Beware of Bandwagons
Evangelicals seem to love bandwagons. Just as there are ever-changing trends, fads, movements and a celebrity culture within our secular culture, so it is within the evangelical subculture of contemporary Christianity. And many Christians today hop from the bandwagon of one spiritual fad to the next, in a restless, endless, unsettled search for what has been described as “the next big thing.” Examples of such evangelical “bandwagons” abound:
– The “emerging church” and “emergent church” bandwagon…
– The “Left Behind” book series and movie(s) bandwagon…
– The Theonomy and “Christian Reconstruction” bandwagon…
– The “Heaven is for Real” I had a near-death experience but God sent me back book and movie bandwagon…
– The “Young, Restless and Reformed” bandwagon…
– The Ken Ham, Answers in Genesis and Creation Museum bandwagon…
– The “biblical patriarchy” movement bandwagon…
– The “Culture Warrior” and Christian activism/transformationalism bandwagon…
– The movements and/or ministries associated with celebrity preachers and teachers such as Max Lucado, Joel Osteen, Charles Stanley, Francis Chan, Greg Laurie, John MacArthur, R.C. Sproul, Doug Wilson, etc., bandwagon…
And the list could go on.
Not all movements and/or ministries that believers tend to turn into bandwagons are necessarily bad. Some of the Christian “celebrities” (for example, John MacArthur, R.C. Sproul, etc.) are pretty sound, orthodox teachers. But the problem comes when a public figure (like a well known and gifted preacher) becomes a “celebrity” and spawns a ministry that turns into a “movement” that draws believers to unthinkingly “jump on the bandwagon” and blindly follow. The problem comes when believers gravitate from one bandwagon to another, from one favorite preacher to another, from one “great move of God” to “the next big thing,” and thus very often from one church to another in a long-term pattern of endless church-hopping.
God’s Word urges us as the Body of Christ to press on to “mature manhood” (i.e., spiritual maturity); and one of the reasons why we are to do so is “so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes” (Ephesians 4:13-14, ESV). It seems to me that the evangelical subculture exhibits precisely what this passage warns about: It is constantly being tossed about by every wind of doctrine, never firmly settled or rooted, always open to being manipulated by the next evangelical marketing scheme, unstable and prone to being led about from one new evanglical bandwagon to the next.
Dear readers, let us beware of the bandwagons that abound in the evangelical subculture, and the spiritual immaturity and instability that such bandwagons display. Instead, let us be grounded in the unchanging and eternally-relevant truth of God’s Word. Let us confess and be grounded in “the faith once for all delivered to the saints.” And let us strive to demonstrate ever-growing spiritual maturity and stability through being responsible, loyal members and active participants in a local, Bible-believing, gospel-preaching expression of the historic Christian Church.
Over at the “Mortification of Spin” podcast, the hosts Carl Trueman, Todd Pruitt and Aimee Byrd have a stimulating discussion of this issue in their podcast entitled “Abandoning the Bandwagon.” It was the inspiration for this blog article. You can find the podcast here: http://www.mortificationofspin.org/mos/podcast/22531