There was a small blow up last week over some admittedly bizarre statements made by Andy Stanley during his Sunday sermon. I was going to link you to a clip so you could listen to it, but it was conveniently removed when Northpoint copyright claimed it. You could go listen to his full sermon from the 28th of February. OR you could read the transcript below.
"When I hear adults say, “Well I don’t like a big church, I like about 200, I want to be able to know everybody,” I say, “You are so stinking selfish. You care nothing about the next generation. All you care about is you and your five friends. You don’t care about your kids [or] anybody else’s kids” … If you don’t go to a church large enough where you can have enough middle schoolers and high schoolers to separate them so they can have small groups and grow up the local church, you are a selfish adult. Get over it. Find yourself a big old church where your kids can connect with a bunch of people and grow up and love the local church. Instead… you drag your kids to a church they hate, and then they grow up and hate the local church. They go to college, and you pray that there will be a church in the college town that they connect with. Guess what? All those churches are big."
Super weird. Totally indefensible. And to his credit, Stanley figured that out on Thursday the week after the sermon. Now why did he wait until Thursday if he knew what he said was wrong, I don't know. But he apologized on Twitter, albeit in a very casual "whoopsie daisy, aww shucks" kind of way. Apparently he and Northpoint's PR wing didn't think that was sufficient, so he gave Christianity Today an interview to talk about the quote which they posted earlier today. You can find it here.
I'm glad that he apologized, and I don't bear him any
ill will over this incident, I'll assume that this interview is
entirely sincere and he regrets his comments. However, I would still argue
that his comments were definitely evidence of a less overt but still very
deficient idea of the church that he's showed off elsewhere as well. Indeed, I'd argue that his
apology interview, a specific, intentional PR piece to clear up the issue,
shows the troubles with his view of the church.
He says that parents should never force their kids to go to a church they don't like just because their parents like it. This comment really shows off his view of church as a product, as a type of spiritual entertainment. If church is just about what you like, then sure, you should go to whatever all of you like instead of just some of you, the most happiness for the most people right? But church is about glorifying God and enjoying him, not about constantly enjoying yourself. You may need to glorify him in being willing to endure the hardship of bad music, or a derpy youth guy, or uncomfortable pews, etc. God forbid, they might actually expect you to keep your kids in service rather than shuttling them out for edutainment (a word which my spell checker does not correct, look at the lows to which we have sunk). His comment says "pick the church you and your kids enjoy the most", my rebuttal is that God disciplines his children to learn to do what is best for them, which is not always (and I'd say rarely) what they would enjoy the most in the moment. He tries to explain it through the lens of the parents being "selfish", but he just comes off as saying "if you're going to a church with kid's min that isn't exciting like ours, you're selfish".
He says earlier in the interview that his target was attendees not church staff at other churches, but that doesn't change what seems to be the message he's sending to parents, "engaging, entertaining kids ministry will get your kids saved, so if you're in a boring, traditional kids ministry because you love the church, you should come to Northpoint instead so your kids won't be bored." Boredom, not impiety or sin is seen as the great evil of kid's ministry for Stanley. (Also, I'd point out that in the interview he never walked back his comment that you can't do good youth ministry if you don't have enough kids to divide high school and middle school, in fact he said that you should only not do that if you're too small to do so.)
When talking about church planting, he strongly implies that the goal whenever possible should be to create a megachurch. When he talks about his relationship to other churches, he talks about all the things Northpoint does for them and teaches them, nothing about things small churches can teach larger ones. Stanley's ecclesiology says "the megachurch is the greatest development in the history of churches and everyone should be like us." Even when specifically asked about how small churches have informed Northpoint he struggles to point it out. He seems to say they learn from smaller churches who are just like them and took their baptismal practice from a small church. But then he immediately starts talking about all the things HE does for small churches (because apparently video sunday school curriculum counts as him teaching the class, I know a few teachers who will be glad to know they don't need to show up Sunday because Andy will be showing up to field questions for them).
