error.
https://youtu.be/Ip3nV6S_fYU
Here is what a real preacher has to say about the issue from a Biblical point of view
America needs a new Great Awakening and it needs to begin with Christian Americans abandoning these social gospel 'churches' for real authentic Christian churches. Justice, love, and mercy will come to us through Christ - not Marxist communitarian social control.
If "big eva", mainline 'Christians', and the corporate megachurch had not plowed under the bulk of the Biblical message for a nebulous version of 'love they neighbor', the cultural war would never have been lost and the color revolution impossible.
I have written at length about the megachurch movement and why I am convinced it is so dangerous to authentic, organized Christianity. I have thrown about the word communitarianism as a pejorative. I have spoken of the importance of the community over the individual in what might be considered a very classical liberal way. So what gives?
Perhaps if you have read much of my writing you have noticed
that I call myself a paleoconservative. Surely you must say, if I truly am
such, I realize full-well that the Straussian neoconservatives and the
progressive liberals alike would likely make the same arguments. They argue
that the United States was founded on liberal principles, deep Lockean
principles that recognized natural rights.
Of course, I know such claims are at best complex and at
worst utterly false. The United States was founded on conservative principles,
and the US Constitution was perhaps only a compromise between a Hobbesian and
Lockean view. The states and their constitutions, the entities that really
mattered in 1788-89, were definitely conservative instruments. Rights were viewed
not as natural but derived from British tradition. In honest truth, no man in
nature has the right to anything he cannot defend. We know this is true but
like the philosophical position that this may not be true. But I digress, what
does this have to do with the megachurch you say.
I do not hold that the individual is supreme, that the
natural moral law and reason alone can suffice to inform a man of what is
right. As a true conservative, in the philosophical sense of the word, I know
full well that the experience of the ages and tradition combined with received knowledge
are the main ways that men come to know truth.
This then is the crux of what might appear divergent views within my own mind on the subject of the megachurch movement. I argue that their communalism diminishes the individual, and the authority structure they set up is potentially dangerous. It is not a traditional authority they prescribe but one of their own design. Yet, I am a man that believes that it was the local communal Reformed Protestant nature of America through most of its history that defined us. It was, from the perspective of many, a very illiberal history and circumstance, but it worked well. In short, I agree with communitarianism, just not the sort that Drucker and his ideology invented.
My main argument against the megachurch movement was that it
was built upon bad ideology deriving from bad philosophy. And, perhaps most
dangerously, they are built upon the premise that they must be relevant, they
have to offer something the people want, in order to get them in the door. It
is this reliance upon relevance, combined bad ideology that makes this movement
so dangerous to organized Christianity. The
megachurch movement and its churches will fail because the culture will drive
them eventually. I am opposed to submitting or seeing others submit to
community and authority built upon such a base.
But these churches identified some real problems and attempted
to solve them. They used, and sometimes, misused, techniques straight out of
America’s conservative tradition to get after the problem. The various
Protestant denominations in the US in the late 1980s were dying or dead, stale,
stuffy, feckless beasts. The pastors, boards of directors and initial groups of
elders that founded what would become megachurches were predominantly generation
X folks, they had sat in those stuffy pews, saw exactly how ineffective those
churches were and wanted something different. Many of these churches got their
start in the mid-late 1990s, this was just off the heels of the failure of the
Moral Majority and the exposure of many televangelist. It was a pretty bad time
in Christianity.
Peter Drucker offered a model to Bob Bufford and the Leadership Council. Early generation megachurches based mostly upon strong pastor personalities, such as Rick Warren’s Saddleback provided examples and lesson-learned. The Leadership Network supplied the template, and the disgruntled, dissatisfied upstart GEN Xers took it and built churches, everywhere.
They identified a problem, applied methodology and systems
to the problem and created solutions. It is hard to argue with that. Except for
the foundation, Drucker’s ideology, and his stated intent. His was a vision to fundamentally
change society, through building community in churches. The problem with
utopian ideas is just that, history generally has something to say about the frailty
of man’s ability to reason out complex social issues with brilliant solutions –
generally the best of such ideas fail the worst, sometimes with catastrophic
results.
History has taught us that the best way to move forward and
solve complex problems is by relying upon the experience of the ages, to fall
back on tradition, to fix what is broken rather than create something new, shiny
and brilliant. The innovators of my generation, GEN X, that abandoned traditional
career paths and forged ahead to build Amazon, Google, Facebook, and our
digital world would disagree with that statement, as too would those folks that
built started those future megachurches in the 1990s. But there is a difference
in building an online shopping mall and digital warehouse and redefining how to
‘do church”.
Success is something that is hard to argue with, yet success
does not make a thing optimal or even correct. Do we yet know the cost of Amazon
on society and our way of life? If
someday the only real purchasing option is online will that be better? We do
not know. We do know that sort of innovation was transformative and abandoned
tradition rather than refurbish old practices? Is the social media revolution
truly good for mankind? I suspect not in
total, but it is too soon to say. The point is, yes, those innovations have thus
far succeeded, but at what cost? And, again, technological innovation is not on
the same level as changing the church just because you can.
What will be the cost to the success of the megachurch
movement? What happens if it fails, now that so many formerly dying churches
have been drained?
As a Christian, Protestant, conservative, I applaud the efforts by the megachurch folks to bring back community. I wrote about this very need in Retrenchment: Christian Defense of Permanent Things. For the same reasons, I am opposed to the idea of building a new and shiny thing, particularly for something as important as faith, theology and religion – Christianity itself. The ‘community’ of a megachurch is too big for accountability – too big to be called community. The group is beyond one’s circle of influence and of concern. The pastor and the staff are too far removed to be knowable. How can you keep accountability of a man that teaches you the word if his congregation is so large that you most can never break bread with him, and few can do it regularly enough in a personal way to actually know him?
What should that entrepreneurial generation Xers have done in the mid-to-late 1990s? If I think the megachurch movement has gone all wrong what should have been done? I agree with them, all the major denominations had serious flaws and error. There was no real possibility of working inside of them to effect change, not in the short-term, not to change the whole thing.
They should have done the only thing a right-reasoned
conservative can do when faced with such a circumstance; retrench and
double-down. Buying into what Drucker
was selling, the Rick Warren-like model, was wrong and they should have
recognized it from the start. That they did not perhaps speaks to motivation, but
I cannot see into their hearts.
By retrenchment and doubling down I mean, in seeing the problem
that existed in the church, they should have focused on the local church. If
they saw it as dead an irrelevant, make it alive, while remaining true to what
came before. If they wanted to build community, they should have begun in the
local church. You do not have to move an entire denomination overnight to
change the world, you do it the proven conservative and rational way, in small
steps at home with people you know. The solution in 1990,1995 or 2000, when
these megachurches got their start, was not that complicated.
