Furtick probably did backflips when he read that paragraph. It’s the dream of every seeker-friendly church: to have an unchurched person attend their services and get the message: We want to do whatever we can to point you toward God.
But there have been multiple controversies surrounding Elevation Church and specifically Furtick’s leadership.
SPONTANEOUS BAPTISM DEBATE
In 2012, a video went viral of one of Elevation’s spontaneous baptism services where over 2,000 came forward to be baptized. In 2013, a document Elevation released to help other churches do their own spontaneous baptism caught attention. You can read a scathing critique of the article here, but the most controversial part is where churches are encouraged to plant people throughout the auditorium to prime the pump for a response. It’s unclear whether the people picked to respond had already requested to be baptized or not.
And this is where the Rorschach test kicks in. I’ve worked for a very large megachurch, and when you’re doing things on a large scale, a high amount of organization is needed to pull off anything. This organization can easily look like (and sometimes be) emotional manipulation or a callous business strategy.
Depending on your point of view, this document is either a smoking gun, a shrewd organizational strategy or somewhere in between.
LEADERSHIP, ACCOUNTABILITY AND EGO
There is no direct oversight of Furtick at Elevation Church. Rather, he is overseen by a collection of megachurch pastors who make up a board of overseers that Furtick himself is a part of. This is a similar structure to the one Mark Driscoll employed at Mars Hill, and it’s a structure that has been widely criticized since Driscoll’s departure and the church’s consequent dissolution.
Furtick owns a $1.7 million, 16,000-square-foot house that, according to him, “isn’t that big of a house really.” As criticism of his personal lifestyle increased, Furtick stopped doing interviews on topics other than his book; however, in 2015 Furtick did say in regards to financial accountability that “to go on record and say here’s how much money we’ve given and here’s what we do with our finances, to me, that would be the most arrogant thing I could do and it would rob me of the blessings of what Jesus said, which is that when you give, you don’t get up and tell everyone how much you’ve given.”
On one hand, Furtick is the pastor of one of the largest churches in the country and undoubtedly makes a large salary. On the other hand, many famous pastors—such as Rick Warren or Andy Stanley—have been very cautious in the appearance of wealth for this very reason. Buying a $1.7 million mansion might not be wrong, but also isn’t very wise.
