A Heavenly (Dreamy?) Boyfriend

 This praise song that David Wells critiqued in the 1990′s shows how much modern Christian music 1) lacks biblical doctrine, 2) privatizes and individualizes faith, 3) thrives on sentimentality, experience, and emotion, 4) exhibits feminization and juvenilization, and 5) views God or Jesus as a heavenly boyfriend.  Here it is (and please note – songs like this are still written, produced, and sung today).:

“I need you to hold me
Like my daddy never could
And I need you to show me
How resting in your arms can be so good.”

“I need you to walk with me
Hand in hand we’ll run and play
I need you to talk to me
Tell me again you’ll stay.”

I have to be honest here.  I’m not sure how a mature Christian man can sing songs like that while thinking about the living God of heaven and earth.  And I can’t imagine that a mature Christian woman whose faith has been forged by trials and tears would appreciate that song (makes me think of the depth of Mary’s prayer/poem that she spoke as a teenager [cf Lk 1:46-55]).  Wells comments thus:

“What is so striking about the hymnody – if that is what it is – of this postmodern spirituality…is its parasitic nature.  It lives off the truth of classic spirituality but frequently leaves that truth unstated as something to be assumed, whereas in the hymnody of classical spirituality the truth itself is celebrated.  The one rejoices in what the other hides.  That seems to be the most obvious conclusion to be drawn from the fact that the large majority of praise songs I analyzed, 58.9 percent, offer no doctrinal grounding or explanation for the praise; in the classical hymnody examined it was hard to find hymns that were not predicated upon and did not develop some aspect of doctrine.”

“Not only is the praise in this postmodern spirituality often shorn of theological scaffolding, but what it facilitates is deeply privatized worship.  One indication of this is that the Church, the collective people of God, features in only 1.2 percent of the songs; what dominates overwhelmingly is the private, individualized, and interior sense of God.  By contrast, 21.6 percent of the classical hymns were explicitly about the church.  The texture of the songs in the postmodern spirituality, furthermore, is more therapeutic than moral” (p. 43-44).

Wells has a lot more to say about this; I strongly recommend this section (and the whole book) of Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision.

shane lems

sunnyside wa

The First Church of the Hermit Crab (Or: Don’t You Want A Full Church?)

This is quite the book: Losing Our Virtue by David Wells.  In it, he explains how many aspects of modernity and postmodernity have crept into the church to the point where any talk about sin is avoided and talk about self is central.  From watered down emotional praise songs to therapeutic sermons to the loss of reverence and awe in worship, Wells calls out the sins of the modern church.  This book is a sort of trumpet call for churches to repent of their worldliness and reform according to the word (rather than culture).  I appreciated these paragraphs near the end of the book.

“The wisdom common to many of our marketers is that, if it wants to attract customers, the Church should stick to a positive and uplifting message.  It should avoid speaking of negative matters like sin.  Not only so, but what has distinguished the Church in its appearance and functions should now be abandoned.  In order to be attractive to people today, church buildings should not look different from corporate headquarters, malls, or country clubs.  Crosses and robes should go; dress should be casual; hymns should be contemporary and empty of the theological substance by which previous generations lived, because this is incomprehensible today; pews should be replaced by cinema-grade seats, organs by synthesizers and drums, solemnity by levity, reflection by humor, and sermons by light dialogues and catchy readings.  The theory is that people will buy Christianity if they don’t have to deal with what the Church has traditionally been.”

“The best construction that can be put on this is that these market-driven churches have become like hermit crabs, which walk around concealed within a shell.  Hidden beneath the outer shell – the corporate style that disguises the churchly business that is supposed to be going on , the mall-like atmosphere in which faith is bought and sold like any other commodity, the relaxed, country club atmosphere – is the little animal who supposedly is really evangelical.  As it moves from rock pool to rock pool, all we can see are the little legs – the most minimal doctrinal substance – that protrude from under the shell.  Is this substance enough to sustain people amidst life’s fiery trials?  Is it enough to preserve biblical identity in these churches in the decades ahead?  I think not.”

Well said.  As you may have guessed, I highly recommend this book.  If your church is a hermit crab church, or if you’ve left one, or if you want to be sure your church doesn’t become a hermit crab church, get this book today (and give one to your pastor!).  Be prepared to be challenged, prodded, encouraged, and motivated to get back to Scripture and the historic Christian faith.

David Wells, Losing Our Virtue (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 201.

shane lems

Pious and Secular America

Back in 1958 Reinhold Niebuhr published a collection of essays which he titled, Pious and Secular America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958).  The first essay has the same title of the book, and I found it to be quite thought-provoking and penetrating.  Notice the depth of these quotes.

“…Here we are in the 20th century, at once the most religious and the most secular of Western nations.  How shall we explain this paradox?  Could it be that we are most religious partly in consequence of being the most secular culture?  That would add a special depth to the paradox.”

“Our secularism is of two varieties.  [1] There is a theoretic secularism which dismisses ultimate questions about the meaning of existence, partly because it believes that science has answered these questions and partly because it regards the questions as unanswerable or uninteresting. [2] There is a practical secularism, which expresses itself in the pursuit of the immediate goals in life.”