Yet, that is not the path the leaders and founders of these churches chose. They picked a model that allowed them glory from building something bright and shiny. It was hubris, arrogance and pride that told those 20-something-year-old idealists that they knew better than the centuries of doctrine, procedure, and creeds that proceeded them. A bold statement, but I stand beside it. A lot of harm can come from relying upon oneself to try to do good.
If you want to know why I have written so vigorously about
the megachurch, yes it is about what I have seen, things that are easily discernable
as fruit from the movement. However, it is also something else. Look to the
founding, look to Drucker’s own words concerning his intentions with The
Leadership Network. Ask yourself about the thought processes of the young men
that started these churches 25 or so years ago – why did they choose the
Drucker model instead of putting their heads down and getting to work on the
local church?
I suspect their egos wanted to build something.
“First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing, ask what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?”
I have made the extraordinary claim that the megachurch movement is dangerous, so where is my proof? I have talked about the origins of the bad ideology of the men that founded the organization that has helped almost every single megachurch form. I have talked about the dangers of manipulation and control and of a lack of accountability but what of proofs? I suggest that the frequency, brazenness, severity and egregious nature of sexual assaults and pedophilia in the megachurch is not run of the mill evil, it exists inside an organization that creates power differences and enables this behavior, by default, not design.
First to the inevitable counter-arguments:
‘mega’ means big, more people, and people are fallible, so of course, these things should happen more often in mega-churches.
This happens in ‘other’ megachurches, not mine, we have good people
This gets more publicity because it happens in a mega-church
To point #1, I agree, however, the stories below point to something different, not just the statistical variation of events that ought to be expected. Point #2 is naive, many parents that trusted their children to leaders that were later abused thought the same thing. Point #3 is perhaps true, I cannot argue against it, I only have the stories we can see and those are ugly.
I think that these cases of abuse in the megachurch are different precisely because the megachurch is different. It is based upon communitarianism, it has a language of control, it is designed to create obedience and submission of the individual to the collective and to the leaders of the collective. That sort of combination has proven to almost always be dangerous, throughout history. We could list the examples, but you already know this to be true. Since history has proven the danger, we can reasonably conclude that there is also a danger in the megachurch.
As I was researching and preparing to begin this series of articles, I watched a lot of megachurch sermons online. One subject I saw pop up across several churches was sermons on parental authority. Often these sermons represented parental authority as a pyramid, with more authority over say toddlers, relaxing over time toward the teenage years. Oddly enough, in the megachurch model, this is precisely the time when the church, through small-groups and small-group leaders begin to exert greater authority. Who one dates, where one wants to go to college, who one calls friends - all are subject to ‘conversations in community’. These conversations are mechanisms of control. If the teenager resists and goes their own way in these choices, they are said to have a ‘heart problem’ - another form of control, one that borders on serious error at that, for only God can know what is in another’s heart (Jeremiah 17:9-10, Acts 1:24, 1 Samuel 16:7 and many others)
‘Parent wounds’ is another subject that comes up. Sometimes in sermons in various megachurches that you can find online but more specifically in the context of small-group sessions. Here tweens and teenagers are encouraged to talk about how their parents have hurt them or disappointed them. I have been told stories of some that simply believe they have nothing to tell being pressured over several sessions to come up with something. This is another form of control and manipulation, all with the outward appearance of helping heal wounds. It reinforces that authority has passed from the parent to the community - the community and the leaders can help, they can be trusted.
What does this have to do with sexual abuse? Almost everything. Many of the examples of recent abuse occurred between adult pastors and leaders and children and teenagers between 11 and 18 years old. Right about the time the community was telling them that these youngsters have a different authority they need to trust and listen to.
Look, I am not suggesting that this goes on in every megachurch nor that every pastor or leader is out to prey on the vulnerable. I am saying that it does not make a lot of sense to hand one’s children over to a group that will tell your kids to trust the community and its leaders more than any other thing in their lives. It is dangerous to place a child in an environment where they talk about ‘wounds’, real or imagined, in one on one counseling sessions with a new authority figure.
Psychologists and counselors have known for years the danger of displaced emotions in vulnerable patients and a pastor friend of mine told me horrible stories that lead him to never counsel women alone. People are weak in such situations, vulnerable and act out or accept things they normally would not. The communitarian nature of the megachurch exacerbates this danger.
So what sort of abuse have we seen? (Search Google for Megachurch Sex Abuse to see a much more complete list)
I find the NewSpring cases interesting because I know some people that have attended there as I know the history of the church, after four incidents in three years, NewSpring Church denies responsibility. When I have returned to Powdersville to visit, the NewSpring campus is still full. This despite their former pastor and his board using church money to ensure his book made the New York Times bestseller list, him attempting to rewrite the 10 commandments and finally him having to resign for alcohol abuse.
Continued attendance is a case of cognitive dissonance. The organization is flawed, far beyond the individual people that acted poorly. The organization selected them, gave them access and accepted them. Changing leadership cannot fix deep foundational flaws. Yet, this is the sort of naivety that persist in many megachurches - blind trust because it is fun, exciting and everyone seems so good.
NewSpring, Willow Creek and Village are unique only because they are mega-megachurches and their pastors figured prominently in the movement. The error of Perry Noble was easier to spot because more people were looking. How many smaller megachurches out there, organizations that were built on the same model from the same organization, have similar problems? Problems not highlighted by high-profile discernment ministry guys keeping an eye on what is going on?
Dangerous? Yes, too much control, too much loyalty to the group, not enough accountability.
I have never joined a megachurch. I have attended a couple several times. I have eight family members that have joined one. Of those eight only one still attends. Of the seven that left, three attended long enough to make their departure ‘interesting’ – more on that below.
My personal experience consists of attending regularly, but never joining, a large Baptist church in the 90s. It was what I define as a phase two megachurch, it was still Baptist and it required a pastor with a strong and attractive personality to grow large. Even though it was an early stage megachurch, I could not buy-in and join it, it was off to me. They had gone in deep for the Purpose Driven dribble. (my ever-comical nephew termed this place the Repentagon because of the shape of the large building they constructed)
the 2000s
I attended the megachurch that most of my family joined when I was home on leave from the Army. It was in those visits and in observing and conversing with my family that had joined that I began to have deep suspicions. Lastly, in an effort to find a church in the town I retired to my wife and I visited the local megachurch a few times – until the parking lot incident that made my suspicions click in my head. That is my experience.
