Almost anyone reading this knows at least the left in the United States says it’s wrong to profile or stereotype.  I wrote, “says,” because they don’t practice it themselves.  The left stereotypes and profiles “fly-over country” and President Obama is famous for profiling small town Pennsylvanians who “cling to their guns and religion.”  Now almost the entire national police force is categorized as racist.

Former New York Times columnist, African American Bob Herbert, wrote the following in 1993:

Jesse Jackson is traveling the country with a tough anti-crime message that he is delivering to inner-city youngsters. In Chicago he said, “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery — then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

One of the most famous stereotyping rants of all time, I recalled, was in 1998 when the late pro football player, Reggie White, said the following:

When you look at the black race, black people are very gifted in what we call worship and celebration. A lot of us like to dance, and if you go to a black church, you see people jumping up and down because they really get into it. . . . White people were blessed with the gift of structure and organization. You guys do a good job with building businesses and things of that nature. And you know how to tap into money pretty much better than a lot of people around the world . . . . Hispanics were gifted in family structure. You see a Hispanic person, and they can put 20 or 30 people in one home . . . . When you look at the Asian, the Asian is very gifted in creativity and invention. If you go to Japan or any Asian country, they can turn a television set into a watch. They are very creative.

Perhaps you remember the uproar about said speech by White about which many laughed and laughed at these comments.  Should someone do this?  Or maybe better, can someone do this?  Is it even possible to be right about this type of information?  Is it helpful?  In the first chapter of Titus, the Apostle Paul was instructing Titus, whom he left on the island of Crete, on how to deal with his audience there in that culture, and listen to what he wrote in verses 10 to 13 (bold print mine):

For there are many unruly and vain talkers and deceivers, specially they of the circumcision: Whose mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for filthy lucre’s sake.  One of themselves, even a prophet of their own, said, The Cretians are alway liars, evil beasts, slow bellies. This witness is true. Wherefore rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith.

Paul quotes a well known Cretian, Epimenides, who stereotypes the Cretians, his own people, and Paul, having been there, says in essence that he concurs — “This witness is true.”  Epimenides was a poet and teacher in the sixth century B.C., ranked as one of the seven wise men of Greece, and originally this particular poem, a known one, characterized his people in hexameter.  Paul says this respected man is dead on, exactly right.

Epimenides and the Apostle Paul engage in some pretty serious profiling that makes Reggie White look angelic:  “alway liars, evil beasts, slow bellies.”  Ohhhkaay.   It’s obviously helpful to do this, because Paul does it.  It’s in the Bible, God’s Word.  It’s inspired by God. And it is written to help the people.  The world today would warn against what Paul does here, but proper profiling and stereotyping can aid in successful spiritual warfare.  He buttresses his entire strategy for dealing with them upon pegging them in an accurate way.

For awhile, evangelicals have protested binary thinking and expected nuance.  No one tries that with gravity, because of the short term disadvantage, which is a dismount in the crunch position.  Truth, goodness, and beauty operate like gravity because they proceed from the same source:  God.   The passengers of Germanwings Flight 9525 last week recognized the absolute authority of gravity and its absence of nuance.  Just because many other truths and goodness and beauty don’t bring the same quick and emphatic authentication, but consummate at a more glacial pace, does not oblige them an incongruent end.  Living by and, therefore, pleasing God, by faith, necessitates behaving as though deeds met by immediate, tangible confirmation equal those awaiting only heavenly reward.

The audience for most of the music for evangelicalism and fundamentalism is people — do people like it?  I’m saying, the people versus God.  I’m not saying they don’t consider God at all, but that people are what they most regard with their music.  Most have stopped fighting the idea that there is a music that God doesn’t like, so it really comes down to what people like.  Most evangelicals directly relate style of music to church growth, which is to say that whether the people like it or not is foremost in their minds, even Calvinists (despite that blatant contradiction).  You read this in Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Church, but you also hear it from conservative evangelicals (see here and here).

Is people the audience of music?  Most evangelicals and fundamentalists would not deny that God is one of the audiences of church music, but not its only audience.  Evangelicals justify their obsession with what music people want with a few texts of scripture.  I want to deal with those and I will, but first, we do know that God is the audience of the music of His congregation, whether Israel or the church.  I spent about 30 minutes looking, so this might not be all of them, but look at these below.

