Claim. Warren argues that event-driven churches keep people busy every night of the week with lots of activity but not necessarily productivity, and that in such churches attendance becomes the sole measurement of faithfulness and maturity — meetings replacing ministry as the believer’s primary activity.
Elaboration. The signature pattern: as soon as one big event finishes, work begins on the next (churches-driven-by-events). Warren’s prescribed audit question is ‘What is the purpose behind each of our activities?’ — the same purpose-test applied to programs, now applied to discrete events. Without that question, the calendar becomes the goal.
Two distinct conflations are diagnosed. First, activity with productivity: motion is mistaken for progress. Second, attendance with maturity: showing up at meetings is mistaken for spiritual growth. The second is the deeper error because it corrupts the measurement system itself — once attendance is the maturity proxy, the church cannot detect that its members are busy but not being formed.
The closing warning — ‘we must be wary of the tendency to allow meetings to replace ministry as the primary activity of believers’ — is structurally important for Warren’s wider argument. Ministry (in his framework) is service flowing from being formed toward the five purposes; meetings are at best an instrument toward that. When the instrument becomes the activity, formation stalls.
The UC parallel is acute. A movement with dense liturgical calendars (Pledge Service, hoondokhae, holy days, anniversary commemorations, workshops, jeongseong conditions, providential events) can easily land in event-driven mode where the metric of faithfulness is attendance. Whether Sunday-service attendance, workshop completion counts, or condition-fulfillment tallies actually track spiritual maturity is the open Warren question. Worth a thread.