Now
I attend a small, quiet church – that is my style, but that is not why I write against the megachurch movement.
Why
Why do I write about the megachurch? I saw first hand the experiences of my eight family members, how it affected their relationships with others and their sense of self and self-esteem. I had a shouting match one evening with one of them that screamed literal heresy at me, something they had come to hold as truth from the megachurch. I have seen the leaders of both the churches my family attended (and attends in one case) manipulate family dynamics, create divisions (parent wounds*) and use the power of position the church provides for personal benefit.
*Focusing on parent wounds creates divisions in families and demonstrates that the small-group, church, and the leaders are capable of helping where parents have failed – trust your leaders! It is a tool to exert control over kids. One particularly egregious, and perhaps nefarious megachurch pastor used parent wounds to attack preachers with dead Christian mentors, subtle deeds not creeds attack (another megachurch tendency).
First Impression
Basically, it all smelled wrong to me the first time I walked in, but a lot of my family was there so I was open-minded; but I researched, questioned and observed. I watched their sermons online from afar, looked at what was going on in other megachurches and observed the changes in my family. Each time one of them left, I debriefed them extensively. The story they all told after leaving was vastly different than the narrative they portrayed while there.
Around 2011 or 2012 I sat with a friend of mine, an Army Chaplain and a Baptist pastor and asked him if I should be concerned with what I was seeing. I love my brother, I mean him no harm in this but he was absolutely wrong in his response to me. He suggested that the Christian church goes through a great change every 500 years and this seeker-sensitive megachurch stuff was alright. I did not know at the time, perhaps he did not know, that 500-year idea came from a heretic named Phyllis Tickle and the Emergent Church. Brother if you are reading this you were wrong, perhaps you were deceived like so many others have been.
Deception indeed.
4 And Jesus answered them, “See that no one leads you astray. 5 For many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and they will lead many astray.
Mathew 24
It is not my contention that all of the megachurches are evil and all pastors heretics. I do not argue that organized, denominational Christianity was not in a mess of its own making before this phenomenon began. I would not argue that the old way got things right.
I do contend, not just because I have witnessed it in some folks I love, but because I have looked around at the facts enough to now state as fact that the megachurch is more dangerous than any boring old baptist church from the 1980s ever could have or would have been. One was filled with apathy, the other perhaps increasing levels of apostasy.
Mine is not an argument about worship style nor music. I prefer one style but that is not my argument.
My argument is not about a conspiracy to take over the church. Not in the sense of an organized effort that reaches down into each and every megachurch. It is true there is a definite line from bad philosophy, to bad ideology, to people like Peter Drucker and the creation of a methodology that could be replicated franchise-style in the creation of megachurches**. However, because one can trace the bad ideas to their source is not the same as an organized conspiracy, do not confuse my argument for the former.
Conspiracies are not necessary, evil exists, and evil has been able to coordinate and combine its efforts. Deception is the primary weapon of evil. I am convinced the megachurch model Peter Drucker codified and has been replicated across America is dangerous, far more dangerous than the apathy it was created to replace.
Wondering who the heck Peter Drucker is and why he matters to this argument? Look hereor better yet here, Resistance is Futile.
If you argue that my observation, my dataset is too limited and all independent megachurches are different and ‘independent’. I would ask you this. How did all those independent churches just spontaneously generate in the late 1990s and 2000s and yet have so much in common if they do not share some core methodology and techniques for formation? They claim to be relevant, different and cool, but there are some stunning similarities.
Their ‘starting out’ story is a little less original and less authentic than is oft-repeated.
And, certainly, not all have slipped into outright apostasy or heresy, but some big names among them certainly have and that is undeniable. Those big names came from the same methodological mold as the others, all from Druker’s model. All churches have some error, and megachurches should be no different – but; Sovereign Grace Church, Bethel, Perry Noble, Mark Driscoll, Steven Furtick and more than I care to name (all tied to the Leadership Network) seem to add evidence that pastors with too much control and not enough accountability are dangerous.
Surrendering to the community is dangerous. Reviving a rebranded form of shepherding (something recognized as apostasy years ago) is dangerous. Focusing on the emotion of religion instead of a deep understanding of theology is dangerous. Forcing loyalty through oaths, (membership covenants) that say you will follow the leaders of the Church and not speak out against the vision of the leaders is dangerous. Placing ‘service’ at the level of Justification, as a part of salvation, is a revival of the works heresy, a variation of Pelagianism – instead of, well Grace alone. Preaching from a weak translation of the Bible that is best used as a supplemental study guide. Preachers that work themselves into every sermon, because, relevant. Topically preaching ‘relevant’ stuff. The introduction of strange, and biblically absent words into all conversations (intentional, relational, authentic, etc.) – all dangerous and troubling.
All the phase three megachurches out there may not have slipped as far into heresy as Bethel, but they all do the things I just described.
The Shunning
I mentioned above that of my seven family members that left a megachurch, three had attended long enough to be invested deeply. When they left I observed a strange sort of fear and shame. For instance, they became physically and observably scared when in the presence, even if just in the same restaurant, with a member of the church. I discuss all of that in more detail in my associated posts, however, this realization and observation was enough to make me know that some of the other things I suspected were correct from the start.
My Assessment
When I combine the social control and manipulation techniques I have observed, with the heresy I have observed (justification by works, instead by Grace alone) and combine that with the publically available facts that lay out the map of the ideas that gave birth to this whole thing – my initial suspicions ten or so years ago make a lot of sense.
** I want to be super clear that I am not implying, nor do I believe most of the folks that have used the “Drucker Megachurch Franchise” template had ill intentions. Most of the folks that started these churches were GEN Xers, and we GEN Xers grew into adulthood with a lot of distrust of the things that were around us. Those of us that grew up in church saw a stale, ineffective church. We knew the Sunday talk and the weekly walk of many people.
I grew up in a very typical place that describes that. I was raised in Powedersville, near Greenville SC. As typical of the Southern Baptist Bible belt as you can get. I saw all the things that likely frustrated those that followed the Drucker plan.
I also do not believe the folks working in these churches as underling leaders have ill intentions, or at least they did not start out that way. There is however something corrupting when you place an ordinary man in a position of extreme power over others, young impressionable folks, and give him a soap-box to repeat the myth of himself that develops from that power. I have witnessed such people abuse their power in subtle ways.
These people did not mean evil, not all of them do overt evil and there are good things that derive from these churches. Most have zero understanding of the flawed philosophy that this movement came from and many of the underling leaders and junior pastors are not even formally trained in theology to equip them to recognize error.
