Chapter 4: Church Dating

Tim Challies correctly posits, “Technology shifts power.”[1] The proliferation of available sermons today is paralleled with the rapid distribution of Bibles that occurred after the printing press was invented. The effect on the church has been just as significant. Believers are even more in charge of their exposure to Christian truth and in more significant ways. Some even argue that there’s no longer a need for regular church attendance.

“Church dating” is a term coined by Joshua Harris in his book Stop Dating the Church. In that book, he challenges church-hopping Christians to stop two-timing and commit to one local church. He describes church-daters as me-centered, independent, and overly critical.[2] They pick and choose what suits their own interests. They select the music of one church, the preaching of another, and the friends of still another. The church-dater is all-powerful and technologies like his car, GPS, and iPhone, help him fulfill his desires. He separates his Christian experiences and fails to see the vital connection between preaching and body-life.

What motivates this kind of selfish spiritual hedonism? I believe at the core of a me-centered church-dater is a rebellious heart that avoids any kind of authority or accountability. The church is being weakened from the inside by an anti-authoritarian attitude.

Forty years ago, John Stott explained that the anti-authority mood of his day was having a negative impact upon preaching.[3] If that was true then, how much more so today?

John MacArthur writes along the same lines: "It is something of a colossal understatement to say that we live in a world today that doesn’t respond to authority very well. If you doubt it, ask the police. Ask teachers, coaches, and congressmen. Ask employers, the Supreme Court, and the president. . . . Deep in the soul of every person is a streak of rugged individualism that begins in the womb and starts to show itself in the cradle. We all want to be our own god. We want to be captains of our soul and masters of our fate."[4]

People just don’t like to be commanded. They don’t like imperatives. They don’t like a Bible that prescribes action. Therefore, they don’t like preaching either, unless it’s the ear-tickling kind—the kind that compromises biblical truth (2 Tim 4:3–4).

“We want freedom to be ourselves, freedom to do whatever we choose,” Keith Drury explains, “This propensity may be Western and very American, but it is also sinful. The gospel of Jesus Christ calls us into submissive community with other Christians. It is our sinful nature that tells us to resist.”[5]

No wonder people have a consumeristic view of the church. There’s a secular heartbeat—an anti-authority mood that separates preaching from accountability-driven fellowship.

But it doesn’t stop there. For some people, church-dating doesn’t provide enough separation between them and the church. These people have taken their haphazard pic’n-mix attendance to a more permanent status. They don’t just date the church. They hate the church. I’ll describe them next week.

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[1] Tim Challies, The Next Story: Life and Faith After the Digital Explosion (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing, 2011), 42.

[2] Joshua Harris, Stop Dating the Church (Sisters, OR: Multnomah Publishers, 2004), 16–17.

[3] John R. W. Stott, Between Two Worlds: The Art of Preaching in the Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1998), 51–64.

[4] John MacArthur, Unleashing God’s Word in Your Life: How to Understand, Study and Apply God’s Word (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2003), 41.

[5] Keith W. Drury, There Is No I in Church: Moving Beyond Individual Spirituality to Experience God’s Power in the Church (Indianapolis, IN: Wesleyan Publishing House, 2006), 21–22.