2 Men Who Rule the Church From the Grave

In reading Dave Breese's 7 Men Who Rule the World from the Grave, two names stand out as responsible for the decline of church culture over the last two hundred years. These men undermined the authority of the Bible and the even the existence of truth. The consequences of their ideas are evident on the staff and youth group pages of many church websites.

The contemporary church overemphasises the personality of the preacher, minimising the importance of the gospel itself. This error makes church more about the preacher than the gospel proclaimed and lived out amongst God’s people. It can be traced back to Julius Wellhausen’s rejection of the sufficiency, clarity, authority, and necessity of scripture. Wellhausen was one of the fathers of religious liberalism.

Downstream of this teaching that the Bible is unreliable, where everyone can choose which parts to believe, there is little objective biblical truth that a pastor can appeal to and preach from. Many churches, then, grow through the pastor’s brilliant wit, or the worship leader’s emotional address and chiselled jaw. This is not gospel growth. This is not good.

Instead, churches should let the Bible speak for itself. Real spiritual growth happens when the church is consistently hearing and reading God’s word. The pastor of the church I grew up in once mentioned this issue to my mom. He became concerned that his personality was what attracted certain people to the church. And, to his credit, he was a really fun and unique person.

My pastor began to steer the Sunday service away from a focus on his own words and style of leading. Heeding Colossians 3:16, he implemented liturgical Bible readings, creeds and hymns based on the scriptures. Every church should be grounded principally in the Word of God. Shaping the church gathering around the Bible being read, sung, confessed, and preached, will help guard a church against the pitfall of attracting people chiefly through its leaders.

While Wellhausen believed that one could pick and choose which parts of the Bible to believe, Kierkegaard took this one step further. He said that one could choose what to believe about anything. His writings sparked the Existentialism movement, the theory that the only objective truth is that which an individual chooses to believe. This focus on the individual is an error particularly evident in young people’s church groups.

Youth Group or Teen Church is the gathering of young adults, usually between the ages of twelve and twenty. Most meetings include games (on a scale of fun to nauseating), chatting to friends, building hype, and singing the latest Christian music with some hits from the 90’s thrown in. One of the teens will probably stand up in the middle of the evening to remind the others that Jesus loves them and urge them to invite Him into their hearts. Although at surface level, this seems harmless (or even fruitful) there is one main problem with this Youth Group culture.

The focus in these evenings is on the individual: each member’s personal relationship with God. This is done at the cost of individuals seeing themselves as part of the body of Christ. During singing all eyes are closed as thoughts are turned inwards – Can I feel God’s presence right now? What is the Holy Spirit trying to say to me? Why don’t I hear Him as clearly as I did last week?

Putting the individual at the centre of what is meant to be Christian fellowship is not only contradictory but unhealthy. It teaches the young adult that he - and what he believes - is what’s most important. This focus on the individual has been heavily influenced by the mystic, Soren Kierkegaard (born 1813). He argued that the church was lacking passion and needed more fervour.

To Kierkegaard, all that mattered was him and God, and consequently he stopped going to church. This goes right against God’s command to keep meeting together now, to encourage one another as we anticipate the day when Christians from all the ages will be together, face to face with God (Hebrews 10:25).

Too many young Christians today have forgotten that their faith is bigger than themselves. Older Christians have lost their grounding in the Word of God; they are attracted to church by big personalities in the pulpit. Wellhausen and Kierkegaard and those who have absorbed their ideologies are greatly to blame for these significant errors in the modern church.