It is with reservation I write today. I haven’t blogged here for some time and its on purpose in case you were curious. Over the course of the last several years I have been tossing around the idea of writing a book. I have stopped and I have started again numerous times. Of late, I have been stirred and shaken, its time to go for it. I had been sitting on it until I clearly saw where I wanted to go recently.

The last couple years in particular have been good in terms of writing on my blog here and elsewhere. My blogging has provided an avenue to share in so in ways that have been both helpful for me and hopefully beneficial and encouraging to those who have read. It is my intention to return to blogging, but I am currently unable as my time is needed elsewhere as I finish my book proposal and seek out an agent.

Hoping to have a good report soon.

I haven’t mentioned my affection for fellow blogger Michael Spencer (aka imonk) here on this blog to my knowledge, but I have elsewhere.  For those interested in the rise (and the eventual demise of evangelicalism many of us are predicting), the thoughts and observations Spencer makes are interesting—agree or disagree—he has some pointed and chilling things to say.

The following was posted in the March 10th 2009 edition of The Christian Science Monitor.

Oneida, Ky. – We are on the verge – within 10 years – of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.

Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the “Protestant” 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century.

This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good.

Millions of Evangelicals will quit. Thousands of ministries will end. Christian media will be reduced, if not eliminated. Many Christian schools will go into rapid decline. I’m convinced the grace and mission of God will reach to the ends of the earth. But the end of evangelicalism as we know it is close.

Why is this going to happen?

1. Evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism. This will prove to be a very costly mistake. Evangelicals will increasingly be seen as a threat to cultural progress. Public leaders will consider us bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society.

The evangelical investment in moral, social, and political issues has depleted our resources and exposed our weaknesses. Being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of Evangelicals can’t articulate the Gospel with any coherence. We fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith.

2. We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we’ve spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.

3. There are three kinds of evangelical churches today: consumer-driven megachurches, dying churches, and new churches whose future is fragile. Denominations will shrink, even vanish, while fewer and fewer evangelical churches will survive and thrive.

4. Despite some very successful developments in the past 25 years, Christian education has not produced a product that can withstand the rising tide of secularism. Evangelicalism has used its educational system primarily to staff its own needs and talk to itself.

5. The confrontation between cultural secularism and the faith at the core of evangelical efforts to “do good” is rapidly approaching. We will soon see that the good Evangelicals want to do will be viewed as bad by so many, and much of that work will not be done. Look for ministries to take on a less and less distinctively Christian face in order to survive.

6. Even in areas where Evangelicals imagine themselves strong (like the Bible Belt), we will find a great inability to pass on to our children a vital evangelical confidence in the Bible and the importance of the faith.

7. The money will dry up.

What will be left?

•Expect evangelicalism to look more like the pragmatic, therapeutic, church-growth oriented megachurches that have defined success. Emphasis will shift from doctrine to relevance, motivation, and personal success – resulting in churches further compromised and weakened in their ability to pass on the faith.

•Two of the beneficiaries will be the Roman Catholic and Orthodox communions. Evangelicals have been entering these churches in recent decades and that trend will continue, with more efforts aimed at the “conversion” of Evangelicals to the Catholic and Orthodox traditions.

•A small band will work hard to rescue the movement from its demise through theological renewal. This is an attractive, innovative, and tireless community with outstanding media, publishing, and leadership development. Nonetheless, I believe the coming evangelical collapse will not result in a second reformation, though it may result in benefits for many churches and the beginnings of new churches.

•The emerging church will largely vanish from the evangelical landscape, becoming part of the small segment of progressive mainline Protestants that remain true to the liberal vision.

•Aggressively evangelistic fundamentalist churches will begin to disappear.

•Charismatic-Pentecostal Christianity will become the majority report in evangelicalism. Can this community withstand heresy, relativism, and confusion? To do so, it must make a priority of biblical authority, responsible leadership, and a reemergence of orthodoxy.

•Evangelicalism needs a “rescue mission” from the world Christian community. It is time for missionaries to come to America from Asia and Africa. Will they come? Will they be able to bring to our culture a more vital form of Christianity?

•Expect a fragmented response to the culture war. Some Evangelicals will work to create their own countercultures, rather than try to change the culture at large. Some will continue to see conservatism and Christianity through one lens and will engage the culture war much as before – a status quo the media will be all too happy to perpetuate. A significant number, however, may give up political engagement for a discipleship of deeper impact.

Is all of this a bad thing?

Evangelicalism doesn’t need a bailout. Much of it needs a funeral. But what about what remains?

Is it a good thing that denominations are going to become largely irrelevant? Only if the networks that replace them are able to marshal resources, training, and vision to the mission field and into the planting and equipping of churches.

Is it a good thing that many marginal believers will depart? Possibly, if churches begin and continue the work of renewing serious church membership. We must change the conversation from the maintenance of traditional churches to developing new and culturally appropriate ones.

The ascendency of Charismatic-Pentecostal-influenced worship around the world can be a major positive for the evangelical movement if reformation can reach those churches and if it is joined with the calling, training, and mentoring of leaders. If American churches come under more of the influence of the movement of the Holy Spirit in Africa and Asia, this will be a good thing.

