Life Church Down The Road

I’ve been think­ing about LifeChurch.tv late­ly (check the Wikipedia arti­cle on them).

In case you’re not famil­iar with the church, it’s one of the best-known exam­ples of the mul­ti-site church move­ment. At present, Life Church uses live video feeds to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly have the same ser­vice in Okla­homa, Ari­zona, Texas, and Ten­nessee. They also stream the ser­vice over the inter­net.

They both start new church­es and acquire exist­ing church­es (that’s their lan­guage, not mine. They are very clear that they are not propos­ing merg­ers — they are propos­ing acqui­si­tions — lis­ten to Kevin Pen­ry). If you’d like to be acquired you can sign up online ask the dust divx movie online .

One thing I want to praise them for: they make their resources avail­able online for free. They’re clear­ly very King­dom-mind­ed.

But some­thing about LifeChurch’s approach wor­ries me.

I’ll explain what it is after some nec­es­sary dis­claimers:

1. I have no fun­da­men­tal the­o­log­i­cal prob­lem with mul­ti-site church­es. If you think it’s okay for a sin­gle-site church to have two ser­vices on a Sun­day morn­ing then you’re incon­sis­tent to oppose mul­ti­ple-site church­es. Once you cede the split­ting of the con­gre­ga­tion it’s all just a mat­ter of degree (if this is not clear to you then spend some time think­ing through your prob­lems with mul­ti-site church­es and how they are also applic­a­ble to a church that has an 8:00am ser­vice and an 11am ser­vice).
2. There are a lot of ways to do mul­ti-site church and there is cer­tain­ly diver­si­ty with­in the move­ment. My con­cerns about LifeChurch’s approach don’t apply to all the ways mul­ti-site is done.

Here’s my con­cern: if LifeChurch’s phi­los­o­phy becomes the norm (an excel­lent test of the sound­ness of a phi­los­o­phy) then we lose some­thing vital to the health of the church.

Let’s say LifeChurch con­tin­ues to grow and spreads into 10 or 15 states. They reach 100,000 in aggre­gate atten­dance. 200,000. 500,000. 1,000,000. These num­bers are not unrea­son­able — mul­ti-site church­es seem to be scale-free net­works and thus will exhib­it the win­ner-take-all phe­nom­e­non. The largest mul­ti-site will be about twice as large as its next-great­est neigh­bor and so on down the line.

In effect, LifeChurch (or some­one like it) will become the Wal-Mart of church­es soon, and just like Wal-Mart the over­whelm­ing nature of their dom­i­nance will be sur­pris­ing and will take a while to sink in. And just like Wal-Mart, that will bring some good and some bad along with it.

What hap­pens when the pri­ma­ry leader of the Amer­i­can gigachurch laps­es into stu­pid­i­ty, heresy, or moral fail­ure? How does that affect Chris­tian­i­ty in Amer­i­ca?

This isn’t an unre­al­is­tic con­cern — evan­gel­i­cal­ism has a his­to­ry of each of these blun­ders. And the high­er-pro­file a per­son is the more prone they seem to be to falling into one or more of these.

• Stu­pid­i­ty: pub­lic dis­plays of igno­rance, par­tic­u­lar­ly on polit­i­cal or sci­en­tif­ic issues
• Heresy: say­ing things about Jesus or the Bible that just aren’t true
• Moral Fail­ure: finan­cial impro­pri­ety or sex­u­al immoral­i­ty, for exam­ple

As things stand now, when Joe Preach­er on tele­vi­sion has a moral blowout that church is destroyed but the rest of us rock on, sad­dened but unaf­fect­ed.

Imag­ine a sin­gle church which con­tains 35% of all evan­gel­i­cals in Amer­i­ca (and a hand­ful in Eng­land and Aus­tralia) hav­ing the same blowout. It’s a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent sto­ry.

That’s bad enough, but what I real­ly wor­ry about is the lack of ide­o­log­i­cal diver­si­ty such an arrange­ment would bring about. Evan­gel­i­cals are already prone to sheep-like behav­ior, but at least we cur­rent­ly hang out in dif­fer­ent flocks.

When we cre­ate an evan­gel­i­cal pope who has far more direct influ­ence over his orga­ni­za­tion than the Pope has over the Catholic church, we will lose some­thing vibrant and vital about evan­gel­i­cal­ism. If we’re not care­ful, we’ll lose a vital part of the gains of the Ref­or­ma­tion.

LifeChurch (and the entire mul­ti-site move­ment) have a lot to offer and are doing some won­der­ful things. On the whole, I have high praise for them.

But it is not unqual­i­fied praise.