Claim. Warren argues that every church is driven by some guiding force — a controlling assumption or directing conviction — even if unspoken, unknown to members, and never officially voted on, and that this hidden driver influences every aspect of the church’s life.
Elaboration. The chapter opens with a fictional Westside Church council meeting where Ben Faithful (tradition), Bob Newman (innovation), Karen Doer (pro-life cause), John Manly (Promise Keepers), Linda Loving (support groups), Bob Learner (Christian school), and Jerry Tightwad (finances) each press competing agendas with no shared standard of reference (what-drives-your-church). The scenario is a diagnostic device: multiple driving forces compete, producing a church ‘trying to head in several different directions at the same time.’
Warren’s etymological move — drive means ‘to guide, control, or direct’ — lets him claim that the question is not whether a church is driven but by what. The diagnostic value is that surfacing the implicit driver is the precondition for evaluating it. Until a church names its driver, it cannot ask whether that driver is biblical.
This sets up the chapter’s typology of seven inadequate drivers (tradition, personality, finances, programs, buildings, events, seekers) followed by Warren’s proposed eighth: purpose. The rhetorical structure is exclusionary — each of the seven is presented as a real force that exists in actual churches and as inadequate on its own, clearing the ground for purpose as the only sufficient alternative. The framing has parallel structure to UC critiques of churches that have drifted from messianic mission into bureaucratic self-perpetuation; the believers-responsibility question ‘what is the church for’ is congruent. Worth a thread on whether UC congregations exhibit the same seven drift patterns Warren identifies.