Churches will be tempted to give in to a survival instinct and do whatever it takes to increase attendance. They’ll work hard to “just get ‘em in the door’. The result is many different methods of attracting religious ‘consumers’ that might seem contradictory to the message being broadcast. The contradiction is justified because of the possibility of souls being saved.
Understood in this way, the end— the greatest end– justifies the means to that end. And that is what is called pragmatism in the church.
Pragmatism since the 1900’s
The two largest and most influential of the pragmatic approaches to ministry are these:
- “Decisionistic Regeneration”, i.e. creating psychological distress or emotional euphoria in order to cause someone to make an instantaneous decision in favour of Christ.
- “Seeker-Sensitive” Ministry, i.e. orienting a church’s ministry toward a demographic subset of the community and addressing all of that group’s ‘felt needs’ or preferences as religious consumers.
Now in both instances of pragmatic ministry, there is a desire to see sinners come to saving faith in Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, there is a failure to understand what saving faith really is, as well as a naivete about the danger that giving false assurance to the person who is only temporarily interested in religious things.
Of course, ministry among real human beings will require wisdom about adiaphora, the things indifferent. This comes into play as we see changes across cultures and centuries. However, we can’t let the wisdom of contextualization give way to pragmatism which pursues results at the expense of fundamental misunderstandings about truth.
What is Faith?
In the examples of decisionistic regeneration and seeker-sensitive ministry, both types of pragmatism had thin understandings of saving faith. They thought that saving faith was merely a mental assent to certain facts about Jesus Christ. Even if repentance was mentioned (which it rarely was), it had more of the character of a momentary emotional regret, than a settled turning away from an old life, to new life in Christ.
The seeker-sensitive model of ministry misunderstood faith as well. They thought that through the benefits of proximity to Christians, the appeal of Christian community would provide sufficient enough grounds for a person to give assent to the facts about Christ and identify as a Christian. In terms of the classic threefold understanding of saving faith, they would only be asking for knowledge and assent, without trust (notitia, assensus, without fiducia).
Nominalism
What is interesting to observe is that even leaders in the seeker sensitive movement have acknowledged that there should have been more emphasis on discipleship. The result of this neglect was that some of the largest churches in the world were filled with people who had only marginal understandings of the gospel. It became an embarrassment to the Evangelical movement that some of its largest churches were producing ‘nominal’ Christians, the very charge which Evangelicals had put to liberal mainline Protestants.
As the 21st century enters its second decade, Christians will have to retrieve the lessons of the past, even the recent past of the last century. Pragmatism threatened to ruin the renewal movement of gospel-centred Evangelicals.
Let us be watchful and careful that we don’t let pragmatism ruin the renewal today.
Photo Credit: The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. George Bellows, Billy Sunday. Retrieved from http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47dc-8e43-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99