You go to the church. The music is nice, the people fairly friendly and the sermon is all about God's love for you and how we should love others. People can basically do what they want; practicing homosexuals are welcomed and even ordained. But no gospel message. Welcome to the liberal Protestant church. Sadly, but understandably, these [mainline] churches are losing scads of members and their headquarters are having to lay off alot of their staff.
If the evangelical church continues to go into emergent and seeker-sensitive models, which IMO as I've said here many times before, is simply going into liberal Protestantism, then...........
evangelicals ----- this might be your future - empty churches, bad budgets, and gentrifying churches.
How to Become a Christian
23 hours ago
7 comments:
Very True
Why don't they realize this? Who is going to tell them, warn them? It's just going to happen and they won't know why, or maybe won't care why. What will people call us Christians who don't succumb to this process? They will sideline us by calling us, "Fundies," or "extremists."
I expect this post is right re: the "accommodate-to-tell" churches.
Re: Colleen's comment "Who is going to tell them?" When I read your question, I heard a little echo in my mind, "If they will not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not listen ..."
Take care & God bless
Anne / WF
According to George Barna's book Revolution, the local gospel preaching evangelical church is losing members as well.
At least emergent churches are asking the question, why?
Some may be losing their grip on the gospel but not all. the point is that the gospel is more than a one way ticket to heaven. It is about bringing all things captive to the obedience of Jesus including culture, music, church, etc.
Emergent churches are holistic in their approach to reaching the lost. Fundies are not. They are trapped into a dualistic mindset that sees culture as evil through and through despite the fact that Scripture says, "In Him, all things hold together." (Col 1)
Fundies don't get it! they don't get the gospel and they don't get the cultural questions that the gospel answers.
Emergent churches do get it and God is going to use them to reach the lost much more than fundies have ever been able to!
to scruples
- I would heartily disagree that emergents have any more of a clue about culture than fundamentalists. You do have a valid point: fundamentalists have pretty much abandoned their relational ties with culture, opting "instead" (because it's false that they HAVE to choose culture OR scripture) to turn Christianity into an intellectual pursuit of scriptural knowledge devoid of cultural relevance.
But on the other hand, the emergent church is no closer to understanding culture because they try to understand scripture on culture's terms. Instead of fixing the mistake of fundamentalism, they swing to the other extreme. Funnily enough, they also commit a lot of the same errors as "non-emergent" churches.
The problem is prevalent in both sorts of approaches to culture: one rejects culture, the other rejects scriptural revelation about culture. But the solution is not to allow culture to determine how we preach the gospel, and the solution is not to preach the gospel while abandoning the clear imperative we have to preach it to culture, as if it has nothing to say about culture.
Instead, the solution is to yet again get over our stubbornness on both sides, and return to a scriptural idea of culture. In which case, I present a very good book titled "Against Christianity" by Peter Leithart. I think he does a brilliant job of showing what the church is supposed to be, and the church's relationship to culture, through the eyes of scripture. I suggest you pick up a copy.
jhn
A short clarification - the problems I pointed out in both fundamentalist and emergent churches are only tendencies, not absolutes. I go to an emergent church myself that hasn't abandoned scripture for the gospel, and there are fundamentalist churches that haven't abandoned culture. Just wanted to clarify. More forthcoming on this topic on my blog at http://www.silasjones.com.
See my post of March 05, 2007 at:
http://fcov.blogspot.com/2007/03/this-was-originally-going-to-be.html
for my response to some of the comments here.
Post a Comment