On the whole, it was all a mistake, it has morphed into something very dangerous and it is, in my observed opinion, the single greatest existential threat to organized Christianity in America.
When you think of visiting one of these places, keep looking, find a Bible-believing place without all the communitarian trappings, apostasy and error.
_______________________________________
Follow me on Twitter if you want to learn more about this subject or to tell me I am wrong @onlyBarryLClark or take a gander at the tag for all post related to the Megachurch
Disclaimer I cannot and will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen.https://t.co/zvZRkK2G6V#Conservatism#Rightist
I recently have been laying out some of the history, philosophy and personalities that are central to or played a key role in giving birth to the megachurch movement. I think it is appropriate to define the term ‘megachurch’ so that there is not any confusion in my use of the word. After all, if someone is going to claim and provide evidence that there is a problem with something, that person should be, in megachurch newspeak, get ‘real clear, and be intentional and authentic’ in the word usage.
Some might say, well Jesus started the first megachurch of course when he preached the Sermon on the Mount. They had the first-century version of the coffee shop in the lobby even with loaves of bread and fish. Of course, that was a sermon, not a congregation nor a church. It dispersed after the event.
Some will say there have been big churches before, even in the 1800s there were examples of some US churches with thousands of congregants. This is true. Those were anomalies and certainly not part of a movement. They happened in some places for independent reasons. When I speak of the megachurch I am not talking about things that have occurred seldom and independently because of that church’s unique set of circumstances.
What Do I Mean by Megachurch?
My definition of the megachurch movement is churches formed and organized upon the corporate business-model way of ‘doing church’ espoused by Peter Drucker beginning in the 1990s and promulgated by The Leadership Network and others.
Deniers
Members of megachurches and underling leaders in such churches will likely and invariably deny that any of this definition could be true – they have never heard of Peter Drucker after all. Besides, their church is independent! Nevermind that they share very similar techniques and styles to all the other ‘independent’ megachurches and they all started ‘spontaneously generating’ around the same time. There is nothing to deny. Christianity Today, Forbes and several national newspapers ran articles throughout the 1990s and 2000s talking about Drucker and his work with megachurches, megachurch pastors and The Leadership Network. The Leadership Network, an organization that every megachurch senior pastor has had interaction with claims proudly that they would not exist without Drucker. There is nothing to deny, it is public record.
The megachurch movement has gone through three phases:
Organic, Cult of Personality Phase
Robert Schuller and his Crystal Cathedral, certainly a mega-church in terms of size, was more of an inspiration for rather than part of the megachurch movement. Schuller grew his congregation by offering sermons that his audience wanted, therapeutic, self-help theology in a cool new format, drive up to the church, at the start. Schuller was not the sole inspiration, but he is representative of the examples in the early 199os. These generated questions in the minds of men like Rick Warren and Peter Drucker and brought them together. As I laid out in The Problem with the Megachurch, Drucker had a vision for creating communities of communities as a way to solve societal and economic programs and by the 1990s he had turned his focus to churches as a means to achieve this.
Drucker, often called the father of modern management, undoubtedly realized two facts related to the examples of Bakker, Swaggert, Schuller, and others. First, much of their success was based upon individual charisma and personality. Second, they gave their audience what they wanted – in the first case emotion, in the second validation – bu no matter the product served, it was what people wanted to buy. Those were the elements of the mega-church examples Drucker wanted to emulate. He needed a methodology and techniques that eliminated the need for the personality factor.
Drucker’s 1984 novel The Last of All Possible Worlds And, The Temptation to Do Good finds a young man conversing with his priest about his decision to enter business with his father instead of the church. The priest is left to wonder if management techniques might not be exactly what the church needs.
His books The New Realities: in Government and Politics, in Economics and Business, in Society and World View (1989) followed by Managing the Nonprofit Organization: Practices and Principles (1990) set the initial parameters for how he saw nonprofits and specifically churches changing society.
In 1984, Bob Buford, Fred Smith, Jr. and Gayle Carpenter started Leadership Network as a way of trying to help the newly emerging wave of pastors who were breaking worship attendance barriers of 1,000 and sometimes 2,000 or more. During his business years, Buford had spent countless hours talking with and seeking guidance from Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, and he now tapped into Drucker’s guidance for how best to frame Leadership Network. He later remarked that Leadership Network would not be the same—in fact, might not exist at all—were it not for Peter Drucker. (Buford later developed that 23-year mentoring relationship into a book, Drucker and Me.)
Leadership Network started in 1984 with a budget of $5,000, and held its first forum with 55 churches that had attendance of 800 and higher. By 2017 the organization was annually serving more than 400 larger churches through in-person events which included more than 1,500 leaders. Online conferences reached upwards of 25,000, and Leadership Network Advance subscriptions exceeded 50,000. (LN)
Before Bob Buford and Fred Smith Jr. co-founded Leadership Network, Buford consulted Drucker for advice. As a testimony to Drucker’s profound influence on Leadership Network, Buford has observed, “Peter Drucker is the ‘intellectual father’ of most all that guides my approach to philanthropy. I’ve long since ceased trying to determine what thoughts are mine and which come from Peter.”
In 1997, Atlantic Monthly magazine editor Jack Beatty interviewed Buford for two hours for a book titled, The World According to Peter Drucker. The entire volume contained only six words from Buford: “He’s the brains, I’m the legs.”
Leadership Network would not be the same–in fact, might not exist at all -were it not for Peter Drucker – their words (LN)
Baptist Model Phase
Rick Warren was an early disciple and partner of Petter Drucker. His Purpose Driven Church in 1995 introduced terminology, in proto-form, that became megachurch newspeak. The entire SBC was adversely affected by Warren, in ways some only began to realize at the SBC convention in 2019. SBC churches, large and small became to some degree megachurch minded, Sunday school classes followed various 40-day programs. Some churches grew and literally became ‘mega’, others just served to place mega ideas in future megachurch congregants.
Many of the Baptist megachurches began dumping the word Baptist from their name. Many Baptist pastors participated in and participate in Leadership Network activities. However, in the final analysis, the megachurch model within the framework of the Baptist denomination still requires a strong pastoral personality. Baptists still vote on elders and deacons. In order to execute Druker’s Leadership Principle in a Baptist church, the pastor has to be a strong, dynamic and attractive personality.
Hipster Phase
A good methodology is replicable across a spectrum of problems, independent of the people involved. Drucker’s vision for an improved society consisting of communities of communities could not heavily rely on strong personalities to repeat. The Leadership Network, by capturing successful lessons-learned, tactics and techniques and making resources available to aspiring megachurches and megachurch pastors created such a methodology.