“sing to thy name” (1 time)
“sang unto the Lord” (1 time)
“sing ye to the Lord” (1 time)
“sing praise to the Lord” (1 time)
“sing praise unto the Lord” (1 time)
“sing praise unto thy name” (1 time)
“sing praise upon the harp unto our God” (1 time)
“sing praise to the name of the Lord” (1 time)
“sing praise to thee” (1 time)
“make a joyful noise unto God” (1 time)
“make a joyful noise unto the God” (1 time)
“make a joyful noise unto him” (1 time)
“make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation” (1 time)
“make a joyful noise before the Lord” (1 time)
“singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord” (1 time)
“singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord” (1 time)
“O bless our God, ye people, and make the voice of his praise to be heard” (1 time)
“shew forth thy praise to all generations” (1 time)
“praise thy power” (1 time)
“praise thy glorious name” (1 time)
“praise thy works” (1 time)
“praising thee” (1 time)
“praise thy God” (1 time)
“praising and thanking the Lord” (1 time)
“praising and giving thanks unto the Lord” (1 time)
“praising and blessing God” (1 time)
“I will extol thee, my God, O king; and I will bless thy name for ever and ever.” (1 time)
“praise unto our God” (1 time)
“praise unto God” (1 time)
“praise to God” (1 time)
“praise God” (2 times)
“make a joyful noise unto the Lord” (2 times)
“sing praise unto thee” (2 times)
“sing unto God” (2 times)
“sing unto thee” (3 times)
“praise thy name” (7 times)
“bless the Lord” (15 times)
“sing praises” (15 times)
“sing praises” (15 times)
“sing unto the Lord” (16 times)
“bless the Lord” (18 times)
“praise him” (18 times)
“praise ye the Lord” (24 times)
“praise the Lord” (33 times)

There are 190 of the above if my math is right (did it in my head).  These start with people and people have God as their audience.  These are directed to or toward God.  Now how many in the Bible start with people and the audience is people?  Are people seen to be singing to people?

I’ve said that I have observed that the chief audience of congregational music, the music of the church, in evangelicalism has become people.  What is the biblical basis for this?  What I hear at least from many evangelicals and fundamentalists is that the audience of the music is both, God and people.  And the basis for people?  There should be a lot of references, right?  Here are the only ones possible:

Psalm 40:3, And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the LORD. 

Ephesians 5:19, Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord; 

Colossians 3:16, Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.

These are the three verses, compared with at least 190 above.  Good hermeneutics would require viewing the three in light of the 190.  In our three examples, notice that without ambiguity, each say, “song in my mouth, even praise unto our God,” “singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord,” and “singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord.”

In Psalm 40, unbelievers see the praise of believers and fear, so they aren’t the audience, just spectators.  That leaves us with the other two.  “Speaking to yourselves” in Ephesians 5:19 is at least ambiguous as it relates to audience.  “Speaking” (laleo) is not even the normal word for singing, and easily “to yourselves” could and perhaps should be understood as the dative of place, “among yourselves,” informing us where this singing to God will occur — in the congregation.  With Colossians 3:16, “teaching and admonishing one another” could be connected with “the word of Christ” earlier in the verse, that is, teaching and admonishing one another with the Word as a separate action apart from singing to the Lord.  In the TR (and critical text both), punctuation is placed between “another” and “in psalms.”

The referenced activities — speaking, teaching, and admonishing — are participles, a fact which says that speaking, teaching, and admonishing will occur, but as a byproduct of something else.  They don’t stand alone as verbs, but in a subordinate position within the sentence.  There are no examples of non-participial verbs, which instruct a congregation to sing to people.  As a byproduct, teaching and admonishing will occur, but this isn’t obligated as an activity.  For that reason, believers should not consider people to be the audience.  God was plain and persistent in stating the direction a congregation should impart its singing and melodies — to God.

1 Corinthians 14:26 ends with the imperative, “Let all things be done unto edifying.”  I’ve heard an argument from that, which says the purpose of singing in the church is edification.  The edification of saints is not the enemy of singing to God.  One should assume that music God accepts and appreciates will edify saints as a byproduct.  God honoring music will edify, but that isn’t its purpose.

Some also argue that several of the psalms actually do have instruction for people in them.  As an example, I’m talking about something like Psalm 33:1, which starts out, “Rejoice in the Lord.”  The content of the psalm commands believers to rejoice in the Lord, and the argument is, that since there is a command to people at the start of the psalm, it was directed to people in its singing.  The latter doesn’t follow the former.   Let me illustrate.

Let’s say you have a popular entertainer singing to his audience, and the lyrics of the song were these:

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?

Those are the first two lines of what some consider the greatest pop lyrics of all time, Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.”  Did Dylan sing the song to someone dressed so fine that in his prime he threw some bums a dime?

The chorus reads:

How does it feel?
How does it feel?
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone

Was Dylan’s audience homeless?  Was Dylan singing “Like a Rolling Stone” to homeless people?