Will the evangelicalizing of Catholic and Orthodox communions be a good development? One can hope for greater unity and appreciation, but the history of these developments seems to be much more about a renewed vigor to “evangelize” Protestantism in the name of unity.

Will the coming collapse get Evangelicals past the pragmatism and shallowness that has brought about the loss of substance and power? Probably not. The purveyors of the evangelical circus will be in fine form, selling their wares as the promised solution to every church’s problems. I expect the landscape of megachurch vacuity to be around for a very long time.

Will it shake lose the prosperity Gospel from its parasitical place on the evangelical body of Christ? Evidence from similar periods is not encouraging. American Christians seldom seem to be able to separate their theology from an overall idea of personal affluence and success.

The loss of their political clout may impel many Evangelicals to reconsider the wisdom of trying to create a “godly society.” That doesn’t mean they’ll focus solely on saving souls, but the increasing concern will be how to keep secularism out of church, not stop it altogether. The integrity of the church as a countercultural movement with a message of “empire subversion” will increasingly replace a message of cultural and political entitlement.

Despite all of these challenges, it is impossible not to be hopeful. As one commenter has already said, “Christianity loves a crumbling empire.”

We can rejoice that in the ruins, new forms of Christian vitality and ministry will be born. I expect to see a vital and growing house church movement. This cannot help but be good for an evangelicalism that has made buildings, numbers, and paid staff its drugs for half a century.

We need new evangelicalism that learns from the past and listens more carefully to what God says about being His people in the midst of a powerful, idolatrous culture.

I’m not a prophet. My view of evangelicalism is not authoritative or infallible. I am certainly wrong in some of these predictions. But is there anyone who is observing evangelicalism in these times who does not sense that the future of our movement holds many dangers and much potential?

• Michael Spencer is a writer and communicator living and working in a Christian community in Kentucky. He describes himself as “a postevangelical reformation Christian in search of a Jesus-shaped spirituality.” This essay is adapted from a series on his blog, InternetMonk.com.

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds; God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father, by whom all things were made.

Who, for us men and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the virgin Mary, and was made man; and was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried; and the third day He rose again, according to the Scriptures; and ascended into heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father; and He shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead; whose kingdom shall have no end.

And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of Life; who proceeds from the Father and the Son; who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets.

And I believe one holy catholic and apostolic Church. I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins; and I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

-The Nicene Creed

Good stuff.

HT: One Passion One Devotion

1 And you were dead in the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— 3 among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind (Ephesians 1:1-3, ESV).

Without any moxie in regards to the truths that define our faith, Christianity is no different than any other man-made religion.

The truth of God offends carnal man.

Despite my affection for Martin Luther, he is not the founder of our faith.  However, Luther shared that truth which wasn’t accommodating in an era drenched in untruth and theological muck.  He took his stand—”Here I stand; I can do no other. God help me. Amen!”  Luther merely rediscovered the wonderful and foundational truths upon which our faith is built—when truth was a pretty lonely topic.  He wasn’t willing to be quiet about it.  When I survey today’s theological landscape, it seems Luther’s day may have met its match.  We could use another Luther or two.  The cornerstone of our evangelical tradition is a line drawn in the sand concerning justification by faith alone.  That is to say, we neither add one ounce to—nor subtract one ounce from—the saving work of Christ.  Our personal redemption owes its entire existence to the handiwork of Christ.  Start to finish.

Risking the danger of oversimplification, one may say that evangelicals and Roman Catholics together teach that God by his grace is the only Savior of sinners, that self-salvation is impossible, and that the death of Jesus Christ as a propitiatory sacrifice is the ultimate ground of justification.  But precisely what justification is, how it relates to other aspects of salvation and how it takes place—these are areas of continuing and anxious debate (John Stott, The Cross of Christ, page 184). 

Another grand doctrine within our evangelical tradition is a firm held position concerning man’s fallenness.  Man is completely lost.  He is rotten at his core and therefore it has spread to his every fiber.  He has no chance at being redeemed outside the realm of a saving faith rooted and anchored in the finished work of Christ.  The reformers would refer to man’s age old dilemma as ‘total depravity’.  It’s as old as the first Adam.  There is no negotiating here with our more compassionate fellows who wish to argue that man has some good traits, some redeeming qualities of his own—or anything to bring to the table when speaking of justification. 

Stott continues, Evangelicals feel the need to press Roman Catholics about sin, grace, faith and works.  Roman Catholics are uncomfortable when we talk about ‘total depravity’ (that every part of our humanness has been twisted by the Fall), which lies behind our insistence on the need both for a radical salvation and for noncontributory grace.  They find this a pessimistic view of the human condition, involving an inadequate doctrine of creation.  They add that human beings have not lost their free will and are therefore able to cooperate with grace and contribute to salvation.  We, however, see the need to underline the New Testament antitheses regarding salvation.  ‘It is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast’ (Eph 2:8-9).  ‘We… know that a man is not justified by observing the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ’ (Gal 2:16).  again, ‘he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy’ (Tit 3:5). 

That’s about as good as it gets when explaining the link between total depravity and justification.

