One Gaping Hole in Andy Stanley’s Small-Church Rant

Recently, Andy Stanley made some off the cuff remarks about the selfishness of parents in small churches:

“When I hear adults say, ‘Well I don’t like a big church, I like about 200, I want to be able to know everybody,’ I say, ‘You are so stinking selfish. You care nothing about the next generation. All you care about is you and your five friends. You don’t care about your kids…anybody else’s kids.’ You’re like, ‘What’s up?’ I’m saying if you don’t go to a church large enough where you can have enough Middle-Schoolers and High-Schoolers to separate them so they can have small groups and grow up the local church, you are a selfish adult. Get over it. Find yourself a big old church where your kids can connect with a bunch of people and grow up and love the local church.”

If you care and haven’t yet, you can hear the remainder of the clip here.

While the Responses thus far have been excellent, from Todd Pruitt, Karl Vaters, and Tom Buck, I feel there is one gaping hole that wasn’t addressed among any of these. Perhaps it has been on another site that I an unaware of, but at the risk of redundancy, I wish to convey what I feel was the most problematic of Andy’s sermon. Obviously, there are highly problematic points within this unnecessary point of division, casting aspersions on the small church as if they can’t be beneficial to children and families, but the issue I took wasn’t initially of that. All of the points raised in these three articles need to be addressed, yet the contention I find is within Andy’s statements as opposed to the apostle John.

Now, if we take a closer look at one portion of Andy’s sermon, we will find clear language wherein he indicts small churches of causing the little ones to stumble. He states the reason why parents are so selfish is that they cause their children to be raised in an area where they don’t flourish under the gospel because they don’t have age-specific groups to be part of. Beyond the unbiblical assumption that churches need to have these groups in order for children to flourish, the step taken too far is of his declaration that these children in turn will come to hate the church. Their parents, therefore, are raising them to hate the church.

The apostle John has some profoundly strong things to say about those who hate the church:

“The one who says he is in the Light and yet hates his brother is in the darkness until now. The one who loves his brother abides in the Light and there is no cause for stumbling in him. But anyone who hates a brother or sister is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness. They do not know where they are going, because the darkness has blinded them” (1 John 2:9-11).

“Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him” (John 3:15).

“If someone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20).

The point being, the church is constituted of the brethren. One cannot hate the brethren (read: the church) and love God. It is painfully clear in scripture that this is the case, as it is stated more than a few times in this epistle alone. Thus, the problematic implication, even if Andy Stanley didn’t mean it like this, is that parents of little ones in the small church – are for all intents and purposes, raising children who will hate God because they are not within the big church.

There is never a point in scripture where the love of the brethren is divorced from the love of God, and this is precisely why Andy’s remarks are so shocking to many people. This is also part of the reason why a Twitter apology is not enough to retract these statements against the small, local churches receiving his critiques. It is not simply an attack lofted against these same small churches, but the God thereof. Implied within such a statement is the deduction that those who call the small church home are intentionally misleading their own children toward Hell.

“…but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matthew 18:6).

Seeing as Christ’s words against this very thing are so unsettlingly strong, this is what I wish to call to light.