Seeker Sensitive

After surviving the loss of its founding pastor, Mt. Tam Christian Community eventually found a capable new leader. We hired John, who had been a successful church planter in Southern California, as well as a pioneer in the “seeker sensitive” church movement. Also dubbed “user-friendly,” these churches were carefully designed to attract visitors and put them at ease, particularly those who didn’t normally attend church (i.e., seekers).

And John hailed from the place where it all began. In 1955, the Rev. Robert Schuller launched Garden Grove Community Church in a most unusual venue—a rented drive-in theater. Schuller’s goal was to present his Southern California neighbors with a positive, entertaining version of Christianity in a non-threatening setting. And it went over like gangbusters. In 1980, the church became known as The Crystal Cathedral after erecting a massive glass sanctuary that held over 3,000 worshippers. Along the way, Schuller’s congregation became known as the first seeker sensitive church in America.

But others would soon follow. Scores of pastors resonated with the theory that most “unchurched” people stay home on Sunday mornings because worship services appear unintelligible and irrelevant to them. They go to church with a friend, let’s say, and have a hard time singing along with unfamiliar hymns that feature unusual (if not downright gory) titles like O Sacred Head, Now Wounded and There is a Fountain Filled With Blood. They can’t figure out when to stand up, sit down, or kneel; then they have to listen to an overweight minister with a bad haircut preach about some ethereal topic like “pre-millennial eschatology” for 45 minutes. Is it any wonder, the theory goes, that people don’t like going to church?

To combat these formidable barriers to church attendance, seeker sensitive congregations make the worship experience as accessible, entertaining, and anonymous as possible. For starters, visitors are never asked to introduce themselves and are sometimes even discouraged from contributing money during the offering. The church choir is replaced by a worship band—complete with drums, guitar, and synthesizer—and hymns are jettisoned in favor of upbeat, catchy worship songs. Sermons are brief, chatty, focused on a real-life issue like marriage or financial management, and augmented by dramatic sketches or video clips from recent movies. In short, everything aspect of the worship service is painstakingly designed to communicate, “You are welcome here, and there is absolutely no chance whatsoever that anything weird is going to happen.”

Mt. Tam Christian Community had a bit of a head start on the whole seeker sensitive phenomenon, as we already featured casual dress and a worship band. Still, readers of this blog will be aware that weird things did happen from time to time.

But with John on board, that was about to change.