My point is that the content of lyrics or text does not determine the direction or audience of the song. Everyone knows that, so they shouldn’t try to make a point with it.  We should pay attention to all the places in scripture that in fact make a point about where singing or playing in worship or congregation or church should be directed, and all of that is only to God.

If I said, “put all your money in the bank,” you would not conclude from that, “put all your money in your mattress.”  If you put your money in your mattress, it would not be because I told you to put your money in your mattress, because I said to put your money in the bank.  If God says, “sing to Me,” you would not conclude from that, “sing to people.”  This is simple, so why do people still insist on considering people to be the audience for church music?  There isn’t a biblical reason, that is, a faithful reason.

When we look at the history of sacred music, we see a shift in the late nineteenth century, where men like Charles Finney saw music as a method for drawing and manipulating people.  The song leader became an important figure for conjuring this atmosphere.  Finney justified these types of tactics with his Pelagian theology.  That change in the audience of the music and, therefore, its purpose, transformed church music, sending music in a trajectory to where we are today.   Churches now obsess on the pragmatic effects of music in the church.  Everyone knows this.

As I write this, the NY Times publishes an article entitled, “Why Our Children Don’t Think There Are Moral Facts.”  This year in our school, I’m teaching biblical worldview, and for awhile, I have been both establishing and explaining the bifurcation of truth in the world.  I thought that the NY Times article titled it well with the terminology, “moral facts.”  Children don’t see certain morals as facts like they do gravity and blood circulation.  Evangelicalism and fundamentalism are already there too, and among other things, their statement on inerrancy explains.

The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, reaffirmed by the summit on inerrancy in southern California, does not reflect a scriptural bibliology.  It synthesized a biblical position with what men believed they could defend with what they reasoned as evidence outside of scripture.  But men fiddle with what the Bible teaches because they don’t see biblical truth as fact.  They don’t take the Bible as true like they do gravity, which is to accept, buy into, or at least be influenced by a worldly two truth system that divides the sacred from the secular, and a reason why I point out music at the southern California summit on inerrancy.  Music can’t be judged because it is not in that lower story of fact, but in the upper story, the subjective realm of values and religion and beauty and aesthetics.  It isn’t scientific.  It isn’t fact.

Since music isn’t fact in this new two tiered view of truth, everyone’s beauty is beautiful, everyone’s goodness is good, and everyone’s truth is true.  When you corrupt or diminish any one of beauty, goodness, and truth, you are also corrupting or diminishing the other, because you are relegating the objective to the subjective.  God now is Who you want Him to be.  This is why music is the gateway to the Charismatic movement, because beauty is already relegated to a subjective, personal realm, not on the same plane as fact.  Your God is now the one Who accepts what you want to offer Him, because you like it — it’s your taste.  Truly, He’s your God too, different than the God of the Bible.  Our God is how we worship Him.  You can deny this all you want, but it is true.

Professing Christians adopted elements of classical philosophy, even though the Greek thinkers were pagan, who had drawn a dichotomy between matter and spirit, the material realm as though it were less valuable than the spiritual realm.  Moral ideals, beauty, and creativity are not subject to scientific investigation.  This is how we get to amoral music.  Nothing in the upper story is moral, so neither is marriage.  And all this relates to inerrancy.

Warfield, educated in the German universities that John MacArthur referenced as the resurrection of the dead Germans, bridged the gap between theology, the upper realm, and science, the lower realm with the term, “inerrancy.”   By doing so, he could save Christianity from its ‘sure demise’ at the hands of scientific evidence.  I think it’s worthwhile knowing that Warfield also believed in evolution and attempted to bridge that to the Bible.

On p. 433 of Richard A. Muller’s Post Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Volume 2, Holy Scripture: The Cognitive Foundation of Theology, he writes:

By “original and authentic” text, the Protestant orthodox do not mean the autographa which no one can possess but the apographa in the original tongue which are the source of all versions. . . .  It is important to note that the Reformed orthodox insistence on the identification of the Hebrew and Greek texts as alone authentic does not demand direct reference to autographa in those languages; the “original and authentic text” of Scripture means, beyond the autograph copies, the legitimate tradition of Hebrew and Greek apographa.

At the end of that page he writes:

The case for Scripture as an infallible rule of faith and practice . . . . rests on an examination of the apographa and does not seek the infinite regress of the lost autographa as a prop for textual infallibility. . . . A rather sharp contrast must be drawn, therefore, between the Protestant orthodox arguments concerning the autographa and the views of Archibald Alexander Hodge and Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield. . . . Those who claim an errant text, against the orthodox consensus to the contrary, must prove their case. To claim errors in the scribal copies, the apographa, is hardly a proof. The claim must be proven true of the autographa. The point made by Hodge and Warfield is a logical leap, a rhetorical flourish, a conundrum designed to confound the critics—who can only prove their case for genuine errancy by recourse to a text they do not (and surely cannot) have.

