Looking and sounding like the world mutes the true spiritual difference between the world and the Christian message. The entire progressive project is an attempt to create an ethos within the church to address the problem of church attendance as if that was the first concern of the church. Now the music, the message, the mission are all choreographed to make people feel comfortable, that is at home.

My last blog raised the concern that the face of Evangelicalism is losing its distinctive commitment to the full authority of the Bible. This softening view of the Bible is not so much an outright denial (often it is not), it is more likely to be exhibited in what the evangelical church/organization looks like in practice or ministry. The growing disposition is to adopt a view of the Bible that allows the evangelical to reimagine (I think that is the word used today) how the church gets on with its business. The reason for this dubious experiment is that evangelicals are in panic mode because they think young people are losing interest in the biblical view of the church. Listening to evangelicals’ conversation one regularly hears two consuming questions: “What can we do to get people in the church and how can we keep the young people from leaving the church?” Good questions on the face of it, but the answers are based on a flawed modernistic understanding of God’s design for the church. In common language, it is that the church must keep up with the times. It is flawed because Christians have an ancient message from the unchanging God which defies the Progressive mantra. The assumption (faulty) is that the cause of the church’s ineffectiveness is that its message packaging is not relevant to those of the world (you have heard this language from the world). Hence, the solution is to change the face of evangelicalism to make it more world-friendly while still trying to be faithful to the Gospel. However, the world-affirming ethos is at odds with the biblical view that the world spirit is at enmity with God. It is something like playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” at a military funeral.

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