Andy Stanley's Evangelistic Approach

Moore and Stanley had a conversation about their approaches to preaching/evangelism that I think is very telling of the seeker movement and why it is so large in a culture of secular humanism. The exchange can be found here. 

In many ways, I understand Stanley's concern about removing the side debates about the Bible, but this is not the way to deal with that problem.

The interesting thing here is that Stanley thinks that nothing is lost in approaching the unbeliever this way. In fact, however, something very important is lost. 

Stanley's method removes the obstacle of God's authority over the unbeliever. What it does is attempt to get the unbeliever, who is being acknowledged in such an exchange as the authority, to grant authority to the Scripture. Since so and so is an eyewitness, you ought to listen to him. Since so and so is Jesus' brother, you should decide to give him a hearing. Since you would agree that these authors have something to say you should listen.

Moore's method, however, is one that retains the authority of God. You need to listen because God who has authority over you, whether you like it or not, whether you agree with it or not, has said this, and hence, you should listen.

One retains the authority of God and one attempts to get people to lend their authority to the Bible as authoritative over their lives.

This is essentially the difference between respect and fear, something about which I've often written. Respect is something a secular humanist who sees himself as the authority can give to some other entity as he agrees or disagrees with its position of authority. Ultimately, he grants authority to it as he pleases. 

Fear, however, is recognizing that something or someone has authority whether you grant it to them or not. It really doesn't matter if you would agree that Matthew is a good eyewitness. If it is the Word of God, it has authority and is true whether you grant it or not. 

This, in fact, is why seeker movements are so large. The primary obstacle for our secular humanistic culture, and for sinners in rebellion against God as a whole, is God's authority overriding their own. Remove that and you get a very big church. Retain that and your church often becomes very, very small. 

So I am positive this approach works, if by "works" we mean it gets more people to accept the facts about Jesus. It, unfortunately, never drives the person in rebellion away from his or her autonomous worldview, and thus, he or she never submits to Christ as the Lord of their thoughts and lives. What we save them with is what we save them to, and this "Finneyesque" method of convincing people to remain faithful to their own self-authentication of the Bible as God's Word is giving us very big churches with very few true believers who are told by the Bible that they must abandon the self to be His disciple.