And Stott again, We cannot avoid the stark alternative that such texts put before us.  Not works, but grace.  Not law, but faith.  Not our righteous deeds, but his mercy.  There is no cooperation here between God and us, only a choice between two mutually exclusive ways, his and ours.  Moreover the faith that justifies is emphatically not another work.  No, to say ‘justification by faith’ is merely another way of saying ‘justification by Christ.’  

In conclusion, salvation is only ‘given’ to an undeserving man, it is never ‘payment’ to a deserving man.  Man offers absolutely nothing in the salvation equation but his sure and deserved damnation.  Christ on the other hand richly provides paradise and life to the hilt.

Our total depravity makes justification the one life or death transaction we can’t afford to miss.

…The biblical gospel of atonement is of God satisfying himself by substituting himself for us.

The concept of substitution may be said, then, to lie at the heart of both sin and salvation. For the essence of sin is man substituting himself for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for man. Man asserts himself against God and puts himself where only God deserves to be; God sacrifices himself for man and puts himself where only man deserves to be. Man claims prerogatives which belong to God alone; God accept penalties which belong to man alone (John Stott, The Cross of Christ, page 159).

Atonement comes down to simple terms: God himself in the person of Jesus Christ hung and suffered in my place.  He took my sins upon himself.  And he died my death.  Essentially, he stood in the shoes I would have otherwise been required to wear.  Atonement simply means my redemption. 

4 But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, 5 to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons (Galatians 4:4-5, ESV).

I’m not sure why we have all the debate about the nature of atonement because it seems to me harder than the side of a barn to miss.

If the gospel message has been more powerfully proclaimed in six minutes – I haven’t heard it done. 

HT: reformation21.

To the spiritual perplexity which exercised so many of the rarest souls of the nineteenth century, God appeared as a Being whom men desired to find but could not. But such a formula, though it truly represented one side of their situation, can never represent the whole of any human situation. For God is also a Being whom it ill suits any of us to find but from whom we cannot escape. Part of the reason why men cannot find God is that there is that in Him which they do not desire to find, so that the God whom they are seeking and cannot find is not the God who truly is. Perhaps we could not fail to find God, if it were really God whom we were seeking. And indeed the deepest reality of the situation is that contained in the discovery, which alone is likely at last to resolve our perplexity, that when we were so distressfully seeking that which was not really God, the true God had already found us, though at first we did not know that it was He by whom we had been found. There is a saying, ‘Be careful what you seek; you might find it.’ And some who have sought God only as a complacent ally of their own ambitions have found Him a consuming fire.   –John Baillie (1886-1960), Scottish theologian

Francis of Assissi is alleged to have said, “Preach the gospel always; if necessary use words.” That may be a great medieval sound bite, but it falls short of what the Bible teaches about evangelism. Jesus began his public ministry by “proclaiming the good news of God” (Mark 1:14). When he gained a reputation as a miracle-worker, his response was to leave the area so he could give himself to the task of proclamation, for “that is why I have come” (Mark 1:38). And the risen Lord left his disciples with the specific commission to go to the nations, “teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:20).

There is a tendency in some quarters today to promote a kind of evangelism without proclamation. Acts of service are done or people are invited to experience Christian worship. But without words of explanation these are like signposts pointing nowhere or, worse still, signposts pointing to our good works. The gospel is good news — a message to be proclaimed, a truth to be taught, a word to be spoken, and a story to be told.   -Tim Chester and Steve Timmis, Total Church

I figure that if I can point one person to Jesus I’ll settle for that, it’s better than pointing one hundred million to myself. 

Jared Wilson recently shared the above quote on his blog The Gospel-Driven Church.  Most everything I write or share can trace its origins to something I found elsewhere and have chewed on as if I were a cow chewing on his cud.  

Years ago while spending a weekend away in Pentwater, Michigan, I ran across and purchased an artist’s colorful display done in calligraphy of the thirteenth century friar’s famous prayer.  Francis of Assisi’s writings have been an inspiration to me.  That being said, I have noticed we (myself included) have a tendency to canonize little bite sized sayings by those we make out to be larger than life.  I’m as guilty as anyone.  This was a guy who is said to have preached to plants and trees after all.  I’m sure Francis was a wonderful man, but we must remember he struggled with formulating a biblical theology and following Jesus just as you and I do.  It all is a process.  And as an aside, I am always a little leary of anyone who has the prefix ’saint’ tacked on the front of their name, but I won’t lobby here for a new Protestant initiative in which we put ’sinner’ in front of our names (although Paul called himself the chief of such).  

But without words of explanation these are like signposts pointing nowhere or, worse still, signposts pointing to our good works — I do get the feeling  that many of us within evangelicalism have replaced a faithful proclamation of the unadulterated gospel with our own version of what we think constitutes sharing the gospel.  And while I won’t discount the need and role of our good works, I will say we put way too much precedence on them — as well as confidence in them.        

If my pitiful – and even my finest — good works are all the testimony I have, my efforts to share Jesus are toast.  The gospel isn’t what I have done since I have become a Jesus-follower, the gospel is only about what Jesus has done.  We can’t forget this holy must — it is his story and his goodness we are called to expound upon.