No longer is a strong central personality required. The ‘cumbersome’ barriers to ‘doing church’ such as voting on elders and the board are eliminated in the new model. A decently charismatic leader, supporting by a closely selected board and an ethos throughout the organization to follow the leadership plan will do just fine.
In the third phase of the megachurch, an operation can be started from scratch, using the template and the methodology developed by Druckerite organizations – using methods that are proven to work. Just like a franchise.
Many megachurches, now with thousands of members, began with a small core, a core that is still often heavily represented on the small hand-selected board. The methodology does not require a rock-star senior pastor, it only requires a guy that is capable enough to act like one. Many claim to not even have a senior pastor, just a self-selecting board of elders and a ‘main pastor’. It does not require a board of world-changers and innovators, just a few folks smart enough to implement a proven methodology. It is basically a turn-key franchise. You only need a little bit of money to start it, for the mailing list. A couple of people with adequate social intelligence and personal appeal to build some momentum and access to the template. It only requires a few leaders that can be ‘cool and authentic’ by following a plan and copying others – ironic. It also requires a lot of followers that buy into the cool act and fail to see that their independent, unique, authentic megachurch is really a lot like all the others.
In short, the megachurch movement is very much a franchise.
** I want to be super clear that I am not implying, nor do I believe most of the folks that have used the “Drucker Megachurch Franchise” template had ill intentions. Most of the folks that started these churches were GEN Xers, and we GEN Xers grew into adulthood with a lot of distrust of the things that were around us. Those of us that grew up in church saw a stale, ineffective church. We knew the Sunday talk and the weekly walk of many people.
I grew up in a very typical place that describes that. I was raised in Powedersville, near Greenville SC. As typical of the Southern Baptist Bible belt as you can get. I saw all the things that likely frustrated those that followed the Drucker plan.
I also do not believe the folks working in these churches as underling leaders have ill intentions, or at least they did not start out that way. There is however something corrupting when you place an ordinary man in a position of extreme power over others, young impressionable folks, and give him a soap-box to repeat the myth of himself that develops from that power. I have witnessed such people, abuse their power in subtle ways.
These people did not mean evil, not all of them do overt evil and there are good things that derive from these churches. Most have zero understanding of the flawed philosophy that this movement came from and many of the underling leaders are not even formally trained in theology to recognize error.
On the whole, it was all a mistake, it has morphed into something very dangerous and it is, in my observed opinion, the single greatest existential threat to organized Christianity in America.
When you think of visiting one of these places, keep looking, find a Bible-believing place without all the communitarian trappings, apostasy and error.
_______________________________________
Follow me on Twitter if you want to learn more about this subject or to tell me I am wrong @onlyBarryLClark or take a gander at the tag for all post related to the Megachurch
** I want to be super clear that I am not implying, nor do I believe most of the folks that have used the “Drucker Megachurch Franchise” template had ill intentions. Most of the folks that started these churches were GEN Xers, and we GEN Xers grew into adulthood with a lot of distrust of the things that were around us. Those of us that grew up in church saw a stale, ineffective church. We knew the Sunday talk and the weekly walk of many people.
I grew up in a very typical place that describes that. I was raised in Powedersville, near Greenville SC. As typical of the Southern Baptist Bible belt as you can get. I saw all the things that likely frustrated those that followed the Drucker plan.
I also do not believe the folks working in these churches as underling leaders have ill intentions, or at least they did not start out that way. There is however something corrupting when you place an ordinary man in a position of extreme power over others, young impressionable folks, and give him a soap-box to repeat the myth of himself that develops from that power. I have witnessed such people, abuse their power in subtle ways.
These people did not mean evil, not all of them do overt evil and there are good things that derive from these churches. Most have zero understanding of the flawed philosophy that this movement came from and many of the underling leaders are not even formally trained in theology to recognize error.
On the whole, it was all a mistake, it has morphed into something very dangerous and it is, in my observed opinion, the single greatest existential threat to organized Christianity in America.
When you think of visiting one of these places, keep looking, find a Bible-believing place without all the communitarian trappings, apostasy and error.
_______________________________________
Follow me on Twitter if you want to learn more about this subject or to tell me I am wrong @onlyBarryLClark or take a gander at the tag for all post related to the Megachurch
I have, intermittently and occasionally, made references, usually as half-serious jabs, about the seeker-sensitive megachurch movement. It is, however, not a simple joke. There are many absurd aspects to the entire movement, and oftentimes one can only but laugh at absurdity. That notwithstanding, this is all dangerous.
First a caveat. I will not suggest that the megachurch movement all by itself is the thing that will destroy organized Christianity in the US. The Protestant denominations were doing a fine job of that themselves. The Presbyterians and the Methodist succumbed to liberal theology and social gospel a long time ago, recent splits within the Presbyterian church and the inevitable Methodist split notwithstanding. The Baptist recovered solid theology in the conservative reformation of the 70s and 80s but error began to slip back in with pop authors and strange 40-day programs. Attendance in all of those churches was falling, by the 1990s they seemed to be dying, stale and irrelevant.
I am not here to argue that the old way is The Way because it was the old way. I understand how the American church and worship styles changed in the major Awakenings. I may personally prefer liturgy, solemnity old hymns and order but that is just personal. My argument against the megachurch movement is not based upon the style of worship I prefer.
Summary (very short version): The big brain (Peter Drucker) behind the megachurch movement was a man that grew up in Austria exposed to thinkers and philosophers of or influenced by a branch of philosophy that gave the world nihilism, fascism, communism, nihilism, and socialism. In his own writing, he expressed his belief that mankind needed a new way, that both communism and capitalism were insufficient. His concept to achieve this was communities of communities, led by a leader and who lead leaders, all following a plan. He believed the community was more important than the individual. He believed essentially that fascism went wrong when it failed to account for the spiritual.
After attempting to implement his plan in American industry through ‘plant communities’ he focused his efforts on the churches. Drucker was key in the formation and growth of the dominant organization that helps megachurches grow and provides templates and plans to megachurch pastors.
At the heart of all of this is the notion that the individual is less important than the community, that leaders must be followed, that the community must be served.
Fascist you say?