“We are somewhat embarrassed by the fact that we are the first culture which is in danger of being subordinated to its economy.  We have to live as luxuriously as possible in order to keep our productive enterprise from stalling.”

In this fine article, Niebuhr also goes on to discuss how the Enlightenment and evangelical Christianity merged on the Western frontier which resulted in political and religious sentimentality: “The heaven of evangelical Christianity and the utopia of the Enlightenment were…blended on the frontier.”  I’ll have to blog on that at a different time.  Meanwhile, I recommend finding this article and reading it if you’re interested in this religiously secular reading of American history.  You’ll appreciate this article if you like the works of David Wells, George Marsden, Michael Horton, or Stephen Nichols, just to name a few.

shane lems

Operation Gravedigger: Bringing Down the Church

This is one outstanding book: Os Guinness’ The Last Christian on Earth (formerly published as The Gravedigger File).  The book is something like Screwtape Letters plus David Wells plus Christless Christianity plus William Willimon.  With his usually sharp and penetrating style, Guinness uses a series of fictional email memos to show how the Western church has been weakened, watered down, and neutered in the last 200-300 years.  Here are a few quotes from one anti-Christian agent to another happily describing some effects of Operation Gravedigger, which they hope will eventually mean the demise of the church in the Western world.

“[The anti-Christian strategy of Operation Gravedigger] may be stated like this: the Christian faith contributed to the rise of the modern world, but the Christian faith has been undermined by the modern world it helped to create.  The Christian faith thus becomes its own gravedigger” (p. 21).

“The church contributed to the creation of the modern world.  Soon she was committed to that world without reservation.  Before long she was hopelessly contaminated – in the world and up to her neck” (p. 32).

“The Christianization of Rome led to the Romanization of the Christian faith and away from the way of Jesus” (p. 34).

“With many Christians little or no different from their ‘pagan neighbors,’ much of American Christendom is more modern and more American than it is any longer decisively Christian” (p. 55).

I’ll no doubt come back to this book in the future.  For now, I do think it is a must read for those of you who, like me, lament the worldliness of the American church.  If a church talks, looks, sings, thinks, and acts like the world, is it still a church?

Please, get this book!

shane lems

American Churches: The Evangelical Answer to Home Depot

  You’ve got to get this book: This Little Church Went to Market by Gary Gilley (Darlington: EP Books, 2010 [reprint]).  The subtitle is telling: “Is the Modern Church Reaching Out or Selling out?”  In this book, Gilley takes on the American church growth industry.  From Saddleback to Willow Creek to Lee Strobel to Bill Hybels, churches and church leaders are straight up adopting a business model of marketing a product and applying that model to the church.  Of course, Mike Horton, David Wells, Os Guinness, and many others have also written well on this subject, but Gilley’s book is a great addition to those other voices.

In This Little Church, Gilley discusses how our culture is entertainment driven, self-focused, consumer based, and swimming in self-help psychology.  He then documents how many American churches have adopted the business model of getting people in the doors by entertaining them, meeting their felt needs, and using Christianity as a resource to give lives a boost.  Preachers talk about fulfillment and say Jesus is a way to find fulfillment and that Christianity brings excitement and spontaneity into dull lives.  While some of these churches are might mean well, ultimately what happens is the whole message of salvation gets watered down to nothing, since neither repentance nor self-denial is demanded of people in the ‘audience.’  Here are a few of my favorite quotes.

“In order to market a church to the unsaved consumer, he must be given what he wants.  Since unsaved consumers do not desire God, or the things of God, they have to be enticed by something else.  Thus the temptation arises for a church to change, or at least hide, who they are so that they appeal to unchurched Harry.  Additionally, the church is tempted to alter its message to correspond with what Harry wants to hear and thinks he needs.  The end result is a felt-needs gospel that appeals to Harry’s fallen nature in an effort to entice him to come to Christ, the ultimate felt-need supplier, so that he is fulfilled and feels better about himself” (p. 44).

“In most arenas truth doesn’t stand a chance against success; this proved to be the case in the church growth wars” (p. 61).

“If Harry is drawn to church in order to get, in order to satisfy his flesh, he is not likely to stay around when and if he discovers that Christ calls for him to lose his life for Christ’s sake (Matt. 16:25).  The result is that churches which have been built on the quagmire of the superficial must remain superficial if they hope to retain their Harrys and Marys” (p. 65).

I’ll have to come back and blog on this book again later.  In case you’re interested, it isn’t long (around 130 pages) and it is easy to read.  Three truths from this book that I’ve really been thinking about since reading it are these: 1) a large church isn’t necessarily a successful one, 2) a small church isn’t necessarily an unsuccessful one, and 3) churches that refuse to cater to and entertain the consumer will ordinarily remain small (now read #2 again!).  We really need to beat our ecclesiastical heads against the wall until we no longer believe that ‘bigger is better’ and ’fun is #1′ when it comes to the church. 

I really encourage our readers to get this book: This Little Church Went To Market by Gary Gilley.

shane lems