Market-Driven Christianity

Galatians 1:10

Religion in America is big business. Scads of money, powerful personalities, huge egos, pension plans, and positions of prominence, influence, and recognition are at stake in the business of religion, just as they are in any other business. There was a time when the concern of churches and preachers in this country was the glory of God and the truth of God. Today, like any business, the concern is for success.

Christianity today is market-driven. The goal of all marketing is to make both the buyer and the seller satisfied. Consequently, market-driven churches, in utter abandonment of God’s glory and God’s truth, in their insatiable quest for success and recognition, do whatever it takes to win customers and keep them. If you don’t like preaching, they will keep it to a minimal. If you want political correctness, they will give you female preachers. If you don’t like to be tied up at noon on Sundays, they will give you the option of an early service. If you don’t like organized, structured worship, they will give you non-traditional, or contemporary (anything goes) service. If you don’t want to be bothered at all on Sunday, they will give you a Saturday night service. Shoot, if you don’t want to be bothered with church at all, as long as you will give them a little money and let them use your name on their score cards, they will give you a call in prayer line and a dial-a-devotion!

Be warned! False doctrine and worldliness always go hand in hand. Worldliness usually leads the way. Many today, who are being persuaded to go along with practices in their churches that they know are wrong, all in the name of making Christianity appealing to men, forget that the modernism which ravaged virtually every protestant denomination fifty to seventy years ago did not begin with heretical doctrine, but with worldly, flesh pleasing methods of ministry. The early modernists did not aim at destroying biblical Christianity. They simply tried to make Christianity palatable to an unbelieving world. It cannot be done. When Christianity becomes acceptable to unregenerate people, it has ceased to be Christianity!

Don Fortner

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