The ‘F’ word is a bit overused in our common dialogue. It often is just a word applied to anyone else that tells someone they cannot do what they want or perhaps an insult applied to a conservative on Twitter. It is overused, and that is a shame, because The Third Way, fascism is a real ideology. People will argue that Drucker wrote a critique of the Nazis in 1936 before leaving Austria and that his website states he was neither a fascist nor a Nazi. I would agree that Drucker thought both the Italian Fascist and German Nazis got it all wrong and that because of the stigma attached to the word Drucker would never claim or want to be labeled as a Fascist. This, however, does not change the fact that his ideas, particularly about the leader model, the individual, and community and societal order were close to fascist thinking. He grew up in a connected home, his father had as dinner guest the same intellectuals that the fascist looked to. He read the same foundational philosophers and agreed with their thoughts. Drucker was certainly of the same intellectual cloth as the original fascist thinkers. That this is a true statement no more makes him a Nazi or aligns him with what the Germans and Italians did to the ideology than to claim that Bernie Sanders, a socialist, should be directly associated with Stalin’s purges. To point out the ideological foundation of Drucker’s thought as he conceived of the megachurch method is simply to honestly assess the source of the ideas.
Perhaps Drucker, seeing flaws in capitalism and communism and the flaws in how fascism was implemented in Europe, while still holding to the core ideas that formed fascism, sought a Fourth Way. An improved and rebranded fascism that included the spiritual. His very words hint at that without using the ‘F’ word.
Proof in the Pudding
Since we overuse fascism, and we have become so skeptical of ideas and information that contradicts what we have come to believe as knowledge, I suggest the following. Look directly at how the megachurches behave and are organized. Despite the independence of them all, they are fascinatingly similar in several areas. They are similar because they share the techniques and methods passed along by The Leadership Network, the organization Drucker so influenced.
Leader Driven: Drucker called these ‘pastoral churches’, he argued that the main pastor should be more of a leader than a minister. He called this the Leadership Principle, but it has much in common with the fuhrer principle from Germany - a central leader that casts the vision and layers of subordinate leaders that manage, execute and get the people to act. As ‘independent’ churches most megachurches are ultimately accountable to only themselves - in practical application, this means the senior pastor and his small specially selected and appointed board.
There is much less transparency in the megachurch than most traditional denominations. The congregation does not vote on big issues or on the leadership. Accounting and finances are generally presented in much less detail. Many megachurch members have never met their senior pastor, he is certainly not a minister to them.
The leader principle extends all the way to the personal (relational in MC speak) level from senior pastor to satellite pastors to community pastors and finally small-group leaders.
It sounds like solid organizational design and nothing more you say. I mean, after all, Drucker was called the ‘father of modern management” you would expect such in an organization he helped shape, no harm there, right? Maybe.
Community: The small-group forms the basis of the organization. All major decisions of the individual should be taken to the small-group. Megachurches teach that it is a sin of pride to take on major decisions outside of community. The small-group is the central feature of the megachurch, not the individual. All movement, progress, and momentum begins in the small-group. People share their dark secrets and confession to their small-group, items that are often used as subtle tools of control when necessary. Participation in the small-group is a foundational requirement.
Community is above family in the megachurch, the family is subordinate to the community just as the individual. That is unless you are in the inner circle. The children’s and teenager’s small-groups feature youngster ‘leaders’ leading kids through discussions of ‘parent wounds’, demonstrating that the group has answers and help where the family fails. Husbands and wives are not immune to meddling in their marital business.
Those that leave the megachurch seldom say anything publicly that is bad about their former church, and many exhibit an irrational level of fear and anxiety when they come into contact with their former leaders. There is a degree of social control present that is difficult to articulate, but easy to observe when you look.
Service: In the megachurch service, oftentimes service done for the church itself, not directly for that outside, comes near to a doctrinal position. I have heard megachurch people claim in anger than an old grandma that lived a faithful Christian life could not be a Christian because she does not ‘serve’. This phenomenon is close to if it has not already become, heresy.
Oaths: One does not simply join a megachurch, you sign a contract, a membership covenant. All of them contain variations of the following (just two sections from a random contract):
Unity
Guard my tongue from destructive criticism and gossip, submit to the discipline of the church elders and appointed leaders, and work for the good of all members.
Participation
Regularly participate in the life of […] Church by attending weekly worship services, engage in biblical community, and serve those within and outside the church.
Members sign this, and sometimes the church requires members to sign again at random intervals, for reasons. On the face of it these seem like commonsensical items. Preachers have admonished congregants for gossiping for years. Of course, a person ought to participate. However, the meanings of this covenant, as evidenced by how the megachurch interprets their meanings are very different than innocent words.
Don’t agree with a plan or a program? Shut up or get disciplined for not working in community to follow God’s plan.
Refuse to date the right person, make the ‘right’ life choices or live in community, then you agree to face discipline from folks you did not elect.
Refuse to ‘serve’, in community? See above, you agree to face discipline.
NewSpeak: Megachurches have almost universally adopted terms that are routinely peppered into almost every sentence and conversation. ‘Intentional’, ‘relational’, ‘authentic’, and others. These terms, what folks schooled in megachurch theology would claim are extracted Biblical concepts, because the words certainly do not exist in any accurate translation of the Bible. Most megachurch members can explain these terms much more fluently than theological concepts. This is all very disturbing and perhaps dangerous. It seems a form of language control. At the very least it demonstrates the theological weakness of the megachurch teaching method. At worst, it is a form of language conformity.
Finally,
The Parking Lot: If you are unconvinced with the subtle ties to fascism in the megachurch go visit one and attempt to just willy-nilly go park where you want. You will find a group of men, those too old to ‘serve’ inside anymore lined up to tell you exactly where to go and park from the moment you turn off the public road. Yes, I get it, the mega in megachurch means a lot of people. Sure, this seems efficient, got it. Hitler made the trains run on time too - I do not want to take the analogy too far, but fascism is designed for efficiency and compliance. There is more to the parking lot than even the parking lot guys understand.
The Bottom-line. I am not saying megachurch pastors are evil or have bad intent, not on the whole. I am not suggesting their small board meetings are conducted in dark rooms with nefarious intentions. I am suggesting that at the root of the ideology and methodology there exists the elements of bad philosophy, bad philosophy that has in other cases gone very wrong. Group-think, language conformity, oaths, control, lack of transparency combined with shallow topic theology is not Biblical Christianity.
The megachurch was born of Continental philosophical anti-rationalism. In the megachurch this translates into:
Anti-Doctrinalism (theologically shallow)
Deeds NOT Creeds (service sneaks in here as a form of Justification)
Head knowledge vs. Heart Knowledge (emotion based, feeling it instead of knowing it; entertainment)
Unity of the Faith Community (community over the individual and families)
Peter Drucker, essentially the key founder of the megachurch movement, grew up exposed to the great thinkers of the German school (Continental Philosophy) during his youth in Austria. In his own writing, he expressed a view that community was more important than the individual (Neoplatonism) and an affinity for Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard. He expressed ideas about the failures of capitalism and communism and suggested a third way, in words that echoed that of Italian Fascist Giovanni Gentile. The creation of a new “noneconomic society” was Drucker’s lifelong project. His life’s work was focused on finding a way to build community structures, focused on the common good that could change society. Part of his plan was based upon the leadership principle, taken from the German model of the fuhrer principle, one leader cast the vision and subordinate leaders ensure the community executes it. Essentially Drucker found both capitalism and socialism to be flawed, they could not solve poverty. He thought Fascism had gone wrong because it ignored the spiritual. He believed a noneconomic system built upon communities within communities accountable to a leader who was accountable to a leader was the answer, an improved version of Fascism.
