Seeker Churches: Promoting Traditional Religion in a Nontraditional Way (review)

The pastor of Second Baptist Church, Houston, believes that church should be fun. The Community Church of Joy in Phoenix engages in “entertainment evangelism.” Where do they look for inspiration? Disneyland. Rather like contemporary corporations, seeker churches exist for specific market niches, and they find that the Disney model serves them well for organizing everything from efficient parking lots to multimedia services. And yet, as Sargeant shows, these churches also want to be seen as orthodox guardians of the sacred, simply making ancient words and practices culturally relevant. How are such strategies pursued, and are these ambitious aspirations — such as becoming “friendlier than Disneyland” — realized? Or does the Disneyization of religion dilute doctrine and demote traditions?

The primary source for understanding seeker churches is their most prominent example, the 15,000 strong Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago. This church begain in 1975 with two young men in a Christian rock ban, Bill Hybels and Dave Holmbo. Today, not only do they boast their own mall-like themed premises, but numerous other congregations follow their lead and learn from their methods through the highly successfull Willow Creek Association. Sargeant claims that seeker churches represent one of the most significant new movements in American religion and one that will be increasingly influential. They have discovered the secret of “marketing the church,” according to George Barna. Seargant’s book explains how this is being accomplished, structuring his analysis around the concepts of ritual, message, strategy, organization, and translation. What is written about Willow Creek is supported by reference to (less systematic) comparative studies of other churches.

It is significant that Sargeant uses the key concepts he does because they bespeak some conventional kinds of analysis, and serve to create the contrasts with which his work deals. Older rituals may be discarded, only to be replaced with newer ones that emphasize informality, unmediated relationships with God, and the chance for relative anonymity at church. Even those markers of time through the year are Hallmark festivals, such as Mothers’ Day, and not Epiphany or Pentacost. The notion that a spoken word is central to Christian worship persists, even when the content of the message alters (to focus on “fulfillment” and “authenticity”). Strategies embrace new marketing techniques, justified for their effectiveness, and organization subtlely shifts from erstwhile hierarchies towards postmodern “flexible specialization.”

But those concepts also indicate how in many ways the seeker churches do still maintain strong connections with orthodox evangelicalism and must thus be seen in terms of continuity as much as radical reshaping. Even the shopping-mall type buildings and the lack of visible symbols such as the cross do not necessarily denote departure from recognizably Christian religion. Longer-term trends towards voluntaristic and privatized religiosity are often reinforced by seeker churches. Like Disneyland, then, they tend to support the status quo of consumer cultures and are likely to play little part in a social or cultural critique of — or modeling alternatives to — the American Way of Life.

Such conclusions clearly give Sargeant pause. While much careful ethnographic and survey research is evident here, Sargeant makes little effort to veil his own position. By contrasting seeker churches with particular kinds of more traditional, evangelical churches, he draws some distinctions that are far from uniformly positive. For instance, Robert Schuller’s notion that “sin” be rethought as “lack of self-esteem” seems like the start of a slipperly slope from a perspective of orthodoxy. Sargeant sees the consumer mentality supporting appropriate cultural styles such as the reintegration of the body into worship, but he cautions that the same mentality offers no means of “reining in” those who may be tempted to go “too far” in the process of cultural identification. Beyond this, Sargeant suggest that deliberately to compete with shopping malls may affect more than mere style or method. The message of that medium could turn out to be that religion is a good for private consumption with the corollary of “seek...