Posted by
CRB on Tuesday, December 26, 2006 5:14:35 PM
We live in a Liberal world. By that I mean the western world since the Enlightenment; the world brought to us partly by a reaction to the rampant religious persecution of the preceding centuries and partly by a demand that all be proven. It's a world guided by a principle of Tolerance that we also know as Personal Liberty where we're generally free behave and live, to believe or not, to act or not, to succeed and fail, as we may individually choose.
Gone is "community". While remnants of it remain, individual autonomy and self-realization are now the keys to fulfillment.
Gone is "faith". Everything around is has been tested and proven to provide maximum efficiency and comfort. There's no need for faith when the need for it, the pain of life, has been removed.
Gone is "purpose". If there is nothing outside ourselves, no community, no God, no absolute reason, then we remain with little other than now.
The church exists in this Liberal world. We live and think and behave within the confines of this thinking. At the beginning of the Liberal period, the 19th c., the freedom meant the opportunity for missions. Into the 20th c. we took advantage of the opportunity for education, building Christian colleges around the world. Many of the opportunities afforded by Liberalism have been well-used.
But the last half of the 20th c. saw the church grab hold of marketing principles, politics, and retailing as the new methods of choice. Without Community we have little involvement in personal ministry, so it's done by proxy, through agencies that we can pay to do it for us. Without Faith we trust that the budget is adequate. Without Purpose we just listen to the pastor and let him lead, but we don't interact with leadership and get our hands into the Biblical basis for and methods of ministry. We don't want to get our hands dirty.
Can we escape our Liberal mindset? I don't know. We're entering a post-post-modern era with challenges for which we're ill-prepared. I think that it's because we have no idea where we are today, so consequently we have no idea where tomorrow will be.
What should we be doing? What the Bible says, of course: Persuading with the Gospel, teaching the whole of the Word and making it applicable to life, living by faith in a community of believers, and having an eternal purpose.
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