A Jilted Lover

MAking God Jealous

An abandoned, bloody newborn, wallowing in a roadside desert. A powerful, attentive father, rearing and then marrying his adopted infant daughter. Yikes. If you were to make a movie based on Ezekiel 16, it would likely earn an NC-17 rating. Add trashy prostitution and lewd bestiality as the story wanders into Ezekiel 23, and yeah, NC-17 isn’t a stretch. However, what’s remarkable about these passages in Ezekiel is not their shock value, but what they reveal about the heart of God.

God is jealous.

Now, before you get all judgy, imagine you’re married to an incredible spouse who is attractive, talented, gifted, and wholly desirable. You’re head-over-heels for them. Completely smitten. Now imagine you return home one day to find them in bed, not with a single lover, but a ton of them. In that moment, your spouse makes eye contact, and you realize they couldn’t care less that you’ve discovered their infidelity.

That’s Ezekiel’s point. Israel cuckolded her husband, the God who had rescued her from Egypt, and she did so blatantly and repeatedly. Israel didn’t dump Yahweh. She still “worshipped” the God who chose her, but she had other lovers—Canaanite gods with their Asherah poles in high places. She indulged in secret trysts “under every green tree,” among ancient groves.

The Bible repeatedly describes periods when the people of Israel and Judah continued worship of Yahweh while also adopting or accommodating other gods and cultic practices. Biblical authors condemned these practices, portraying them as marital unfaithfulness (see Ezekiel, Hosea, and Isaiah). Jeremiah uses the metaphor of adultery and divorce to describe Israel’s treatment of God. He warns of Yahweh giving Israel a “certificate of divorce” because of her idolatry, yet Israel and Judah persist in their unfaithfulness, testing God’s patient, covenant love. It was so from the beginning.

Having been purified during a generation of wilderness wandering, Israel was quickly seduced by novelty—new gods and new ways to worship. God declares Himself a jealous Lover. He brooks no competition, and He’s willing to go to great lengths (like the Babylonian Exile) to banish any other supposed gods from Israel’s affections.

Modern Competitors

Good thing we don’t have to worry about that anymore!

We wouldn’t do what the Israelites did, right? While it’s fair to say modern evangelicals have forsaken ancient fertility gods, it’s disingenuous to claim we’ve avoided Israel’s unfaithfulness. We have different gods—or, more to the point, different competing lovers. Chief among these is success, measured by novelty,¹ money, and power—especially novelty. Evangelical churches have been obsessed with these since the middle of the last century.

Eugene Peterson puts it this way:

“People learn to shop for churches; there is no loyalty … They’re consumers being attracted to one product or another. The vocation of pastor has been replaced by the strategies of religious entrepreneurs with business plans. I was astonished to learn in one of these best-selling books (on church life) that the size of my church parking lot had far more to do with how things fared in my congregation than my choice of texts in preaching … size is the great depersonalizer.” ²

Bigger is Better, and More Fun!

“The bigger, the better,” we tell ourselves. “Then we’ll reach more people!” To Peterson’s point, large size can certainly degrade a congregation’s familial connection. But its impact on the modern church is more insidious than loosened bonds and depersonalization.

Big, new, and impressive appeals to something more puerile and vapid in the evangelical heart: novelty. We don’t want yesterday’s coffee shop or pub. We want today’s Now. New. Fresh. Interesting. Exciting. We can’t abide FOMO. Tradition is passé—unless it’s recast as ’70s boho. If old can be new again, it can be bigger than ever. This isn’t rocket science. It’s marketing.

It’s also biology. Neurologically, newness triggers dopamine. Novel and exciting things signal possibility, opportunity, and reward: new coffee, new foods, new opportunities, new pathways, new lovers. When we’re attracted to something new, our brains perk up before we consciously evaluate whether it’s good or not. That’s why people flock to “new,” swelling the ranks of whatever’s marketed as the latest, greatest thing, churches included.

All of this bypasses the slower virtues of deep spiritual formation, heartfelt disciplines, and abiding faithfulness. “New” replaces them with instant possibility—an alluring “virtue” in a distracted, hyper-stimulated, and insecure culture like ours. Newness-aimed-at-bigness replaces the slow, substantial process of Christian identity formation with something designed to be both readily accessible and scarce. A doubly delicious enticement.

“New” also serves our culture of fluid, self-constructed identity. Start over. Reinvent yourself. Define who you are. Embracing “new” becomes a delightful act of self-recreation. And we do it repeatedly because “new” is fleeting. If your latest church is part of your identity structure, you have to switch to make the reinvention work.

That’s at least one reason we see herds of evangelicals migrate from church to church through cycles of transfer growth. Witness the church schisms of 2020–2021. Congregations that once tolerated non-dogmatic differences split over politically motivated rivalries: masks or no masks; vaxxed or not. Churches ceased to be sanctuaries of charity in the non-essentials and divided along lines of tribal identity. White-hot political polarization merely accelerated a trend decades in the making.

The pattern began in the 1950s when “forward-thinking” churches adopted the marketing and operational best practices of American business—think Mad Men meets a clerical collar. New ideas led to new growth, especially in affluent suburbs as millions left urban centers for greener pastures, overtaking fields and orchards. Entrepreneurial pastors saw an opportunity.³

This gave rise to independent Bible churches like Willow Creek Community Church, founded in 1975. These regional megachurches dominated metropolitan areas from their suburban enclaves. Next came the multisite franchisers of the 1990s, like Mars Hill and Saddleback, followed in the 21st century by global brands like Hillsong—ever bigger, ever more powerful, with their own Christian Top-40 factories fueling the cult of “new.”

