What we have heard from others doing this is that the Warren Consultants and marketers anticipate resistance in the local church congregations. They wait until the resistance becomes pronounced enough. 

Then they offer THOSE people their own service, but they make sure it is not the Main church service. So what happens - pragmatically - is that those who are the one who are the most concerned about the SPIRITUAL growth (and Not the numbers game) - are the ones who agree (by participating in the process) to their own marginalization, as they become separated from the Rest of the congregation. 

Then the Warren Consults (read: new advisors to pastors) slowly devote less and less resources to that "second" service and those people simply leave. Never mind the fact that people seem to miss the point, that what they really should be doing if they wanted more people was to 

1) go out and witness to them 

2) have the pastor step up a face-to-face visitation program and 

3) especially PRAY PRAY PRAY.

4) Prayer and Fasting

The other thing is that this system is such a "perfect" setup for Pastors. IT could be that they will get New numbers (i.e. more people) and that they should wait for the new numbers of people to actually SHOW UP, and then to continue to attend for a number of years. 

But instead, the Pastors move ahead with Construction projects for a bigger church. This is presented in the context of not wanting to quench the Holy Spirit.  (which is rather ironic, since in many cases, the Holy Spirit and the Bible were not only NOT consulted, but willfully ignored...by Pastors)   In truth - the main things that are not quenched are the Bank loans, and the Financial Debt that the churches are agreeing to take on.

After having done that, it is no wonder that the pastor - internally - feels as though it is only "responsible" to support it. After all, not only does he have a church congregation to help, he has a brand new debt-structure that he has to maintain, every month.

Good thing Jesus was never into buildings.

 

(Christian Congregations did not even HAVE Church Buildings for the First FOUR HUNDRED years of EARLY CHRISTIANITY)  

According to the Rick Warren consultants, their advice is good for everybody, the "church", the bank, the construction people, and the marketers. And every new church with its own BUILDING is a "success" story.

 

IT IS Good for just about everyone, except the Congregation, the people who pay the Bills of the CHURCH.

Taken just by itself, one church with one new building would not make a whole lot of difference. But taken by the Thousands of Churches that have adopted this program, we can only wonder just how many hundreds of missionaries will have their support cut or cut short...in order to help pay for the building...So the way that the local church becomes "successful" - according to the PDL model in many cases - is that they seem to take resources away from the People in order to give those resources to a building, to the Warren Consultants, and to the BANKS. 

And new church buildings must be sustained by people who WANT to stay there. Getting a person in the door is one thing...keeping them there in order to help them grow spiritually is something else entirely...and if the Holy Spirit seemed to grow the church rather large during the first 3 or 4 centuries when there were No church buildings in the days of the Early Christians, it is hard to see how the Holy Spirit would be limiting himself to the Walls of the new building.

We thought that the "Holy Spirit is only in the building" was the Roman Catholic model, and that Protestants were staying away from that.

For more than a Thousand Years, Protestants have been calling upon the Roman Catholic Church and their Leaders NOT to invest in Church buildings, because it represents a mis-prioritizing of Financial Resources that should go to the P-E-O-P-L-E.   The funds should instead be used to buy books for a church library, to help the poor, to help missionary and kindness & ministry projects abroad - and to help PEOPLE learn and know more about Jesus Christ. 

Now, thanks to RICK WARREN and his consultants, this advice is turned upside down as Pastors and congregations are encouraged to ABANDON the people and to service the Church Debt of a New Building. 

This is theologically and Morally wrong, in addition to being very Short-sighted by the Pastors.

The thing that STANDS OUT is that if these Warren Consultants  called themselves "bankers" and said "we are here to indebt you for 20 years", that people would be a lot more cautious.

What was that Bible passage about the requirements for those who are the Advisors of a Pastor - [they used to be called Deacons and Elders] - that those people had to be very well spiritually grounded, very knowledgeable about the Bible, and very on-fire for the Lord, and they had to be tested for some time...they did not come in off the street into Leadership positions without first being tested by Local Congregations.

In the Warren model, these pastors are literally changing the Spiritual advisors of the church, without going through any evaluation process about them personally, - and without the consent of most Churches and most church elders.

IF their results were of a deeply lasting spiritual nature, if the Warren Consultants were producing churches that were HOLIER and where church members were knowing the Lord on a very deep spiritual level, then their Spiritual Fruit would be abundant, and theologically and doctrinally sound. But the results of the Warren Consultants are:

1) the Church Structure is changed

2) The Advisors to the Pastors are changed

3) The Board of Elders in local Churches are usually ignored, bypassed and kept out of the loop

4) The Church agrees to hire and pay the Warren Consultants great sums of money

5) The Local Churches indebt themselves for decades, not for soul-winning, but for a Church Building

6) The most Theologically Grounded Church members and church leaders LEAVE

7) The Pastors agree to STOP preaching controversial topics on Sundays

8) The Marketing Gimmicks of the Warren Groups are almost all a TRANSFER of people, from other Churches to 

Warren Consultant Churches - for a short enough period of time. In other words, it is not NEW people who are coming to know Christ. It is the people from the other churches down the street, that are attracted by Marketing Gimmicks. That is an increase in church numbers - temporarily - but that is NOT a Spiritual Revival.

An observer might be tempted to say...that Jesus is being marketed right out of his own church...And the results of seeking God in a church setting - as a true part of the body of Christ is 2 things: a) those who have a broken heart, a burdened heart for those who are lost and b) a new lifestyle centered around Prayer in order to have a much better understanding of the personal wil of God. In a real revival, the result of the additional burden for the lost that people sense, is that they start to look at their own lives, in order to identify what obstacles might exist...to the work of the Holy Spirit.

Having felt some of his power at a true revival, they would only want more.
Instead - in the warren model - the people who love God and are truly concerned about following Jesus...are the ones who leave the church...

So that Warren Model is not attracting the more Spiritual members of the Congregation, it is allienating and pushing them OUT...of the Church.

And we should think of it as a "Warren Model" - it is a man developed system, it is the product of men, and the result is that most churches focus LESS on God, Less on their own spiritual nature, and that the Pastor suddenly feels much more constrained to make people FEEL Good, so that they will keep coming back and paying for his new Church Building.