I think Andy suffers from church CEO syndrome. He looks at everything as numbers and efficiency. You see it in his books and conference teaching all the time (I've read chunks of Visioneering and Enemies of the Heart and I attended a conference with him a couple years back). He's perfectly okay making authoritative statements on issues to which scripture doesn't speak and his answers pretty much uniformly conform to what corporate America (albeit, good, moral Murica) would say about the issue. I'll gladly accept his apology, and I'm far from disowning him as a Christian or anything silly like that, but I think he's got some major doctrinal issues, and I'd hazard a guess that he'd brush off my criticisms because I don't have experience in large churches, and I think that's part of the problem. Stanley sees himself as the top of the mountain, the CEO of a spiritual enterprise, and that's a place where there's no reason to listen to folks who tell you what you don't want to hear until you are forced to do so. And that's a scary place to be for the church leader.
He says that parents should never force their kids to go to a church they don't like just because their parents like it. This comment really shows off his view of church as a product, as a type of spiritual entertainment. If church is just about what you like, then sure, you should go to whatever all of you like instead of just some of you, the most happiness for the most people right? But church is about glorifying God and enjoying him, not about constantly enjoying yourself. You may need to glorify him in being willing to endure the hardship of bad music, or a derpy youth guy, or uncomfortable pews, etc. God forbid, they might actually expect you to keep your kids in service rather than shuttling them out for edutainment (a word which my spell checker does not correct, look at the lows to which we have sunk). His comment says "pick the church you and your kids enjoy the most", my rebuttal is that God disciplines his children to learn to do what is best for them, which is not always (and I'd say rarely) what they would enjoy the most in the moment. He tries to explain it through the lens of the parents being "selfish", but he just comes off as saying "if you're going to a church with kid's min that isn't exciting like ours, you're selfish".
He says earlier in the interview that his target was attendees not church staff at other churches, but that doesn't change what seems to be the message he's sending to parents, "engaging, entertaining kids ministry will get your kids saved, so if you're in a boring, traditional kids ministry because you love the church, you should come to Northpoint instead so your kids won't be bored." Boredom, not impiety or sin is seen as the great evil of kid's ministry for Stanley. (Also, I'd point out that in the interview he never walked back his comment that you can't do good youth ministry if you don't have enough kids to divide high school and middle school, in fact he said that you should only not do that if you're too small to do so.)
When talking about church planting, he strongly implies that the goal whenever possible should be to create a megachurch. When he talks about his relationship to other churches, he talks about all the things Northpoint does for them and teaches them, nothing about things small churches can teach larger ones. Stanley's ecclesiology says "the megachurch is the greatest development in the history of churches and everyone should be like us." Even when specifically asked about how small churches have informed Northpoint he struggles to point it out. He seems to say they learn from smaller churches who are just like them and took their baptismal practice from a small church. But then he immediately starts talking about all the things HE does for small churches (because apparently video sunday school curriculum counts as him teaching the class, I know a few teachers who will be glad to know they don't need to show up Sunday because Andy will be showing up to field questions for them).
I think Andy suffers from church CEO syndrome. He looks at everything as numbers and efficiency. You see it in his books and conference teaching all the time (I've read chunks of Visioneering and Enemies of the Heart and I attended a conference with him a couple years back). He's perfectly okay making authoritative statements on issues to which scripture doesn't speak and his answers pretty much uniformly conform to what corporate America (albeit, good, moral Murica) would say about the issue. I'll gladly accept his apology, and I'm far from disowning him as a Christian or anything silly like that, but I think he's got some major doctrinal issues, and I'd hazard a guess that he'd brush off my criticisms because I don't have experience in large churches, and I think that's part of the problem. Stanley sees himself as the top of the mountain, the CEO of a spiritual enterprise, and that's a place where there's no reason to listen to folks who tell you what you don't want to hear until you are forced to do so. And that's a scary place to be for the church leader.
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