CRN.Info and Analysis

An "editor", posting anonymously and cowardly writes:

A Little Leaven is reporting on a church whose latest sermon series will plum the “spiritual depths” of the Heroes TV Show. (We didn’t even know the show was supposed to be Christian)

When will these purpose-driven seeker-sensitive types come to grips with the fact that they are not producing disciples? Willow Creek’s data proves it! Instead, these people are only pretending to do church by spiritualizing pop-psych and self-help.

The problem is that’s not what the study found.  What the study found was that attending lots of programs didn’t correlate with spiritual maturity.  Let me quote Hybels on the issue:

Some of the stuff that we have put millions of dollars into thinking it would really help our people grow and develop spiritually, when the data actually came back it wasn’t helping people that much. Other things that we didn’t put that much money into and didn’t put much staff against is stuff our people are crying out for.

In other words, this wasn’t a study on the success or failure of a type of church as a whole.  Its gets even worse for the anonymous "researcher" who wrote this.  This study had absolutely nothing to do with the way sermons are framed or promoted.

Which leads me to question whether or not there was any actual research done. 

The more often these mistakes happen, and happen in favor of the watchdoggies’ point of view, the more I begin to think that these are less the result of incompetence, and more the result of malice.