Did you ever have to make a choice that you knew you had to make but didn’t want to because you respected the person you knew you had to confront about false teaching? This isn’t another brother or sister, but a respected pastor and theologian in my city whose church we recently started to attend once again. Years ago, I had attended this church before moving out of town. Since we have recently relocated near this city, we decided to re-visit my old church. Everything was going well until we started membership classes this Sunday.

We received a great teaching on the ordinances of baptism and communion, but when we turned the page to the second part of our teaching booklet, regarding how the church was structured, we saw the word: Saddleback – spelled in big bold capital letters, along with all the things it stands for. My husband I both were shocked and stunned that this church had tailored it’s “new look” around the questionable teachings of a popular bestselling book. For those of you who don’t know, Saddleback is an acrostic for the purpose driven goals in books made popular by Rick Warren. Saddleback is the name of the church he pastors. These slick marketing methods, designed to increase church membership, and get Christians more involved, are increasingly coming under fire from respected theologians across the board. The criticism is that Warren’s methods are simply psuedo religious mass marketing tools, designed to target the largely unchurched younger generation by making Christianity more attractive while downplaying some of the harder parts of the gospel, such as repentance.

We know that Jesus sometimes took unpopular stands with the religious leaders of his day, and severely took them to task for substituting their man made traditions in their temples. This man and his church are not by any stretch of the imagination “a brood of vipers,” or ” whitewashed tombs”, but folks like us that we know genuinely love the Lord and wish to serve Him wholeheartedly. That’s what makes things like this so difficult. We believe that this purpose driven “model” they’re using is not the model of the Bible, but another man-made redefinition of the purpose of Christians. This book, which emphatically states in the beginning, “This is not about you.” is in fact a step by step guide for individuals and churches to “grow” into their SHAPE, another Warren acrostic. On the face of it, there seems to be nothing wrong with that, but in essence it’s a modern day redefintion of Christianity, because it puts the focus on how we do all things Christian, instead of how Christ wishes His church to be run. This is exactly the mistake the religious leaders of His day made. They added their traditions to the Word of God until most of the religious practices of the time that Christ lived in were heavily slanted toward the purposes and traditions of men, and their performances.

My objection to the purpose driven life/church/business etc; is that it over emphasizes our purpose, which we learn to identify through various methods outlined in Warren’s books, rather than carrying out the good works that God planned for us before the foundations of the world. What Jesus really wanted us all to do to carry on His work is already clearly spelled out in scripture. Funniest thing, I thought THAT was still supposed to be our church model.

One of the biggest Christian cop-outs of our time is the phrase : “I don’t feel led of the Lord to ….” People say that Jesus would never lead us to do something that went against the truth. That’s very true. Jesus would not. It’s our driving need for recognition, affirmation and personal fulfillment that gets us into trouble. Initially, the fruit looks pleasing to the eye. The purpose driven life model caters to this. That’s why we need to be careful that we don’t fall prey to redefining our roles as Christians, to the tune of a 40 million plus selling book, and begin making it our Bible instead. We need to get out of the habit of using Christian self-help books as a guide to model ourselves and our churches after, because changing God’s stated purpose for his people to fit our personal agenda is something Jesus really would NOT do.