Friday, March 16, 2012

Evangelicals Collapsing Cultural Influence

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to an article called Evangelicals Collapsing Cultural Influence by David French. French is an evangelical and writes as an insider describing what he sees as a departure from long standing norms in Biblical Christianity from the view in the pew. It is an excellent article and I heartily recommend it.

He nailed it. What he doesn't talk about is the "why" behind the collapse, which is a Christianity that has been neutered by false gospels. As long as we keep playing stupid games with the gospel we can expect nothing but a continued decline in the exact same way that the mainline Protestant denominations have. They traded the gospel for social programs. Evangelicals have traded the gospel for being "nice" (moralistic therapeutic deism). Many evangelicals offer nothing more than a God who is a therapist and who is moral (think Veggie Tales), but we can't even get the moral part right because the gospel so many evangelicals preach couldn't change a spark plug.

Therefore the world watches while our marriages end in divorce, we have the same addictions they do, and we spend our money on the same filth that WE PROTEST (abortions, porn, alcohol, drugs, ad infinitum, ad nauseum). And our teenagers turn into unbelievers and the unbelievers turn into atheists and we keep doing the same thing over and over again (purpose driven hooey, seeker sensitive nonsense, emergent tripe, legalistic loopiness) wondering why nothing changes? And we forget that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result! Do another altar call. Pray another sinner's prayer. Dunk another corpse and make sure we get him on the membership roll. Do it all in the power of the flesh because the shema of the modern evangelical is, "If it works we don't need the Spirit of God."

Our prayer times are limited to saying grace before we gorge ourselves on the fat of the land and the rest of the world can go to hell because we have ours. The great irony is that in reality, we don't have ANYTHING. No Spirit of God, no fire on the altar, no revival and in many cases, no salvation but a lot of self deception.

When judgment comes on America it will not start in Hollywood or New York City or any one of a number of places we love to hate. It will start in the evangelical church. Jesus never wrote any letters warning godless entertainers but He did write seven letters to churches in Asia Minor and warned them that if they did not get things right He would come and remove them (Rev. 2-3). It's time to stop running social clubs and start running Biblical churches with uncompromising preaching in tandem with uncompromising living. It may already be too late. May God have mercy on us all.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Amen! Welcome to the blogosphere! I will be reading this blog as often as you write.

Shirley said...

My feelings exactly. And this is the very reason we need to be careful about calling other people out on their doctrine. It isn't enough to call ourselves "Christian" because of the doctrine we believe. We must be living it and sadly, generally speaking, we're not.

Anonymous said...

Wonderful and valid assessment. You are part of a remnant. May the Lord help you to connect with others who see this truth as well. I pray you would consider checking out standupforthetruth.com the web portal for a show about these very issues.

God bless you,

Larry Cornell