I am wrestling. Wrestling with I observe and experience in the North American church. I, along with many of you, am passionate for people to know Christ as well as for the church to be the church – i.e. healthy, growing into adulthood, mature, full of the life of Jesus per Eph. 4:11-16. I love the church. More importantly Christ does also. When I visit with other traditions (e.g. Orthodox, Roman Catholic, monastic), part of my tension is their lack of cultural relevance to communicate Jesus Christ into our culture. I see few young people. When I visit evanglical churches, the over-concern for growth in numbers seems to overshadow any time for genuine formation. Shallowness prevails. Dr. David Wells, a professor at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary recently published a book The Courage to be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World. While I am not in agreement with everything he says or writes (I actually had two courses with him while in seminary), he is a sharp thinker and worth listening to his observations of American Evangelicalism today. He writes: There is a yearning in the evangelical world today. We encounter it everywhere. It is a yearning for the real. Sales pitches, marketed faith, the gospel as a commodity, people as customers, God as just a prop to my inner life, the glitz and sizzle, Disneyland on the loose in our churches – all of it skin deep and often downright wrong. It is not making serious disciples. It cannot make serious disciples. It brims with success, but it is empty, shallow, and indeed, unpardonable. It is time to reach back into the Word of God…and find a serious faith. It is now time to close the door on this disastrous experiment in retailing faith, to do so politely but nevertheless firmly. It is time to move on (pp.57-58). He argues that the marketing, mega-church model that can so easily mix American values with biblical Christianity cannot work because it is so internally flawed, that the very worldview upon which it is predicated is off center. By marketing products and services for our use rathar than a focus on submission of the god of the universe empties the truth out of the gospel. Do you think David Wells is accurate in his observations?
26
Aug
