In Chapter Three of Christ Above All Earthly Pow'rs, David Wells dissects the impact of rampant immigration on contemporary American religious life. I write "religious life," but Wells argues that it is precisely "religious life" that is going the way of all flesh, to be replaced by an amorphous and individualistic spirituality. The authority of institutionalized Christianity is giving way to the influx of various secularized forms of Eastern Mysticism with its emphasis on the experience of the self. Just look at the transformation of available titles in the religion section of the local Barnes and Noble; it is not only the Bible gracing those shelves.
Although some may find shelter in the fixed system of Islam (another growing demographic) from the moral collapse of American culture, the real appetite is for life as a pilgrimage--a journey from one transcendent experience to the next, always in search of finding true self-actualization, meaning, and purpose. Life in the Father's house (religion) is displaced by life on a journey (spirituality). It is precisely this search that seeker oriented congregations tap, but not without consequences. Wells comments:
America is tuned in to spiritual matters but not to religious formulations. This makes it very easy to gain a hearing for what is spiritual but hard to maintain a genuinely biblical posture because that becomes a part of "religion." It is very easy to build churches in which seekers congregate; it is very hard to build churches in which biblical faith is matured into genuine discipleship. It is the difficulty of this task which has been lost in many seeker churches, which are meeting places for those who are searching spiritually but are not looking for that kind of faith which is spiritually tough and countercultural in a biblical way (p. 119).
After pointing out that Christianity is not without its own emphasis on life as a journey (think of Israel's wanderings and "here we have no continuing city"), Wells points out the differences between the two metaphors:
What sets these two conceptions apart is the possession of revealed truth in the one case and its absence in the other. That being so, the current evangelical disposition to shuck off its cognitive structures and minimize the practical place of revealed truth in the life of the Church means that it has brought itself to the edge of a precipice. It is a precipice precisely because as evangelical faith has chosen to minimize itself in these ways in order to become attractive to postmodern seekers, it is losing what makes it distinctive from all of the other postmodern spiritualities. Today, it trembles on the edge of becoming just one of many spiritualities in the marketplace even as the liberal Protestants much earlier diminished Christianity by making it out to be just one among many religions, better than others, perhaps, but not unique (p. 123).
And that is why, earlier in the book, Wells said this:
When the Church loses the Word of God it loses the very means by which God does his work. In its absence, therefore, a script is being written, however unwittingly, for the Church's undoing, not in one cataclysmic moment, but in a slow, inexorable slide made up of piece by tiny piece of daily dereliction (p. 9).
Now before I do cartwheels because I think we're committed to expositional preaching and opposed to the seeker-driven philosophy, I seriously wonder how much I/we unwittingly buy into some of the same values exposed in Well's work, namely, a spirituality that is anti-institutional, deeply privatized, individualistic, and therapeutic (pp. 95-96).
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