Warfield invented an extra-biblical and non-historical standard for the Bible that now stands as “inerrancy.”

The apex of Warfield’s designed inerrancy can be found in the fourth and fifth propositions of the short edition of the Chicago statement in 1978:

4. Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God’s acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God’s saving grace in individual lives.
5. The authority of Scripture is inescapably impaired if this total divine inerrancy is in any way limited or disregarded, or made relative to a view of truth contrary to the Bible’s own; and such lapses bring serious loss to both the individual and the Church.

What’s wrong with that?  There’s nothing wrong with it in itself, but it is akin to what Kevin DeYoung talked about in the first Q and A, led by Albert Mohler.  The former statements, which represented biblical teaching, were replaced by more ambiguous and arbitrary statements of the Chicago statement that would conform to the spirit of the age.  The Chicago statement would aid in preserving the coalition, not so high that they would lose their academic institutions. This is now considered a conservative position, but it is one where two tiers of truth still remain, the scientific lower story and the subjective upper.

The new position, called inerrancy, is a change in belief on the historic, Christian, biblical position.  I can be happy about something that is true, but is less than the whole truth.  It is still true, and I celebrate that.  In that sense, I am a supporter of the summit on inerrancy.  I say that, because men act like your opposition denies the truths they do tell.  They tell truths, but they are carefully crafted ones to dodge what the Bible actually teaches and what Christians have believed before the enlightenment.

You can’t ultimately defend a doctrine that isn’t the whole truth.  If there is something left short, because the purveyors are ashamed or unbelieving, it is still lacking in sustaining faith. When we’re talking about the Bible, we’ve got to get what we believe about it from the Bible.

In the same Q and A to which I referred, John MacArthur talked about Fuller Theological Seminary leaving what we understand is the Warfieldian position.  He said that Peter Wagner brought students from his church growth class over to see what a growing church looked like, but then he stopped, and when he did, he told MacArthur.  MacArthur said that Fuller did not depart from inerrancy based upon an intellectual basis, but based upon a pragmatic one.  There is a strong similarity between Fuller and the folks at this summit on inerrancy.  What am I talking about?

They departed from scriptural, objective beauty, not based on intellect, but based on pragmatism.  They welcome a breathy, intimate, sultry song being sung as worship, not on an academic level, but on the level of worldly lust.  This, by the way, is how doctrine changes the most anyway, as Peter reported in 2 Peter 2-3.  Men deny the Word of God, because it clashes with their own lust.  Doctrinal statements are not left, primarily because of a wrong doctrinal position, but because of a wrong affection toward God (read Jonathan Edwards’s Treatise).

I don’t know where to put this, so I’m going to include it here, rather than as an aside.  Some reading this would marginalize it as the ‘rant’ of a KJVO.  Actually, KJVO, as they would understand it, I’m convinced is a product of their own confiscation of a scriptural bibliology.  Left without a perfect, authentic original-language apographa, based upon fact, that is, biblical truth, men filled the vacuum with a mythical perfect English that is as much a denial of objective, biblical fact as Warfield’s invention of inerrancy.  Warfield was warding off what he saw as future apostasy due to the existence of textual variants.  The KJVO, which does not include me, embrace a perfect English translation that is as much a pendulum swing to avert mass departures.

John MacArthur, either with a lack of discernment or out of pragmatism himself, gave credit to the Jesus movement, aka the movement of Lonnie Frisbee, to be a genuine revival.  That movement gave him a lot of people, so perhaps it was difficult to call it a fraud.  He nibbles all around it to call everything, but that, a strange fire.  And that movement is the birth of Christian rock as well. MacArthur was at the front door of accepting this ugliness that defiled the affections of those professing to be God’s people.  And he continues with the Gettys.  There will be no woman out front, singing in a sensual voice, in the kingdom of Jesus Christ.  This is not God’s will on earth as it is in heaven. This is man’s will, false worship, producing a lack of understanding about Who God is, Who the Holy Spirit is, and how He works.  It is acceptable to the world and confusing to them about the nature of Jesus Christ.

Evangelicals and now fundamentalists will say this “music issue” isn’t a gospel issue.  It is.  If you don’t have a biblical Jesus, you don’t have Jesus.  If you don’t repent, you don’t believe in Jesus.  It mistakes the nature of grace to a cheap grace, even using MacArthur’s own words.  Cursed are those who don’t love Jesus.  And this is not love.  This is flesh.  I believe MacArthur himself knows this. And then if Jesus is Lord, He’s Lord of the music too.  If He is Lord of everything but the music, because the music is an idol, that’s a gospel issue.