Drucker tried to implement his ideas in industry in America. He is perhaps most famous for being the creator of modern management. He found that factories were insufficient to implement his community of communities plan as people simply moved too often.
In 1990 he wrote Managing the Nonprofit Organization: Practices and Principles and changed his focus from business to nonprofits, specifically churches and more specifically what he called pastoral churches. In a Forbes interview in the ’90s, he said, "The community … needs a community center. … I'm not talking religion now, I'm talking society. There is no other institution in the American community that could be the center." he told Forbes that pastoral megachurches are "surely the most important social phenomenon in American society in the last thirty years." Drucker advised “you must change the primary role of pastor from minister to leader”, harkening back to the leadership (fuhrer) principle. (Rosebrough)
The Leadership Network, an organization that claims to mentor thousands of pastors and hundreds of churches states on their website, “Leadership Network would not be the same–in fact, might not exist at all - were it not for Peter Drucker”. (Network, 2005) A quick search of their site, conference attendees and participants demonstrates it is difficult to find any randomly selected megachurch pastor that has not participated in some way. (Steinfels, 2005) The corporate, business model of ‘doing church’ was created by Peter Drucker, because he saw it as a way to implement his vision.
The next time your megachurch pastor or one of his underlings relays the story of how it all started with just a handful in someone’s house or a bar, remember Drucker. A few of them probably did start it, and maybe they met in a bar or a house, but it was much more like a board meeting than a very small church hoping to grow to thousands in a few years. That little groups read Drucker, participated in The Leadership Network, did market research and bought a mailing list. It was a lot less authentic, much more programmatic and planned than the organic story people recall so fondly.
So, what of these churches that the Drukerites have helped build, what are they really all about. Firstly, they are anti-rational, emotional rather than reasoned. Heart-knowledge over head-knowledge. Deeds over creeds. There is no messy theology or doctrine to scare you away or confuse, two thousand years of Christian thought and writing out the window. Secondly, but perhaps most importantly, it is about the collective, not you. Everything is done in community, decisions, confession, service, discipline. Everything follows the plan, the plan from the guy on the big screen you probably have never met.
Community, service to the community, a leadership plan and everyone on board with the plan. For many it begins in the parking lot during a visit, there are people there to tell you exactly where to park - getting people on board with the plan early in the experience. If you join you will be assigned to a small group, so will your kids. The small group is where small furhers help ensure the plan and the community are taken care of. Your small group is, of course, a member of a larger community, the satellite campus, with another underling leader. You see your main leader on the large screen but he never minsters to anyone, most never meet him. To join, you were probably required to sign a membership covenant, one that says you will submit to disciple and follow the leaders. Major life choices must be brought to the community. Your children will be pulled away from you as they are forced to talk about ‘parent wound’ in their small group to their leader that is barely past being a kid themselves. The family is an impediment to the collective, it will be praised and talked about but in reality, it is subordinate. You may come to believe that service to the community somehow relates to your salvation. You will notice that everyone speaks in code, peppering sentences with authentic, intentional and relational, and of course community. Basically, once you join you become part of the collective and give up being part of yourself.
If you leave the church, you will be shamed and ostracized. Most that leave never say anything bad publicly about the church or their experience. The community still has a hold and still instills fear of shunning on them.
None of that meshes very well with authentic, orthodox, genuine Christianity and that is because it does not. Very little of what megachurches focus most of their efforts on is biblical Christianity. This is not to say that many Christians do not attend these churches, nor that the leaders did not have good intentions when they started out. However, power corrupts, and the power from a community focused on the community, with leaders accountable to nobody is pretty intoxicating. In the last few years some notable megachurch leaders have fallen, and some entire churches of thousands have collapsed overnight.
In some cases, megachurches have slipped into outright and atrocious heresy. The December 2019 Bethel, raise Olive from the dead tragedy comes to mind. Oddly enough, even after outright heresy and apostasies like that groups like The Gospel Coalition, the 9s, 9Mark and the Leadership Network fail to disavow them. Every megachurch still associated with the Drukerites is guilty by association with that tragic heresy related to that little dead girl and her family.
Megachurches in Drukerite model are the fastest-growing segment of Christianity in America. The leaders of these churches are accountable to nobody but their small hand-picked boards. Nobody is there to ensure they maintain any sort of orthodoxy in doctrine or theology - they have dispensed with all that just as the Postmoderns have gotten rid of all the parts of modernity and history that confound them.
Drucker thought a better, more spiritual version of fascism, with communities of communities, was the future for mankind and he worked to see that through, churches, megachurches were his vehicle. One does not have to be around one of these operations long, not with your eyes open, looking past the fog machine and disco lights, to see authoritarian behavior. Reason tells anyone that walks in that something is not right - they keep you by suspending reason and playing to emotion.
Left unchecked, particularly considering the collapse of all the other protestant denominations, it is not hard to see, absent divine intervention, how within ten years there will be much Christianity left in any of these churches if they can hold out 10 years, without accountability and built upon bad ideology, there is no way they can survive 20.
See Chris Rosebrough presentation (follow along PowerPoint here)
Network, L. (n.d.). Drucker’s Impact On Leadership Network. Retrieved from https://leadnet.org/druckers-impact-on-leadership-network/
Rosebrough, C. (n.d.). Resistance is Futile. Retrieved from http://004f597.netsolhost.com/fftf/ResistanceisFutile.pdf
Steinfels, P. (2005). A Man’s Spiritual Journey From Kierkegaard to General Motors. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/19/us/a-mans-spiritual-journey-from-kierkegaard-to-general-motors.html
I have been conducting a bit of research, watching a lot of mega-church pastor’s sermons, and I have noticed a trend that the Babylon Bee nailed recently in a satirical story of a preacher that placed himself in the middle of a sermon about election.
Churchgoers were impressed by Vickery’s theological illustration and his general ability to always make himself look good in his messages.
