Many evangelicals say they’re just trying to satisfy demands not met by traditional churches. Craig Groeschel, who launched Life Church in Edmond, Okla., in 1996, started out doing market research with non-churchgoers in the area — and got an earful. “They said churches were full of hypocrites and were boring,” he recalls. So he designed Life Church to counter those preconceptions, with lively, multimedia-filled services in a setting that’s something between a rock concert and a coffee shop.

Once established, some ambitious churches are making a big business out of spreading their expertise. Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., formed a consulting arm called Willow Creek Assn. It earned $17 million last year, partly by selling marketing and management advice to 10,500 member churches from 90 denominations. Jim Mellado, the hard-charging Harvard MBA who runs it, last year brought an astonishing 110,000 church and lay leaders to conferences on topics such as effective leadership. “Our entrepreneurial impulse comes from the Biblical mandate to get the message out,” says Willow Creek founder Bill Hybels, who hired Stanford MBA Greg Hawkins, a former McKinsey & Co. consultant, to handle the church’s day-to-day management. Willow Creek’s methods have even been lauded in a Harvard Business School case study.

Hybel’s consumer-driven approach is evident at Willow Creek, where he shunned stained glass, Bibles, or even a cross for the 7,200-seat, $72 million sanctuary he recently built. The reason? Market research suggested that such traditional symbols would scare away non-churchgoers. He also gives practical advice. On a recent Wednesday evening, one of his four “teaching” pastors gave a service that started with 20 minutes of music, followed by a lengthy sermon about the Christian approach to personal finances. He told the 5,000 listeners about resisting advertising aimed at getting people to buy things they don’t need and suggested they follow up at home by e-mailing questions. Like Osteen, Hybel packages self-help programs with a positive message intended to make people feel good about themselves. “When I walk out of a service, I feel completely relieved of any stress I walked in with,” says Phil Earnest, 38, a sales manager who in 2003 switched to Willow Creek from the Methodist Church he found too stodgy. ~Yahoo Finance

Granted, I belong to a liturgical tradition in which musical instruments are officially and properly forbidden, to say nothing of “multimedia-filled services,” and normally I don’t bother to comment on the liturgical oddities and absurdities of other confessions (since they are all, in various ways, quite strange and shocking to me), but all of this is truly appalling to me. I actually feel sorry for people who think they have found true meaning in such “worship.”

If it aims to make people “feel good about themselves,” it is not challenging, instructive or edifying. And how can it be edifying in places where there is no Cross (rather important to “getting out the message,” wouldn’t you say?) and no Bible (what, pray, are these people reading if not the Bible?)? Worship has ceased to be a living relationship with God, and has indeed become a glorified self-help assembly, as if the lesson to be taken from the Gospel is in any way consonant with the language of “self-help,” which suggests a bizarre preoccupation with the self and autonomy in these churches that is itself spiritually dangerous.

What is more, liturgy is our work for the supplication and glorification of God. It is not entertainment, or something to be jazzed up to keep the spiritually bored titillated long enough to pay attention through a whole service. Consider our conventional English word for liturgical celebrations: service. Why do we call it that? Someone is being served by it, which is to say that someone is receiving the submission and obedience of others. Whom are these pastors serving, and whom are the people serving? All of the business plans, marketing jargon and “giving the people what they want” tells me that the pastors are serving the people not as a humble shepherd but in the way that waiters or customer service representatives of corporations “serve” people, and it tells me that the people are serving themselves as if the church were a buffet line and not a consecrated place in which man honours his true God.

Goodness, if some of these people found Methodist churches “stodgy,” what would they make of an Orthodox church? Of course, the more traditional and authentic a church is, the less “stodgy” or “boring” it will seem, as more traditional liturgies convey to people the words of Life and should, if the heart is willing, inspire and spiritually delight. And if people are so concerned about “hypocrites,” they should know that they will find them wherever they go. We are fallen, and at times we are all hypocrites, which is to remind us that we have quite enough spiritual labour ahead of us for ourselves without needing to worry about whether anyone else is being hypocritical.

If people are going to church to “feel good about themselves,” they have surely got the wrong ideas about Our Lord and His Church. The Lord does not ask us to feel good about our wretched present state, but calls us to take up our cross and to be perfect as His Father is perfect. Our very being being transfigured, perfected and deified by God–this is the Good for which we should yearn, rather than the pitiful, self-important, self-congratulatory, self-satisfaction of feeling vindicated by shallow, sentimental pop-worship.

It isn’t that God wishes us to be miserable, or something of that sort, but that so much of what we believe about ourselves is delusion encouraging us to “feel good about ourselves” instead of being watchful, serious and honest about the state of our souls. Christian life involves, and indeed must have, the stripping away of that delusion before repentance and salvation in Christ are possible. Surely Orthodox monastic wisdom that self-esteem is the most pernicious vice would help cure some of that delusion in these people.

Truly, this is something like the abomination of desolation (Matt. 24:15). Something sinister and corrupt stands in place of the worship of God in these churches. Pardon the apocalypticism, but if these churches are the cutting edge of the future of evangelical Christianity in this country I can only hope that the Orthodox here are ready to recover the bewildered, spiritually lost millions who will probably flee from these increasingly hollow forms of religion in a few decades’ time.

Hat tip to A.C. Kleinheider.