The Local Church is a Liability to a Christian
By admin May 26, 2008
In his new book, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth-lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World, David Wells comments on the two weakness of the classical evangelicals. First, doctrine shrank because liberty was allowed on all issues other than the core principles that defined evangelicals – Scripture’s authority and Christ’s penal substitutionary death (7-8). In the end, a “series of hybrid” evangelicals emerged – “feminist evangelicals, ecumenical evangelicals, liberal evangelicals”, etc – that were defined and shaped by their additional “tag” rather than the core principles (9).
The second weakness was the vanishing of local churches. It became a matter of “personal choice” for whether or not the core principles needed to be lived out “primarily in an ecclesiastical context.” Thus, there was the rise of parachurch ministries, which lived to “strengthen the life of the churches” in the beginning. Since then, however, evangelicals have thought of their faith in “para” terms and apart from the church (10). This attitudinal shift coupled with the rise of church “marketers” resulted in many churches disappearing and becoming “entirely parachurch in nature! (11).
Wells concludes that this “disappearing trick would never have been possible if evangelicals were still thinking in doctrinal terms.” He continued:
The truth is that without a biblical understanding of why God instituted it, the church easily becomes a liablility in a market where it competes only with the greatest of difficulty against religious fare available in the conveniences of one’s living room and in a culture bent on distraction and entertainment. Few demands are made by television preachers, or on borrowed DVDs, and every pitch for a financial contribution is subject to death by the mute button. That cannot be said of the preacher in a church! This conquest by the market, accomplished silently and without any fanfare, has not only greatly diminished the church but, one has to say, has also greatly diminshed what it means to be a Christian believer (11).