The Great Assumption
What is motivating Seeker-sensitive worship?
Bart Swaim
January 1, 1997
The whole business of "seeker-friendly" Worship, I must admit, makes me squeamish: musical performances emulating mtv, dramatic interludes inspired by television ads, sermons based on popular sitcoms, and all the other techniques that "seeker-sensitive" churches have imported from popular culture. It all seems fantastic, rather like a Borges story. I have no interest, though, in writing an article on the merits of electric guitars versus pipe organs. Nor do I think anybody wants to read one. But a more interesting subject is the motivation underlying seeker-sensitive techniques— the commitment to making worship evangelistic. The idea of worship as an evangelistic tool motivates Christians to design their worship according to the perceived preferences of those not yet converted. Surely Bill Hybels, pastor of Willow Creek Community Church outside of Chicago (the most well-known seeker church in the United States), would not propose that the best way to worship God is via a "TopTen List" in the manner of David Letterman. Rather, he adopts such practices because, in his view, fifty-one percent or more of the unbelievers who visit his church like Letterman's show. And this assumption—that worship is, or ought to be, undertaken for the purpose of evangelism—remains, with only a few exceptions, unquestioned. Nearly all books on "church growth" adopt this great assumption, if for no other reason than that they are, after all, books on church growth. While many such books, thankfully, do not define worship styles solely by their evangelistic merits, even those books that do speak of worship as something other than evangelism seem to view it as good only to the extent that it motivates worshipers to evangelize. So it is, ...
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