You either have a consistent Christian worldview or you don’t.  God is one, so only the one beauty, goodness, and truth can be defended.  Holes exist any other way, holes that are patched with fiction, with imagination, with myth, which, by the way, exalt themselves against the knowledge of God. When you start picking and choosing what you will believe and what you will not believe, you have moved truth into that upper, spiritual, subjective realm.  You can now make up your own view of beauty.  You can make up your own view of the nature of God’s Word.  There is no wonder that men are making up their own view of marriage too.  And you will not have any real, objective basis to stop it.

Let God be true and every man a liar.  That’s kind of what the Warfieldians say they believe.  I’m saying they don’t — not with this point of view.

Keith and Kristyn Getty lead the music at the summit on inerrancy in Southern California for 2015.  I didn’t know until I started watching one of the sessions on livestream, but I’ve got to comment.  I knew the Gettys were popular with conservative evangelicals and many fundamentalists, but I had never heard them live or even in a recording, that I know of.  I was glad to see and hear, because I think I’m more informed now and I want to describe it for both those who have and haven’t heard.

I knew that Steve Pettit, now the president of Bob Jones, used the Gettys music, perhaps in a more tame or conservative fashion.  I remembered also that David Cloud had written about their music being used at West Coast Baptist College in Lancaster.  I only knew they were the Gettys because they were in the schedule for the conference.  What I recalled as well was that the Gettys are known as modern hymnwriters with dense theological lyrics.  Having watched them now, I can see why they are popular.

Keith Getty is on the piano and his wife sings out front.  This is a huge auditorium, full mainly of men, but she is out front leading the singing.  All of these men are being led by this woman and her voice.  It isn’t a manly situation.  She is the furthest thing from manly and the music itself isn’t.

Getty plays the piano like an entertainer and in a style best described as soul.  Soul combines elements of “gospel,” rhythm and blues, and jazz.  The feel is a softer version of Billy Joel or Elton John.  I think he might see that as a compliment.  He does the soulful eye clinching, placing his face close to the piano, with a gentle bobbing of his head with the rhythm.  Today his act would be considered authentic, which is a common judgment under postmodernism, where an act could be authentic.

Kristyn sings for effect with a breathy, sultry quality, mouth close to the microphone in very intimate fashion.  If a woman came up to talk to me with the same quality that she sings, I would hope no one was either watching or listening, and I would quickly excuse myself.  Except she’s singing to God, supposedly.  I think that’s what they would say — that she’s singing to God in a style like Marilyn Monroe sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to President Kennedy.  She has a kind of hippy quality to her of the nature of Joan Baez, the throatiness, the clenched eyes, all the artificial signals of fake authenticity.

As dense as the lyrics of the Gettys may be, and others have advertised, they are not anything as good as the hymnal we use at our church.  It’s still a different quality of poetry than the old hymns and more fitting for this popular modern music they sing.  The music doesn’t match the words.  It isn’t reverent.  It isn’t holy.  It is sentimental at best and erotic at worst.  The group of four doing the ‘worship leading’ is also effeminate, which should not be the kind of ‘leading’ for a huge group of men.  Everyone in the auditorium should just have handed in his manhood card upon being led by this group.

I know I’m going to get myself in trouble, but MacArthur himself said in his Strange Fire Conference that music was the gateway to the Charismatic movement.  The Getty music is Charismatic.  I understand that there is worse, but that is no consolation.  When I went to look up the Gettys to learn some more, because I know they are influential, the videos on youtube were their appearing on the Harvest Show on LeSEA Broadcasting network.  I looked into the Harvest Show and LeSea, and LeSea is Lester Sumrall, a Pentecostal preacher, who started the network.  It didn’t surprise me with the name “Harvest,” a very common designation for Charismatics.

Getty is very much associated in name with the songwriter and musician Stuart Townend, whose music also has become popular with conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists.  Townend is the worship leader at Church of Christ the King.  I went to their website and they have the back of a playing card as a symbol of the church, Christ the King.  King of Hearts.  Get it?  Clever, huh?  His Wikipedia article says, “Townend has led worship and performed events across the world at many conferences and festivals, including the Stoneleigh Bible Week in the early 1990s to the early 2000s, Together On A Mission, Mandate, Mission:Worship, Keswick Convention, Spring Harvest and many more. He has also featured on Songs of Praise and worked alongside other high profile Christian musicians including Keith Getty, Lou Fellingham and Phatfish.”  There is zero jump now from Townend to Getty to MacArthur to fundamentalists.

