For my first twelve years, I grew up in and attended a church in a small rural town in Indiana. Our town was 2,600 and that was my world at the time. I didn’t know anything else. We very rarely got out of town and mainly to visit my grandparents at their farm near an even smaller rural town, one of 300. I call those villages, even though locals don’t use that term. Transportation occurred a lot on gravel roads. Where I live now, I go visit people in the “holler,” which is Appalachian English apparently for a small secluded valley between mountains — in this case, between hills. Indiana doesn’t have mountains.
The idea of pragmatism didn’t occur to me as a child or young person. I wasn’t assessing church growth methodology. Everything was more basic than that to me. However, what the adults did affected children and their understanding of church. All that really matters — knowing what church is.
Most of my adult life I’ve served in urban areas. I was in the San Francisco Bay Area for 33 years, 8 million people, then in Medford, Oregon for a year (much less urban, Jackson County, 225,000), the Ogden, Utah for a year (Ogden-Clearfield about 680,000), and then Carlisle, UK for 2 1/2 months, the largest city in Northern England (about 110,000 in the region). The town where I now live, Westport, IN, had a population at the 2020 census of 1,393. It’s grown apparently to 1,666 in 2025. The median household income of SF Bay area is $140,000, Medford, $73,000, Ogden, $73,000, and Westport (drumroll), $32,000.
Emphasized to Me in a Small Rural Town
When I arrived in Westport, I was informed by two other pastors of these two major points, very much emphasized to me. First, you don’t want to debate about doctrine, because it will look like a family squabble, and make Christianity look bad. Essentially this meant give a false gospel a pass. I know that, because I asked about it point blank. The gospel is not a delineating factor for fellowship here. When you argue about that, it will just hurt everyone.
Second, I was told that doctrine didn’t matter. People do not care about doctrine. It’s mainly about social life, friends, and having it better in the here and now. If you try to be doctrinal, you’ll just turn people off. Someone of standing gave me this detailed information in a long post office conversation in the early months after our arrival. Since then, I have learned even more.
What Is Pragmatism
Before I move on, I should define pragmatism for you, because I’m using that word. Even though one can define pragmatism as the “end justifies the means,” I am using it with the meaning, “a way of drawing the crowds for the present moment.” It’s the way the churches and their leader get people into their buildings. One judges success by how many he can get into his auditorium. A church gets a record attendance and then says, “God is at work,” the latter naturally following the former. Is that what really happened? Some call it a “outcome orientation” versus a “process orientation.”
When I was in California, if we had a record attendance, that meant that we had less than the number of people who were in fifty yards of cars stuck in traffic in the daily commute at any given moment. It really does matter how you got them into the building, the means that you used and are using to attract or lure your crowd. Why are people coming? When they do come with those attractions or allurements, what does it take to keep them? When more people come and then you want them to keep coming, what do you do and say so that they come back?
Dangers of Pragmatism
Builds on False Positives
I want a full church building. What do I have to do? Compare that with what the Bible says. What says the scriptural means of grace that God ordains and uses in His Word? Pragmatism relies on myself rather than on God and His Word. What are the dangers of pragmatism? First, it builds a church on false positives. By false positives, I mean situations where pragmatic methods — strategies chosen because they appear to “work”— produce positive, short-term, visible results (high attendance, money, high-energy services) that are misinterpreted as long-term spiritual health, genuine conversions, or divine blessing.
Pragmatic means foster false positives, because the crowds mask the nominal Christianity it produces. It might create a record number of people, people who consider themselves Christians because they attend, but who don’t grow in their faith or change their unregenerate lifestyles. What is won by superficial methods must be maintained by the same, results in superficial spirituality that cannot endure true discipleship. The Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 3 used the analogy of wood, hay, and stubble, something built on what will not last, and these methods will not, because they’re unscriptural.
The methods of pragmatism spawn what Jesus called in Matthew 23, ‘twice the children of Hell than they once were.’ It’s not a neutral method. No, it harms. It creates an increasingly fake church. One should compare this to Jesus, who confronted His crowds with the truth and His expected outcomes, which resulted in shrinking His crowd (see John 6). He was concerned to preach the true gospel to every person and not leave out any of the hard stuff.
Entrance to Liberalism
Second, pragmatism is what one might call a “gateway drug” to liberalism. In general, this deemphasizing of the nature of Christ, who He is, and biblical truth, does lead to doctrine not mattering. This is fertile soil for future liberalism. It builds on compromise. The attraction or lure of a true church is the truth itself. If people don’t like that or won’t take that, then you don’t have a church. Jesus founded His church on a true profession of faith: “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” The Person of Christ must be bigger than the temporal allurements or attractions, often psychological ones.
