The fads that exist in the church (using the term in its broadest possible sense) today — the seeker-sensitive and emergent movements — are largely motivated by fear. It is a fear of being unattractive to postmodern man, and so becoming irrelevant. The prevailing notion is that we must become postmodern if we are to gain an audience with the postmodern culture.
But this has never been the way God has worked. He has never called his people to blend in with the culture. On the contrary, we are a people called out of the culture to display the character of God to the culture. And we need not fear that our peculiarity will hinder God in his work of redemption.
[W]hen Paul says it is God who grows the church, he clearly is assuming that God is sovereign. God rules over all of life, bringing about his providential will, from the mighty events like the falling of empires to the most insignificant, like the falling of a sparrow. This means that within this world, kingdoms and cultures rise and fall according to his sovereign will. Paul says he has even established the nations’ boundaries (Acts 17:26).. Nothing, therefore, is more absurd than the panic that now grips the evangelical church. It is terrorized by the specter of postmodernity. Reading today’s “how-to” literature, one has to draw the conclusion that the church’s days are numbered unless we rush in to prop it up with our own know-how. God, you see, has more on his hands than he can possibly handle. Unless the church capitulates and kisses its (post)modern enemies, it is done for!
The desperate measures being proposed for these desperate times are often little more than a case of weak knees and unbelief. We believe altogether too little in God’s sovereign control, otherwise we would not be in full retreat before the pressures and demands of the (post)modern world. We look like the soldiers of some sorry nation that are very brave when they are safe in their protected barracks but, at the first sight of an enemy, lay down their arms and run.
The truth is that there is nothing in our postmodern world that is a serious threat, or an insurmountable obstacle, to the will of God, this is true of this saving will as well. He is as sovereign in the way he begets faith today as he is over the sparrow that flies or falls, he will grow the church. Today, we no longer seem to believe this, and want to aid his cause by our week and foolish capitulations.
—David F. Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant: Truth Lovers, Marketers, and Emergents in the Postmodern World (Eerdmans, 2008), 244.
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Posted in: Church & Culture · David Wells · The Courage to be Protestant
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3 Comments:
#1 || 09·01·31··10:48 || Betsy Markman
This is so awesome! I have far too many books on my "must read" list, but "The Courage to be Protestant" is going to have to nudge some others further back in line. Praise God for its truths, and may there be many more like it!
#2 || 09·02·01··03:28 || andrew
i wasnt very impressed with the book. Does God really want us to go back to the 17th Century? What about ressourcing the church from the early days and then look afresh at the 21st century?
#3 || 09·02·01··07:32 || David
Does God really want us to go back to the 17th Century?
Andrew, you must have read a different book, because there’s no way you got that from Wells.
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