Keith Getty has written one of the most well known Christian songs.  I really didn’t know it, but it is a hit, which has been sung by many different performers, entitled, “In Christ Alone,” very popular especially in Great Britain, that hot bed of Christianity.  Sure, salvation is in Christ alone, but the style of music is not anything like what it is to be in Christ.  In Christ I’m a new creature with old things passed away.  Their song says “yes” to old things.  In Christ the old things remain with the Gettys.  I’m sure there are those who would swear on their sincerity.  I would guess that Elvis was sincere too when he sang his gospel music.

The Wikipedia article on Getty is informative.  The last sentence of the first paragraph states:  “Keith and Kristyn Getty are currently living in the United States where they write music and tour.”  They tour, and their tour has brought them to the Shepherds Conference.  And what is the big idea for the Gettys?  There is a section on their philosophy, for which the last line comes from Kristyn and reads, “To try to search for the melodic ideas and song structure that might bring more people in—that’s what we’re trying to investigate. Is there a way to bring everyone together musically?”  They want to bring more people in.  The question should be, “What does God want?”  And the discussion is over. Everyone should then conform his taste to what God wants.  But that’s not the way “worship” is today.  Today the significant question surrounds what will bring people in.

The worship wars pit the older generation, the one less effected by postmodernism, that understood and still might understand objective beauty.  The new generation has moved beauty and art and even religion over to the upper story that is subjective, where there is wide latitude for everyone’s taste. They are trying to bring these two sides together.  Could that be a good thing?  Is that biblical unity? If you think so, then we don’t think very much alike at all.

What is very sad is that John MacArthur and all these folks in Southern California, including Ian Murray, who I’ve got to believe disdains this kind of performance, pushes this upon all of these people.  It isn’t true worship.  It is modern syncretism. It masquerades as spirituality with the lilting Celtic feeling combined with the blues.  It’s an impostor, and yet it is presented as worship there in a conference on inerrancy of scripture.

Some might say, “If this is bad, then why is it so acceptable to so many?”  We’re in bad shape, that’s why.

It will be interesting to see the reaction to this.  I wish it was repentance, but I would anticipate something closer to the response you get from a dog, whose food has been taken away.

Twenty-seven years ago when my wife and I traveled in a U-Haul truck to the San Francisco Bay Area without a stick of furniture, we came to preach the gospel in an area where the gospel had not been preached.  Going to preach the gospel is a different mentality than going to start a church.  If you go to start a church, the church gets started, and you’ve reached your goal.  Scripture doesn’t present starting churches as the goal.

There are several evangelical churches in our area and I’m not sure what their goals are, but one of ours is to preach the gospel to everyone.  If that is the goal of some of these other churches, some of which have bigger crowds than ours, then I would not know it by my own experience with them.  In living here for twenty-seven years, our house has never been visited by someone else preaching the gospel.  I have never had someone attempt to evangelize me or even hand me a gospel tract in twenty-seven years with one exception.  My wife and I were in the Macy’s in San Francisco, looking at some luggage, and a piece of luggage that we observed had a tract wedged onto it.  We looked and it was our tract, that we printed, that someone with our church had attached to that piece of luggage (I think it was Thomas Ross).

I believe that churches are so interested in getting big, that they forget why they’re here.  Many of their programs are about successful church growth, meaning additions in numbers, but not in someone hearing the actual gospel.  They wouldn’t even encourage their church people to preach it to everyone for fear that the gospel would turn people off.  I know this to be true, because I’ve had it said to me by many different people through the years.  They would rather someone hear about their rock band than about Jesus, for instance.

As well, I know that churches do not preach a true gospel.  They want their church to get bigger and they think the true gospel contradicts that goal.  They have minimized or even eliminated certain attributes of Jesus Christ to make Him more palatable or acceptable to this culture. What I’m saying is that they are purposefully not preaching Christ, because they think they’ll be more successful if they don’t.  I’m not saying that some of them would deny these aspects of Christ, but that they just leave them out, understanding that someone might learn about them later at a time when those characteristics of Jesus might be tolerated by them.  God knows all this.

The population where we live is so dense that we never end in reaching to every last person with the gospel.  Even if you get to a door, you’re talking to one person.  Five may live there.  Only one is hearing at that given time.  One is better than nothing, but four haven’t heard the message, if you’ve talked to one.  For this reason, you’ve got to keep talking to people in your area, never stopping.  Even though we’ve been preaching the gospel here and knocked on every door in an area of about 300,000 people, and many of these multiple times, we have not preached to every single person.  By the time we get back to certain areas, other people have moved in, faster than what we can get to them.  People not that far away have never heard of us and they would say that no one has ever talked to them about this.  No one.

