The End of Evangelicalism? III

In this post I’m going to finish my interaction with Michael Spencer’s essay, “The coming evangelical collapse.” In his last section Mr. Spencer falls into a trap that I think is self-defeating and self-fulfilling. That is the assumption that all is lost and the Evangelical church needs to go underground. He writes:

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.

This drives me a little nuts because only in America would we find truly minor setbacks the end of the line. Our culture takes a sharp turn toward the post-Christian (largely because the church has been shallow and unengaged culturally) and we immediately clamor for catacombs to worship in and nervously look for spies who might turn us over to the pagan authorities. I want to scream, “Get a grip!” The church needs to take a deep breath, re-assess, and begin the work Ecclesia Semper Reformanda anew. In tandem with this, we need to vigorously re-engage the culture and seek for a “godly society”, something evangelicalism hasn’t done in a long time. “Godly society” has mainly meant creating a ridiculously impoverished counter-culture that is a sad reflection of the larger culture. We need to get back to the idea that the church is a culture and the church makes culture. For goodness sake, we have the right answers, we should apprehend culture as it was intended to be, and we’re on the winning side!

Next, Spencer says:

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.

Ruins? Only for the pathetic squishy mega-church (and all its wannabes) end of the Evangelical spectrum. For the rest of us, we haven’t even begun to fight. The Faith is an existential age-long struggle. Only in America would we lay down after the first round. As far as vital house church ministries go, I have to ask “what is that?” It sound like an oxymoron. The church is the household of God but a house church, in as free a context as we have in America, is just plain silly. The early church met in house churches because they had no choice. They longed to build visible glorious structures and institutions. I ask the reader, did the church build hospitals and universities before or after the house church age? This house church movement is a Protestant phenomenon that will drive people into the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Church when the novelty of pretending to be a persecuted sect wears thin. In the end, I believe the church (including the evangelical side of the house) needs to start acting more like the church. This includes an unabashed re-affirmation of the church as the cultural standard, a visible and vital institution, and the only government that passes from this age into the next.

Comments

[RevK]

Enjoyed it all.

[Bobber]

Check out William Lane Craig's discussion of this. He strongly criticizes several points. Most interesting is the assertion of how modern philosophy has been virtually taken over by Christians.
http://rf.convio.net/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5887