David F. Wells of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Massachusetts, here challenges evangelicalism with a disturbing analysis of its present condition. He believes that we have allowed ourselves to be shaped by the popular culture whose ethos is alien to God-consciousness, to ‘other-worldliness’, and to passion for biblical truth. In putting ‘success’ before theology we have produced a plague of nominal evangelicalism which, unless reversed, leaves us ‘headed towards the oblivion of irrelevance before God’.
‘What is most lost is what most needs to be recovered. It is the unsettling, disconcerting, moral presence of God in our midst. He can no longer be the junior partner in our religious enterprises and he can never be just an ornamental decoration upon our Church life. It is because God now rests so inconsequentially upon the Church that the Church is free to plot and to devise its success in its own way. That is why so many of our forebears in the faith would scarcely even recognize us as their children today.’
- Pages: 16
- Type: Booklet
- ISBN: 9781800400146
- Published: 1995