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Distressed by consumer Christianity, this church razed the ministries enjoyed by so many for so Iong—and started over.

Oak Hills Church executed cutting edge worship as well as any church in their area, and they programmed the seeker-model on par with the church that originated the concept. In Folsom, California, Oak Hills was not the flavor-of-the-month, it was the flavor-of-the-decade, until the leadership team sensed a mandate from God and abruptly changed direction.

Some might call what happened afterward an implosion. Those who survived might call it a necessary demolition-—a bloody, painful dismantling of an unwieldy and outdated structure in order to shift affluent suburbanites from self-centered consumption of ministry to actually help people become more like Christ.

Founded by Kent Carlson in 1984, Oak Hills Church is set in a "white bread" suburban community as Carlson calls it, outside Sacramento. The congregation thrived while they did the nomads' tour of rented facilities using the seeker oriented model of ministry. Attendance topped 1,800 in 1999 when the church moved into their first permanent building on their own property with their own mortgage. As they settled in, so did a growing dissatisfaction.

Something didn't seem right. "A number of us were doing some really hard work in terms of the whole spiritual formation process," Carlson says, "and we were not completely satisfied with the 'product' we were turning out—not only our church, but all of evangelicalism—that we were not in any significant way helping people to be substantially transformed." Read more