Few of those enterprises have ended well.

What few realized, except Peterson and a handful of other prophetic voices, is that all this big-new-impressive stuff led us right back to ancient Israel. Like them, we’ve become polytheistic syncretists, worshipping both the Creator and the idol named Success. We now have two gods, instead of the One.

Watched It Happen

I’ve seen this firsthand over the previous 30 years in metro Portland. My own church, Beaverton Foursquare (known as B4Church), was once Oregon’s largest congregation, with more than 5,000 in weekly attendance during the late ’80s. It had its day as the new church and became very large, in part because of its novelty. It’s not that the Holy Spirit wasn’t at work or people weren’t coming to Christ, but many congregants were already Jesus-followers when they arrived, having left mainline denominations or simply moved into the growing suburbs.

Then Imago Dei Community arrived in the late ’90s, dropping the “church” moniker in a brilliant rebrand. It drained young people from B4, Cedar Mill Bible, and other churches that had ridden the ’80s growth wave. Ironically, Imago Dei’s current property once housed the largest Foursquare church in Portland, a church whose decline was partly driven by B4’s rise.

Next came Solid Rock/A Jesus Church/Bridgetown, holding sway over Portland’s Westside for more than a decade through a now-dissolved multisite model. More recently, five years of political polarization and resurgent fundamentalism breathed life into a once-plateaued Athey Creek, whose attendance surged post-2020 as politically conservative believers fled churches they felt lacked the spiritual and moral courage to resist going “woke.” Athey’s Lead Pastor, Brett Meador, saw an opportunity. In his defense, it seemed a principled stand to defy public health restrictions. What it became was a lightning rod, a new rally point for dissaffected Christians.

Almost all these churches have enjoyed, or will enjoy, about a decade in the sun as they move from new to established. The next stop? “Old.”That’s when people start leaving for the next new thing. There aren’t sufficient ethical, theological, or spiritual differences to explain the migration. The leaders aren’t heretics or criminals. They’re simply no longer new. Christian consumerism remains the simplest explanation.

Their sad, slow slide out of newness is subtle at first, until it isn’t. What’s doubly sad is these churches were, or are, led by pastors who haven’t simply avoided sin and error. They are genuine Jesus-followers looking to make disciples. They marry and bury people. They visit the sick. Their teaching honors the Bible as God’s reliable and authoritative Word. They pray for their staff, leaders, and congregations. Most do their very best to lead operationally and spiritually in ways that honor Jesus as Lord.

However, their “success” isn’t only predicated on their faithfulness, as most would like to believe. There are sociological and cultural tides in play. Those who once shepherded 1500 and now lead 500 have not lost people because they’re bad shepherds or a scandal rocked their church. It happened for the same reason we no longer have Blockbuster Video. Consumers move on, and nobody wants to be Blockbuster.

They want to be Netflix, so they innovate. They try to “new” themselves into an attractive relevance, which is exactly the kind of sacrifice demanded by Success.

A Holy Response

So, what should we do? Get younger, faster, and smarter? Constantly reinvent ourselves, again and again? Honestly, there’s nothing wrong with bringing more youthful vigor, urgency, and intelligence to church leadership, unless those efforts are offerings made to the gods of success, the deities of “new.” The Church writ large can’t afford that. It has a prophetic duty to the broader culture. It needs to speak the wisdom of God into the zeitgeist, willing to praise, pardon, and condemn as necessary.

What the Church also can’t do is adapt to the mold. The Church was never intended to be a liquid, taking the shape of its container. It was always meant to be a solid, strong enough to break upon, and loving enough to bind the wounds that follow.

So often, discussions of Church compromise and adaptation focus on hot-button issues, things like same-sex marriage, gender, and politics. These are important. The Church can, and should, engage them biblically, but it must do so without worshipping success, without using disagreement and polarizing issues to segment their “customers,” witlessly or otherwise.

The Church can have only one demographic: human.

Congregants over Consumers

Okay, don’t hate me. Full disclosure: I work at a large church with resources. But I never wanted to be part of a big, market-savvy church for the sake of novelty, or worse, success-worship.

No, what I really long for, what I want to help nurture, is a local church full of faithful lovers. A congregation that’s a living embodiment of John 13:34, “As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” Not a business full of consumers, but a family⁴ of committed congregants led by an embodied presence: The Holy Spirit working in and through a shepherd, a pastor who knows the names, faces, and stories of the “sheep.” I also want courageous Bible preaching like that of my pastor, Bo, especially when it offends me.

That’s what we’re trying very hard to do at B4Church, despite the cultural headwinds that batter every church. We want real. We want something that lasts through generations. To hell with new for new’s sake. I mean that literally.

1. Deborah Haarsma, astrophysicist and M.I.T. Ph.D., comments on this attribute, “In Western culture, we often assume small means insignificant.” Conversely, we assume big means important and impressive, successful, if you will.

2. This is a compilation of Peterson’s quotes, chiefly reflected in his writing from The Pastor, and within his biography, Burning in My Bones.

3. For more on this, see CT Media’s The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, produced by Mike Cosper.

4. Scripture consistently uses familial, relational language for the Church (brother, Father, Son, marriage, household, etc.), even remixing Aristotle’s Household Code (Eph. 5) to show that family is central to understanding God’s relationship with His people, and them with one another.