Many churches of all persuasions are hiring research agencies to

“Many churches of all persuasions are hiring research agencies to poll neighborhoods, asking what kind of church they prefer. Then the local churches design themselves to fit the desires of the people. True faith in God that demands selflessness is being replaced by trendy religion that serves the selfish.” – Billy Graham

In these powerful and sorrowful words, Billy Graham, the great evangelist of the twentieth century, speaks not only as a preacher of his age but as a prophet for all time. His voice resounds with both lament and warning — that in our pursuit to please men, we risk forgetting to please God. When he declares that “true faith in God that demands selflessness is being replaced by trendy religion that serves the selfish,” he exposes the spiritual sickness of a generation that has traded the eternal for the fashionable. He calls upon humanity to remember that faith is not a marketable product, but a sacred covenant — one that demands surrender, not comfort; devotion, not convenience.

The origin of this quote can be traced to Graham’s lifelong mission to restore sincerity and humility to the heart of Christian worship. Speaking in the later years of the twentieth century, he observed the growing rise of consumer culture, even within the walls of the Church. As society became driven by choice, preference, and personal gratification, many religious institutions began to mirror this spirit. Churches no longer asked, “What does God desire of us?” but instead, “What do people desire of us?” In doing so, they transformed sanctuaries of repentance into stages of entertainment, and the altar of sacrifice into a mirror for the self. Graham, who had dedicated his life to preaching repentance and redemption, saw in this a tragic inversion of the Gospel — a drift from selflessness to self-service, from truth to trend.

When Graham speaks of churches hiring “research agencies to poll neighborhoods,” his tone carries both irony and grief. For he sees the absurdity of a divine institution — founded upon revelation — turning to the opinions of the crowd for direction. It is as though the shepherd were asking the sheep which path to take. The very nature of faith, he reminds us, is to follow God’s will, even when it runs against the current of human desire. Yet, in an age intoxicated by popularity and ease, even faith can be reduced to performance — dressed in the garments of modernity but stripped of its soul. The result, as Graham warns, is a “trendy religion”, one that soothes the ego but never transforms the heart.

History has seen this pattern before. In the days of ancient Israel, the prophets cried out against priests who sought favor rather than truth. The prophet Jeremiah condemned those who cried, “Peace, peace,” when there was no peace — men who told the people what they wished to hear rather than what they needed to hear. And in the early Church, the Apostle Paul warned Timothy that a day would come when people would “not endure sound doctrine, but, having itching ears, they will accumulate teachers to suit their own passions.” Billy Graham’s words stand in this same lineage of divine admonition. He saw that the spirit of idolatry had returned — not in the form of golden calves, but in the worship of self.

Yet there is compassion in his warning, for Graham understood the human heart. He knew that people turn to comforting religion not always out of arrogance, but out of fear — fear of sacrifice, fear of the unknown, fear of being confronted by their own sin. And so he does not condemn without hope; he calls for awakening. True faith, he reminds us, is not meant to be easy. It is a refining fire, not a pleasant fragrance. It demands that we give up our will for the will of God, that we abandon the shallow pursuit of approval for the deep pursuit of truth. For in surrender, paradoxically, lies freedom. In selflessness, there is peace.

Consider, too, the example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who stood against the rising tide of Nazism in his own Church. When others bent their sermons to please power, Bonhoeffer spoke of what he called “costly grace” — the grace that calls a man to follow Christ even unto death. He refused to turn faith into comfort and paid with his life, executed in a concentration camp for his resistance. His story stands as a living embodiment of Graham’s warning — that true faith is not molded to fit the desires of the world, but challenges the world to conform to God’s truth.

So, my listener, take this message as both mirror and compass. Ask yourself: Is my faith convenient, or is it true? Do I seek a God who serves me, or do I serve a God who calls me to rise above myself? In an age of customization and comfort, let us remember that the sacred cannot be tailored. The Church, the soul, the truth — these are not marketplaces. They are sanctuaries where the self must yield, not be flattered.

And thus, the wisdom of Billy Graham endures as a call to courage: to resist the religion of self and return to the faith of surrender. The lesson is clear — that faith which costs nothing, changes nothing. To walk with God is not to ask what pleases us, but what pleases Him. For in that obedience, in that self-forgetting love, we rediscover the purpose for which faith was given — not to serve the selfish, but to sanctify the soul.