The guest post today is from a blogger I have guested here not that long ago. This particular post made me consider how important it is to be aware of the movements and trends in society when we are involved in a church.
This Holy Soup post by Thom Shultz discusses the ‘Seeker Sensitive’ movement in churches in the last generation or more.
After reading this post I did a little research, and learned a few things about this movement that I did not know before. For instance, the seeker sensitive movement has been closely associated with the mega-churches, primarily in North America, who have modeled their worship services on other ‘entertainment’ that interests society as a whole, as a means of attracting non-church-ed people.
What I did realize about the seeker-sensitive movement is that of the desire to make church appealing to those for whom going to church is foreign.
This is not a bad thing, not at all! Certainly if someone enters the doors of a church they should be warmly welcomed, not looked at from afar with curiosity. No visitor should enter the doors of a church, and leave afterwords without someone at least greeting them. After all, as Christians, we would all agree that our purpose is the Great Commission (the instruction from Jesus to spread his teachings to the world), and we really cannot do that without relationship. How fortunate we Christians are when that world walks right through our doors.
What this post from Thom Shultz is saying is that maybe their are fewer seekers than we previously thought? Maybe we have created and re-created our worship for seekers who are no longer seeking?
Personally, I think our world will always have seekers. In the words of the French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian philosopher Blaise Pascal, “there is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.” And that “God shaped vacuum” will keep people seeking … they just might not be seeking in churches.
itsawonderfilledlife 