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The Present Future & An Unstoppable Force

Jul 28, 2004 Print This Post

{ MOOD: Decent | ITUNES: “Rebecca” – PJ Harvey }

I must be in a “church” mood lately because everything I am reading and listening to is on this topic. I am also thinking about teaching on the church this fall.

Most recently, I have read this book by Reggie McNeal:

While I don’t agree with all of his theology, it is a great book. My friend Scott recommended it to me and told me it was a book that was ruining his church in a good way. Basically, the author (a Southern Baptist…ironically I read this down here in the heart of SB country), proposes 6 tough questions for the church. If you have been around the “PostModern” church discussions for awhile, nothing here will suprise you, but he does a great job articulating the points. I discovered in this book a lot of criticism of the church (much of it rightly deserved), and (in a breath of fresh air, really) some solutions. I really enjoyed the book, once I decided to ignore my doctrinal hesitations.

This book reminded me of Steve’s assertion that much of what is being written now has this air of cynicism. (As well as the fact that many young people who grew up in the church are the same way…this is a topic for another day). I think that is true. Yet, there seems to be this transition. And quite frankly, I think I need to make this transition in my own brain. Yes, it is good to have healthy levels of discontent. And where there is reason to be cynical, cynicism. But, let’s not stop there. Let’s look at the church Jesus started. Let’s look at the church the early church fathers died for (I mean the apostles, not guys in the 1300s). Let’s find ways to make that church come alive in the cultural context that God, by his grace has chosen to drop us in!

Anyhoo, I am now diving into another book (Ironically, by another Southern Baptist):

I have come across a passage that may sound cynical, but is meant (I hope) by McManus to be a springboard to this type of forward excitement and thinking. If he doesn’t intend it that way, I do in offering it to you (and it is a long passage, but it deserves a reading):

Do you remember all the voices warning us that America was becoming a secular nation? Do you remember believing it? We were convinced that the great enemy of our time was Secular Humanism. Too many of us still believe this. While our nation systematically eliminates overt Christian influences from the public arena, America’s new grass-roots religion is not atheism but pantheism. Even with the public schools advocating evolution and removing creation science, belief in God is nearly at 100 percent. Even with the bombardment of modernity’s materialism, rationalism, existentialism, and empiricism, our society continues its spiritual quest. America is an extraordinarily spiritual society.

The indictment that we must receive is that the Christian faith as we express it is no longer seen as a viable spiritual option. Masses gave the church a try and left wanting. We accuse them of not being willing to surrender to God; they accuse us of not knowing him. People are rejecting Christ because of the church!…Is it possible that it wasn’t the nation that was becoming dangerously secular but the church? Wewere neither relevant nor transcendent. We have become, in the worst of ways, religious. We are the founders of the secular nation.

Now can we take that as an exciting challenge? Can we use that to point the fingers at ourselves and not “those other churches?”