Liberalism arises from anti-supernaturalism. Pragmatism is totally natural. You use coffee, food, give-aways, socials, parties, jumpers, rock music, comforts and conveniences, fun, and more. Then you mask it by using words like “community.” You are creating “community.” “Community” is a kind of husk or shell in which you can pour about anything. You see “communion” in the Bible, which sounds very close to “community,” but “communion” in the Bible is based on the truth, on doctrinal truth. The union of communion is common belief.
Long Term in Destruction
Peter commanded in 1 Peter 2:11, “Abstain from fleshly lusts.” The pragmatic rural town church focuses on fleshly lust. It treats people like animals. The dog won’t like his medicine unless its coated or covered in dog food. These people don’t like the actual things of God, so they’re given these temporal things, which are labeled, “community” or “connection,” words that make fleshly lust sound significant and spiritual. What is ironic, is that it won’t work. Pragmatism is only long term in its destruction, not in its true success.
The liberalism of pragmatism doesn’t start with something like the denial of the virgin birth or denying the power of the Word of God to save and sanctify. The reliance on my cleverness, charisma, and human ingenuity is the initial naturalism. Pragmatism founds the church on naturalism. Doctrinal and practical liberalism will come later. The people experiencing liberalism don’t even know they’re getting it. Few to none will say, “That’s liberal,” because they aren’t judging methods based on scriptural criteria.
Loss of Spiritual Discernment
When someone suggests “the Lord worked” based on the success of a temporal, fleshly method, it discourages people from the spiritual discernment to detect that. The feeling they get from the rock music — “that’s God.” They accept it. This creation of community does not look anything like early Acts where early true believers experienced persecution for their beliefs. They communed for sure, but it was daily around the apostles’ doctrine, not a clever food pantry or coffee clutch.
Liberal values develop from pragmatic naturalism. The temporal physical things get priority. True love is a handout. Someone preaching actual doctrine, something is wrong there. The person who is open and accepting to a wider divergence of doctrine in the ecumenical manner and flavor — that’s love too. It doesn’t take long for these churches and then ironically their communities to turn liberal, maybe a generation or two.
Mission Drift
A third danger from the pragmatism, one could call, “mission drift.” The pragmatism distracts from the mission of the church. The church becomes about whatever it is that works at getting the crowd. I have taught in parenting that behavior that is rewarded will recur. Pragmatism begets more pragmatism, because the crowds, the surge in excitement, reward the pragmatist. The bait and switch of it is the label. The bait is the pragmatic method and the switch is that God really worked. Look at what was produced, it was God. So more ungodly things happen because of the behavior is rewarded with success.
People in the small town become acclimated to pragmatism easily. It can spread in a small town. If another leader questions the method, he is evil because he is destroying community. The network in small rural communities is strong. People who rock that boat can easily become marginalized. The fear of that, however, stops people from saying something and the town can sink down into the eternal damage this causes. Pragmatism will not lift up a depressed small town. It’s just a short term fix, like a sugar high or the charge from the caffeine in a strong cup of coffee.
False Idea of “Community”
Think with me about the idea of forming community around the lies of pragmatism. It is essentially taking advantage of people. There are many parallels in history and they look and sound bad. The Roman Empire had its bread and circuses. That kept and controlled the hoi polloi. You can see the elitism in that, not recognized at the time as elitism, because the people were getting something — a feeling, an experience, and short term fulfillment, like Esau and his mess of pottage. A few people control many. They’re not building them, because it’s based on a lie.
The pragmatism of the small rural town is different than the city pragmatism, but not in philosophy. It’s a less expensive budget, which can rely on lower technology. It is not less studied though. Small rural town pastors go to pragmatic small rural town church growth conferences. This is how you do it there in those places. Here’s the secret to this growth we achieved. You can do the same. Here’s the formula. The people under this leadership almost never know it’s happening when it does, but it is happening.
Pragmatism Spreads
Then the pragmatism spreads. In Numbers 32, Moses required participation from the tribes of Reuben and Gad. Their non-participation would spread. That was unfathomable, because it happened one generation before when only ten spies discouraged everyone from not crossing the Jordan. People want success, even if when it is superficial, short-term, and naturalistic. Some call imitation a high form of flattery. Pragmatism yields more pragmatism in a race to the bottom. “Hey, what’s wrong with a sno-cone?” Sure, what’s wrong with a sno-cone?
I hope that you reading can and will be honest about pragmatism. Please open your eyes. Look at what’s going on. This is everywhere and it’s not going to end well. The actual end, the real bottom line, will not be good. This is where all the “isms” find their true answer in Jesus Christ. Pragmatism emphasizes “an end,” not “the end.” The real end of things is only good in Jesus Christ, and that doesn’t come from pragmatism.