God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams by David F. Wells
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was a very stimulating read that is very relevant, very needed, very prophetic. David Wells--in my opinion--hits the nail on the head in so many ways with regards to the state of the church in recent days. The trend in the church that he mainly discusses is its slow slide into conformity with the surrounding culture worldview and values. As he puts it, God's presence is felt "too lightly" on/in the church and there has been a "hollowing out" of the deep, abiding, serious aspects of the life of the church. I think these two quotes are a good summary and leave lots of food for thought:

“We have thus become the pawns of the world we have created, moved about by the forces of modernity, our inventions themselves displacing their inventors in an ironic recapitulation of the first dislocation in which God’s creatures replace their Creator and exiled him from his own world. As it turns out, we too have lost our center through this transition. We have become T. S. Eliot’s ‘hollow men,’ without weight, for whom appearance and image must suffice. Image and appearance assume the functions that character and morality once had. It is now considered better to look good than to be good. The façade is more important than the substance—and, that being the case, the substance has largely disappeared. In the center there is now only an emptiness. This is what accounts for the anxious search for self that is now afoot: only the hungry think about food all the time, not the well fed, and only those in whom the self is disappearing will define all of life in terms of its recovery, its actualization.” (p. 14-15).

“The fact is that while we may be able to market the church, we cannot market Christ, the gospel, Christian character, or meaning in life. The church can offer hand child care to weary parents, intellectual stimulation to the restless video generation, a feeling of family to the lonely and dispossessed—and, indeed, lots of people come to churches for these reasons. But neither Christ nor his truth can be marketed by appealing to consumer interest, because the premise of all marketing is that the consumer’s need is sovereign, that the customer is always right, and this is precisely what the gospel insists cannot be the case.” (p. 82)

Exactly--so, let's make sure we are a part of the counter-culture movement who long for and act to see true revival come to the Church & churches.


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