Personal Preferences, Church Culture, and Biblical Authority

I have a theory about how we choose churches in North America. At this point, it’s just a theory, based on my own observations and experiences. Maybe one day I’ll be able to put some hard data behind it, but I’m sharing it now because I do suspect there’s some truth to this—and maybe you’ll find it helpful to reflect on.

The basic idea is that, in general, people don’t tend to choose a church based on objective factors, like doctrine or history. People don’t tend to say, “I know what this church believes, and I agree with those beliefs, and so that’s where I’ll settle.”

Instead, people gravitate towards a church when its culture fits with their personality, inclinations, temperament, and preferences. Often, that church’s doctrine is one of the last things they’ll consider as they decide whether or not it “feels right.”

I can think of some clear examples in people who have left Protestant churches for Roman Catholicism. They made the move because they liked the reverence or the aesthetic experience of the liturgy, and simply held their nose at some of Rome’s troublesome doctrine, accepting it as the price of admission for the great feelings of awe they got each week at mass.

But a similar dynamic occurs within Protestantism all the time. Growing up, I spent a number of years in various Charismatic environments (and still have some dear friends who attend similar churches). In my experience, most people do not choose to attend a Charismatic church because they’ve evaluated and been convinced by the theological arguments for the continuation of the charismatic gifts. Instead, they land there because those types of churches fit well with how they’re wired. They like it when services are energetic and unstructured, they don’t mind new and novel experiences, and they have a higher level of trust and curiosity when it comes to supernatural phenomena. They also tend to be fairly active in missions, outreach, and social causes, which correlates with their willingness to engage with the unfamiliar. Continuationist theology is often simply taken for granted as a part of this whole milieu.

On the other hand, I’ve observed that people who gravitate towards more conservative churches are not typically drawn by a love for the doctrines that gave those churches birth. Rather, it’s often because they have a preference for safety, certainty, assurance, and predictability. They feel uncomfortable when things get too out-of-control. They may honestly believe that “Baptist” is just a worship style, and they prefer it, hands down. (Get it?)

They’ll listen each week to Biblical preaching, not necessarily because they believe that expositional preaching is the best way to handle the Bible, or even because they love and submit to the word of God, but because a consistent message from a predictable book feels like the right thing to do in that environment.

Over time, these collective preferences and practices solidify into a church culture that establishes what is normal and expected, and, like all cultures, is all the more powerful the more it goes unnoticed. Good doctrine may be embraced, formally, and is often a source of emotional comfort: “We believe in the good old truths.” But functionally, these doctrines are little more than accessories to a culture that actually sets the church’s factory defaults.

All this means that pastors in conservative churches are up against a lot of pressure when they try to start leading people, from the Word, to do things that they are uncomfortable with—like evangelism, discipleship, or simply growing spiritually. If a set of preferences has been operating as someone’s de facto authority, then when we use the Bible to motivate them towards something that seems uncertain or unsafe, it feels like we’re challenging their whole system of belief.

This is why churches which formally embrace the authority of the Bible can be so resistant to Bible-driven change. When a pastor uses the Bible to challenge aspects of a church’s culture, he may in fact be challenging the whole reason some people are there in the first place, and if they don’t actually have a developed doctrine of Biblical authority, they won’t see any problem with their refusal to follow where God’s word is leading.

Obviously, I’m painting with a large brush here, and a finer point could be put to much of this. But the encouragement here is for us to make sure that God’s word really is in the driver’s seat of our lives and our churches. If Jesus has called us to pick up our crosses and follow him, we should probably not expect to find comfort wherever we go. In fact, like Paul and Silas in chains, it may be that when we are the most uncomfortable, we are the closest to where God wants us to be. It may be that we need to die to our preferences, regularly, in order to fruitfully fellowship with the people of God in a church that embraces and follows his truth. So be it! It will be worth it.

To pastors (and future pastors), the encouragement here is to think like a missionary. If you were pastoring in Papua New Guinea or Paraguay, think about all of the hard work you’d be doing to understand the local culture, appreciate what’s good, and help your people follow Jesus even if that means rejecting parts of their culture that feel very normal to them.

As pastors in North America, we have basically the same job, even if we serve in an established church. Evangelical culture can be just as hostile to Biblical authority as any other in the world. That’s not a recipe for despair; it’s an invitation to read the New Testament more carefully—watching how the apostles applied the Great Commission in various cultural settings—and think like missionaries as we lead our people to live as citizens of the kingdom.