Week 9 Reply to Alex Lazo’s Weblog

I think that you are right that some American churches are trying to show off of their programs and activities. I want talk about a church that can be one of the competitive churches in Southern California. I visited Saddleback church (Rick Warren) and was so amazed at the decoration of the church building and the size of the programs. It was really spectacularly competitive with other churches. What really struck me though was the population of the church members. I heard that most of them were evangelized by this church. In a sense, I think this is good to be “seeker-sensitive,” but then the problem is that the new members do not seem to grow deeper into spirituality compared to other models such as Pentecostal or Charismatic because all of the setup is fixed for entertaining the seekers. I may be wrong at this view since I just visited only one time and heard about it from others. But I believe that there are pros and cons in this type of model.