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Why bother with church?Worrying about churchWHY BOTHER WITH CHURCH? This is a very disappointing book. The chosen subject is excellent - in our highly individualistic and self-centred age, there is a need to remind people of the centrality of the church in God's purposes. The reason the book is so disappointing is because the contents are so poor. The basic problem is profound: I would question whether this book is evangelical in its approach. Time and time again the author gives answers different from the great teachings of the Bible so clearly identified by evangelicals from the Reformation onwards. That is a serious claim, so let me give some examples. For a start the book is thoroughly human-centred rather than God-centred. This is reflected in the way that, throughout the book, people are seen primarily as consumers rather than as sinners in need of salvation. More seriously still, in dealing with the fundamental question: 'How do we encounter God?' the author rejects the truth that this can only happen by faith in Christ as he is presented to us in the Bible, and instead tells us: 'We need to feel, touch, sense, see, even smell our way to a full encounter with God. Hence the alternative-worship culture's use of images, movement, music, touch and video, often all at the same time, to help the worshipper to encounter something of the otherness' (p.54). It is sad, but no real surprise, when at another point the author relates how he asked a fellow minister the question, 'So, what's the gospel for people like this then?' He clearly views the response he got as a good one, and quotes it at length. That response ends with this sentence: 'So the church is vital in building people's self-esteem by helping them do things for themselves and others that they couldn't do on their own' (p.131). This 'gospel' of self-esteem is not Christian.Of course, there are useful insights and helpful comments in the book, but I wouldn't recommend spending much time examining the contents of a house which is built on sand. The only real value of this book is in illustrating the way that much professing evangelicalism pays lip-service to the authority of the Bible, when actually its agenda is set by other concerns. Very worrying also is that this book is published by IVP. Does this mark a shift in editorial policy away from a robust commitment to historic evangelicalism? Tim Gill, Maidenhead© Evangelicals Now - March 2002 |