Revitalize Your Church

A troubled friend recently wrote these words. How would you respond to him? I tend to espouse reason over belief. There is a two thousand year divide between the religious and the rational which has created so much misery. Life has become something to be endured, promising more adversity than joy. The Bible espouses a tradition which evokes images that can be found alien and frightening: unyielding rules; a paradoxical mixture of mysticism and literal belief; the repression of women; the suppression of dissent, whether philosophical or scientific, and that's not even the Old Testament. . .

Have you noticed that American Christianity has gone squishy? Perhaps it’s the consumer culture. Maybe it’s the “Me Generation” coming of age. It might be that the Bible has taken a back seat to the entertainment industry in the recent decades. It certainly has something to do with a lack of sound doctrine being preached and taught in our churches. A lot of people are now under the impression that it doesn’t make any difference WHAT you believe, as long as you believe something. Of course, that is faulty logic. For instance, you might believe it’s safe to step out of a flying airplane without a parachute, but you’ll come to a rude awakening in a few seconds. WHAT we believe is vitally important. We need to know the Truth in order to be set free. (John 8:32) Hosea 4:6 says, “My people perish for a lack of knowledge.” The average church member knows less about the Bible today than the average non-believer did a hundred years ago. When Christians decry the demise of our culture, w...