The Seeker Movement by David F. Wells Part 2

Excerpts from Above All Earthly Pow’rs: Christ in a Postmodern World

It is, rather, an attempt to exploit one side of Pauline paradox. The paradox is that Paul could say at the Areopagus in Athens that God rules in history so that people “should seek” him in the hope that they might “find him” (Acts 17:27) while also saying to the Romans that, as a result of the pervasiveness of sin, “no one understands, no one seeks for God” (Rom. 3:11). Here is the two-sided truth: we should seek God and yet no one seeks God. This paradox reflects our condition as those who, made in the image of God, are made to know him but who, nevertheless, are fallen and will not “honor him as God, or give thanks to him” (Rom. 1:21).

The seeker-sensitive approach typically emphasizes the one side of this paradox while significantly discounting the other, seeing sinners as more or less neutral in their disposition toward God and the gospel and therefore amenable to marketing techniques. It typically does not see sinners as those who are unable to submit to God, despite all the marketing techniques, without his intervention. IT is the degree to which these techniques are used, the degree to which the church arranges its life around the seeker impulse, that creates a scale of seeker sensitivity in these churches, from modest on the one end to “seeker-oriented” on the other. This, of course, makes generalizations difficult, but without them understanding is impossible.

(Page 267-268)