As our church keeps preaching the gospel in the same area, we also want to move out further. We went up into the Sacramento area for awhile, about two or three years ago, because one of our members owned a care home up there.  We decided to meet on Sundays in their care home and evangelize all around that building.  I’m eyeing a particular valley around highway 24, right in the heart of the Bay Area, where I’m quite sure the gospel hasn’t been preached.  In three of the four towns in this strip of geography, there are no Baptist churches.  The fourth town has one, a Southern Baptist church, that I can see isn’t preaching the gospel to its area.  We can drive to this area in ten to fifteen minutes by a reservoir and over some hills.  There is a well-known Catholic college there, St. Mary’s, and the average house price is over a million dollars.  There are 70-80,000 people there in that valley just right around the Caldecott Tunnel.  I know that Buster Posey, Stephen Curry, and others like them, live there.  Will they listen there? Maybe not, but that’s not the goal, remember?  We’ve got to get there to give the opportunity to hear it.  We’re preparing to do that in the next few months.

The experts might say that we need a “launch” that would cost us about $300,000 to get a proper start. I mean this.  I’m not being sarcastic.  This is what you hear.  Some of those churches that launched did get pretty big.  They knew what to do.  They got the right grungy stage and the proper screen and drums and worship team and communications style.  They got bigger because they could attract people with that.  But most people have still not heard the gospel from them, and they don’t care.  Our launch is going to cost us some personal sacrifice but very little extra money.  We’ll probably need to print up some tracts, which we will, and maybe a card to make it easier to contact us, but that’s about it.  If someone believes, we’ll have Bible studies in that home.  A new believer would welcome that, because of actual conversion, and then we could branch out from there.  It will cost us money for gas to drive the twenty minutes.  Maybe you could take $100,000 you would be giving to the launch, leave them $200,000, and give that third to us.  I’m quite sure more people will hear the gospel our way.  A lot of gas and tracts could be purchased with the $100,000 that the launch might need for the gritty faux brick decoration and the sound system.

There is something bigger than the church and that is the kingdom. People are added to the kingdom by believing the gospel.  Everyone who is saved will be in the kingdom physically some day, worshiping Jesus Christ.  Just because our church is self-supporting doesn’t mean that the kingdom is of a suitable size.  Just because I get a paycheck and earn a living doesn’t mean that we can settle in and ignore the people who are in proximity for us to preach the gospel to them.  Just because our church has a great choir and an orchestra and a Christian school doesn’t mean that we are all set. People have yet to hear the gospel.

Our church believes in one God, Who Is Three Persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  That belief distinguishes us from others, but I didn’t choose that it would distinguish us.  We believe the Bible is the inspired Word of God.  The Bible is our sole authority for faith and practice.  Those qualities distinguish us as a church.  We teach that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone.  That doctrine sets us apart from many others, even though I would have everyone to believe that same way. Many don’t.

I discovered I’d already written on this part of the two (here as well).

When I think of pandering, normally I imagine what political candidates do to win voters.  They invent and reinvent themselves to conform to whatever group they’re campaigning.  I don’t remember the word “demographic” back as I grew up, but now a population is categorized by many different characteristics, such as age, race, gender, wage, and employment status, usually for marketing purposes.  I could hardly believe the relevance when reading the following, entitled Present Day Problems:  Why Men Do Not Go to Church, Some Faults in the Church, written by W. C. King in 1903:

Earnest men are losing faith in the sincerity of the churches, and weary with the insipid sentimental forms and empty platitudes often emanating from the pulpit, and the futile attempts of church organizations to improve society by imitating its weaknesses: sugar coating theater-going, dancing, and card playing with a religious flavor. No longer the fosterer of the family and the guardian of social purity, churches pander to self-indulgence and anti-social practices which are destructive of domestic life and imperil the existence nations.

This isn’t new!  Pandering is most often the choice of the evangelical (versus a fundamentalist), who doesn’t trust God or find His ways sufficient or satisfying.  I’m not the only who has noticed.  I like the way James Rasbeary puts it:

I suppose this “church shopping” mindset has come about with the commercialization of churches. It is no secret that churches compete with each other for members instead of trying to reach the unsaved; it is also no secret that many churches pander to people in exactly the same way that businesses do to their customers.

Thomas Clothier writes:

Sola Scriptura is fundamentally opposed to relativistic individualism. In a culture wherein the individual reigns supreme, and churches pander to “keep the customer satisfied,” the doctrine of Sola Scriptura states that all individual ideas and behaviors must be in submission to, and aligned with, Scripture. This opposes those in the church, and the culture, who justify their sinful behavior, and consequently their disobedience to Scripture, with a self-centered perspective wherein the individual’s desires are preeminent.

