A friend had this quote posted on his facebook page this morning. Very thought provoking. Enjoy!
from JD Greear’s blog today:
“I can’t help but feel that lurking beneath the surface in much of the current disillusionment with the church is a dis-ease with the traditional message of salvation. People are passionate about the poor, the environment, and third-world debt. But they seem embarrassed by a violent, bloody atonement for sin, let alone any mention of the afterlife that hangs in the balance.
My observation is that as people grow tired of hearing about the atonement, salvation, the cross, and the afterlife, they grow tired of church. Because the more that sin and redemption and heaven and hell recede into the background, the more the church becomes just one among several options for making a difference in the world.
So as much as the church has been nothing but a holy huddle at times and as much as I admire zeal for good works, there is a danger in much of the missional literature that the gospel of God’s grace toward sinners gets swallowed up in urgent calls for world redemption and cultural transformation. There is a danger of centering our churches on adopting schools and offering parenting classes instead of being centered on the message of a heavenly Father who adopts unworthy children of wrath through the work of His Son on the cross. There is a danger that we find our unity in doing good missional deeds for our community and not in the good news of the gospel. There’s a danger our Christianity becomes all imperative and no indicative, all about what we need to do with God and little about what God’s done for us. There’s a danger that when people get disinterested in the gospel, they get disinterested in the church. And once they leave the church, they’ve left the only institution whose mission aims for eternity and whose gospel is truly good news.”
- Kevin DeYoung and Ted Kluck, Why We Love the Church, pp. 50-51