“Some Sundays, I’ll admit, I have no idea how he’s going to end up making himself look great, cool, popular, important, or heroic. Especially with this one—I was thinking, ‘How is Pastor Chuck going to make himself the man in a message on election?’ I mean, it’s election,” said church member Becky Lenhardt, adding that despite her doubts, somehow he was able to pull it off.
“I can’t wait until next Sunday to see how he’ll become the hero of a sermon on creation,” she added.
I have come to the conclusion, after watching dozens of videos from various mega-church pastors, that this is pretty much par for the course. I suspect they would be incapable of preaching a funeral or a wedding without performing the verbal equivalent of photo-bombing.
This sort of behavior is closely related to the story of the worship leader that took 16 hours to explain to his congregation why he selected a particular song for that morning and what it meant to him. Me, me, look at me.
Satire is a pretty good way of addressing the absurd and getting after a reality that makes no sense. I thought I was alone in this observation of crass interposition but apparently not.
I was told recently by my wife, current and previous, as well as others that I scowl. It is a fact that I am well aware of and a face I seem to make more often the older I get. As a young lieutenant, a colonel that wanted to be helpful once told me after a meeting in which I disagreed strongly with some folks that outranked me too much for me to be heard that I had to learn to control my expressions. I never tried, I used it as a tool of communication at times I was unable to speak. I scowl, more now than then.
I have my reasons, I write about them here. My wife Bri tells me she thinks that 50% of what I write is correct and the other half is me being a curmudgeon. By that, she means I make polemic statements and often do not support them with facts. I believe a large portion of the curmudgeonness is a result of believing I know things that should be obvious and require no justification. Things based upon common-sense, first principles and universal truths. I am wrong about a lot of things but not things based upon those principles. So I often scowl.
“WTH did they just say?”
Resolutions are overdone, but this year I am going to make one and stick to it. Before I resign myself to being Clint Eastwood in Grand Torino, or Andy Rooney or Robert D. Raiford I am going to take some time to figure out some things. There is a lot I just do not know, and even more, I do not understand. I am going to spend my time between January and May being introspective, inquisitive and a little stoic. A little critical thinking, some self-improvement and a journey of inquiry await me.
What makes me scowl?
I have great suspicions about the megachurch, corporate Christianity movement. I believe it has in some cases and will in many others lead to heresy, cult-like behavior, and false Christianity. It was easy to see years ago with a place like NewSpring, it is harder with less well-known operations. But all within the seeker-sensitive megachurch movement share the same sorts of heterodoxical shepherding mentality, follow the fuhrer principle, stress service and community over justification by faith (deeds over creeds, works over faith) and are built upon cults of personalities; almost all are dominionist. The entire movement derives from the ideas of Peter Drucker and anti-rationalism. I dare say there is not a single mega-church ‘pastor’ that has not attended a Druckerite leadership conference. Drucker was a guy that thought that fascism went wrong because it abandoned the spiritual and he thought he could reshape the world through communities and saw churches as a place to begin. A fascist apologist as a trainer of ‘pastors’, extraordinary – but true. It is dangerous. This trend is changing America and Christianity, and not for the better. Heresy and wrong Christian behavior is a lot like pornography, you know it for what it is when you see it but it is sometimes hard to describe.
When I see churches that preach shallow doctrine (and sometimes false doctrine), create new loci in the form of a focus on community and service that receives much greater importance than things actually taught in the Bible it worries me. When a church teaches that its community is more important than the individual and their relationship to God and to their natural family I see something that looks a lot like fascism and not just a little cult-like, not to mention being very unBiblical. A church that isolates, controls and manipulates the minions, uses small groups (‘cells’ taken from the communist playbook) to effect control, all the while holding the senior pastor distant and accountable only to his most loyal dufus henchmen is not a Christian church, it is a proto-fascist cult in the making.
Don’t believe me? Take a listen, read and research the points made in this presentation, Resistance is Futile: You Will Be Assimilated Into the Community. It will give a whole new meaning to those terms mega-churches throw into almost every other sentence (intentional, relational, attractional, and authentic). By the way, good luck finding those terms in a concordance of the Bible. The PowerPoint is here to follow along.
Even entire once-solid denominations like the SBC are falling for error. If the cultural war is lost in the US, as I firmly believe, and religious belief is at an all-time low it is doubly troubling that the fastest growing “Christian” churches are moving toward not being Christian at all and are rather becoming communities led by false teachers that fancy themselves to be rockstars. These communities downplay the role of the individual as being nothing more than a servant to the community. When one combines this trend with the ideology of the radical progressive movement it is easy to see how some form of authoritarianism or totalitarianism will find its way into the public square in the near future.
This has all happened before. Dangerous secular ideology, inflamed with wild passions on one side and buttressed by compliant false Christianity on the other. The Barman Declaration was resistance to this sort of communitarianism and “leader” driven church nonsense in 1934 Germany.
Yes, I scowl at the purveyors of these false teachings, these wannabe rock stars with their head mics and ridiculous hipster personas. They represent something that is alien to Western culture, Christianity and common-sense. They ceased being laughable losers long ago and now represent an existential threat to Christianity in the US and the West.
“Not buying what you are selling, it smells funny”
I do not understand why the entire new generation of young men is so feckless and effeminate. I recently spent some time with youngsters that I can only term as weak dweebs, there were only two potential men in the group. Why is this? Have men of my age always looked at young men and shook their heads? I suspect so, but something seems different now. Am I just wrong? I do not know. I need to think about this more. I am reminded of what I read in history books about Korean soldiers during the 1950s and how tough they were. When I was last in Korea young men dressed in pink and carried Hello Kitty purses. Is that where we are headed?
Hello Kitty “men”
I am convinced, beyond any point of correction that politically the US is finished as we knew it, the old republic is long gone, the empire failed, classical liberalism failed, and the political process is broken beyond repair, dire times are ahead. I know enough about history to see the similarities between this and other great changes and falls. Am I wrong? If I am right, is just saying it enough? Does it need to be explained better for more people to see it? Should I just have fun, fiddle on the roof and not care? I don’t know yet.
“Don’t do it”
Yes, I have scowled a lot, sometimes when others wish I would not… I Scowl at:
Junior camp directors, I scowl.
Folks that have no shame and no honor, yep, I scowl.
Young men that do not act or think like men, I scowl.
Someone that does something so crude, banal, rude or stupid I have only the option to say words, cane them or scowl, I usually begin with the scowl to let them know where I stand. It seems the most polite and least violent of those options.
I am going to write a lot less, read more, pray more, think and question a lot over these next few months. I need to understand why I believe and feel as I do. I need to wrap my head around where the world is going. If I come out on the other end believing as I do now, I will scowl more freely.