Dr. Dave at Truth Really Matters declares:

Seeker-sensitive market-driven churches are pandering to the worldly inclinations of the lost world, and not establishing their foundations on Biblical truth. Scripture has much to say to condemn this approach (1 John 2:15-17, James 4:4, 2 Peter 2:1-3).

In his book, Making Peace:  A Guide to Overcoming Church Conflict, Jim Van Yperen concludes (p. 50):

Of course conflict will result when the church panders to a sinful culture.  The church’s tacit agreement with modernity before, and post-modernity today, had undercut the truth of the Gospel and bred a shallowness of faith that compromises the veracity of Scripture.

Alex Green writes:

The main focus of the activities of the church or services becomes ‘putting on a show’ for people, resulting in the attendees turning up to be entertained without anything being asked or expected from them. People don’t feel engaged or part of something, they come purely to take from and not give to the experience. The structure of the services and activities run by the church panders to the consumerist expectations, demands and lifestyle of the people that attend. Emphasis is on ‘looking right’ or ‘looking good’, on having the latest technology or most recent, most popular songs. The focus is not so much on Jesus as a living, active presence in our lives but on a sanitised, domesticated Christ that is cool or fashionable, grabs a coffee from the foyer on the way in and subtly confirms our underlying desire for everything to be about ‘me’, that life is about talent or appearance and not about character.

All of the above pretty much say it.  But I want to add some more.  You can’t anymore go long before seeing a church pandering for attenders.  Even if they aren’t attempting to add to their numbers through pandering, they are sending the signal that certain qualities will be tolerated.  The most conservative evangelical, John MacArthur, says that music is the gateway to Charismaticism, but rest assured that you won’t need to reject that very music at Grace Community.  Just know it is a gateway that you can continue keeping in your life.

Pandering goes by many different names:  seeker sensitive, contextualization, indigenization, inculturation, missional, emergent, resurgent, third wave, even new Calvinism.  Pandering conforms to the spirit of the age.  It conforms to the world.  Here’s some of the reasoning that leads to pandering to the youth culture, as written by Dan Phillips:

a.  Some people insist that no yoots will come if we don’t change our music/worship style from X to Z. Hence: church’s sell-by date is coming due.
b. Others insist they will leave instantly if we don’t keep our music/worship style at X, and shun Z. Hence: church’s sell-by date comes due even faster.

It meets people at their social level. They need associations, friends, singles need to meet singles, let’s have restaurants for them, let’s have recreation. That’s the first wave that connects with them socially.

The pandering is called the “third wave,” because it begins on a social tier, the first wave, which then connects psychologically, the second wave, and finally identifies with people at the level of sensuality — rock music, coarse language, dancing, and crudeness.  This is why evangelical churches are even pandering to same-gender couples today.  Scripture on the other hand calls for watchful self‑discipline that refuses to pander to the appetites of the body at the soul’s expense.

Selfishness contaminates the Gospel. Personal ambitions, goals, dreams, and personal plans being fulfilled contradict the true essence of the Gospel.  Sinners in their natural decadent state do not accept a message that does not pander to their sinful whims.  Sowing to the flesh, like Galatians 6 talks about, panders to rather than crucifying the flesh.

Loving the world means having your primary hankering or longing or desire those things which gratify your flesh, to pander your physical, fleshly appetites, the things you feel.  Churches use this method to grow with their choice of music, dress, activities, and style.  When the Spirit of God transforms a heart, spiritual instincts draw that person away from those things that pander to the flesh.

The pandering extends in many varied directions and manners.  A church might stop door-to-door evangelism.  Any music tolerated.  Hair length on men, not an issue.  Casual clothing welcomed for worship.  Unfaithfulness to services permitted.  No entertainment prohibited.  Social activities and occasions scheduled for almost every demographic on a regular basis.  None to little standard of modesty upheld.  Preaching toned down in its application.  Often sermon length shortened or number of meetings reduced.  Hymnbooks replaced by the screen.   Pop style syncopated, sensual rock rhythm added to many of the songs.  Singing styles tend towards performance.  All of these strategic toward or techniques of church growth.

Any church that is different than the previous paragraph knows it is different.  It knows it is being out-marketed.  None of the above criteria are biblical, but they are major.  Everyone knows it.  They aren’t treated as important in a discussion, but they are a priority in the making of a decision.  Some know that they get less bible, less doctrine, and fulfill God’s will less, but it is worth it for the creature comforts.  Anyone who goes to church on a regular basis knows these things are so, but also won’t likely admit that he had succumbed to pandering.