Hideous Frame of Reference

Moving beyond specific instances, there is a broad and sinister trend in churches across the US.
By no means am I in favor of democratic church polity. This was never the New Testament model, and what we today consider the modern version (Robert’s Rules of Order, etc.) is entirely Post-Enlightenment, not even really what the Greeks had in mind. And what the Greeks had in mind was hardly anything at all like the Hebraic New Testament congregations.
Nor do I support the Medieval version of feudal polity, much less the Reformation presbytery. Those are all Western inventions, far removed from the New Testament (which everyone wants to forget is a collection of mostly Hebraic documents which simply used Greek as the means to transmission). The New Testament church was an Ancient Near Eastern tribal polity, a forgotten form of Eastern feudalism, which centered entirely upon people, not property.
Today we have a growing trend to technocracy of a sort. The Purpose Driven (PD) model has been widely panned, though often from a false concern for trappings. There is nothing amiss with dressing down, a casual atmosphere, using contemporary music, nor any other merely cosmetic changes. There is nothing particularly sacred about hymnals, choirs in robes and suits with ties. All of that sort of complaint serves as controlled opposition. The real problem is the Purpose Driven theology is blasphemous; it’s based on a wide range of New Age paganism. That’s fine for New Age religions, but it has no place in Christian churches.
We shouldn’t suggest Rick Warren consciously chose to follow evil. I’m quite sure he’s a true believer, even though he has been caught talking out both sides of his mouth. He’s just a man with a vision and career in church leadership which he doesn’t realize is completely wrong.
The condensed summary of Rick Warren’s work is this: There is virtually nothing about sin, redemption, repentance and turning away from this sinful world. The whole focus is on worldly success. It’s all about having a good, conservative middle class American society, not simply as a decent way to live, but to completely displace the Hebrew religion of Jesus Christ. It amounts to a peculiarly Western version of law covenant, a soft legalism which uses the full range of political corruption to accomplish the management goals. There is no Spirit of God at work, but a substitution of very human enthusiasm. There is an appearance of following the Bible by shallow application of words which appear to match the topic at hand, but which often has little to do with the actual context of Scripture. Charisma of the man is the only accepted sign of Spirit anointing, so that there is a rather soft personality cult effect. The officially chosen programming is fully enforced, though you’d never notice it without being there and seeing first hand what kind of emotional pressure is applied to those who deviate from the script. Nobody seems to notice the programming seldom relates to any actual real need, but that the participants are manipulated into believing they need it desperately.
I won’t take the space here to lay out the scientific evidence, but all those giant screens from which the preacher’s message is projected are proved to produce the effect of dampening human critical thinking process. While people can resist this effect, the vast majority are so highly conditioned by their own habits of massive TV and movie consumption, their resistance is rather effectively suspended.
Even churches which manage to keep some semblance of good Christian doctrine still suffer from absorbing this kind of structure and basic assumptions about what is supposed to happen after repentance. We end up with a rather large collection of spiritual infants never reaching any significant spiritual maturity.
This insidious beast has been long displacing genuine Christian religion for more some two decades. It’s now to the point a significant number of new monster churches and other organizations are built from this model at the start. Thus, rather than some nasty fights which make the news, the whole thing becomes the core framework up front. It is submerged from sight, with a kinder, gentler face. Yet the result is the same: It’s just a cultural caricature of genuine Christian faith. Indeed, so deeply is this thing submerged, it becomes the culture of church management thinking. The current younger leaders, the movers and shakers, are so deeply influenced, they seem utterly convinced God Himself works this way. When they read Scripture, they read it in this PD language, as it were.
The greatest disaster is not really the huge number of people deceived, because they participate willingly. It’s all quite comfortable for them, and they absorb the same subcultural bias without thinking. God alone can set them free. But there is a very large number of people empowered by the Holy Spirit to bring His love who don’t need or want this spoon-fed structure, because they are intimately acquainted with the actual needs of the people in front of them. Real human needs seldom coincide with that high-tech programming. These people are, in many different ways, shown the door. Then there is an even larger group of needy people who stand to gain from the ministry of those squeezed out the organization. I am hardly the only one who has witnessed the distressing disappearance of the very most effective ministries by truly talented people who don’t happen to have official permit to operate.
Fundamental to any genuine Christian congregation is a a regular, and rather academic, study of the Bible, balanced with a concerted effort to meet you where you are. It makes room for more than just the leadership to serve as a conduit for God’s miraculous touch. Everyone is encouraged to rise as far above this hideous fallen world as possible, and become more spiritual, less worldly. It is assumed there will be a natural degree of variation, and the standard of what constitutes a threat is not based on modern management techniques, but ancient family love and stability seeking. The only physical property needed is access to some copy of the Bible in the common vernacular of the members.
Yes, there is a bit more to genuinely following Christ than that, but even this seems alien to the latest crop of monster churches.