Is Your Nazarene Church a Member of Willow Creek?
February 26, 2009 by exnazarene
A few years ago at lunch, a friend of mine and I, were relating our concerns for our different churches. It seemed we were both hearing the same things from the pulpits, though, her church sermons were ahead of what I was hearing by about six months.
We compared notes and found that we were both hearing the same packaged sermons, or packaged ideas of the 5 Signs of a Healthy Church….and Where Did the Church Measure Up on the five “healthy” signs.
This sermon series was clearly being presented to begin to shift the congregation and church into a ’seeker-sensitive’, market-driven mode. After my church finished with this series, the pastor, still riding the same wave, presented some canned sermons from an Andy Stanley series called The Foyer Environments. This went on for weeks as well. This was eventually followed with sermons on changing our focus to being on a journey with God and others. The term Sunday School was changed to Journey Groups. We were becoming “relevant” to the outside world. This was followed with the Nazarene Publishing House’s small group study of The Quest, by Frank Moore. (The Quest is a 40 day study patterned after Rick Warren’s 40 Days of Purpose.) Our next emphasis was small groups.
Back to my friend: She began confronting the leadership in her church on the topics and actually found several sermons from an online source that the pastor presented as his own. Eventually, she and her family left after seeing the slide into the Warren/Hybels seeker-sensitive, market-driven phenomena.
Our family left our church as well, only after trying for over 18 months to point out to the leadership that the Rick Warren/Bill Hybels/Andy Stanley strategy for growing a church was not the Biblical way to grow a church, or bring the people of the church into a mature faith. Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God. Romans 10:17 (Emergent influences were beginning to enter in as well and overlap with the seeker format. The Youth Group was having Rob Bell’s Nooma videos shown to them.)
It is so sad to see pastors run after the enticement of these mega-church deals at the expense of giving their congregations the solid food from God’s Word. Gone are the days of expository preaching because it is not seeker-friendly and might offend an unbeliever….and besides, it takes lots of time to study God’s Word and exegete out solid teaching and application. The early history of the Nazarene Church states that it was supposed to be a believer’s church.
If you have experienced this at your church, or are experiencing this same pattern at your church, the blame may not be with the universities, but the blame might be found with all the conferences that Saddleback, Willow Creek, and North Pointe Community offer during the year. (I know my pastor and staff were/are fans of Andy Stanley’s Catalyst and Drive Conferences presented annually at North Pointe. They would come back pumped and ready to implement the next market-driven ideas.)
I was astounded to come across a list of Nazarene churches who are listed as members of the Willow Creek Association. It costs $249 a year to be a member, and you get all the sermon outlines, power point slides, music suggestions, etc….along with many other perks. You can check the Membership Benefits at this link: https://www.willowcreek.com/membership/member_benefits.asp
Here is a list of Nazarene churches (as of this date) that are members of Willow Creek...
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GJ - This ex-Nazarene layman is smarter than a bunch of Lutherans--Missouri, WELS, ELS, CLC, and ELCA--who have stampeded like Gadarene swine off the cliff. The Barry/McCain administration of Missouri did nothing about the Willow Creek Association LCMS church near the Purple Palace. St. John in Ellisville is weirder than ever.
St. Mark in Depere, Wisconsin is WELS/Willow Creek. Tom Trapp's WELS church joined and trained the whole staff (big discounts!).
As you must know by now, Ski's training for The CORE is Andy Stanley and Craig Groeschel. Ski's sermon titles and texts are Groeschel's too.
KJV Mark 5:13 And forthwith Jesus gave them leave. And the unclean spirits went out, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the sea, (they were about two thousand;) and were choked in the sea.
