Pastor's Blog

More from David Wells on "Self", chapter five of his book, The Courage to Be Protestant . As it turns out, we are a nation, frankly, in which we are all underappreciated. Even worse, we have all been victimized by someone. And worse yet, we are all about to collapse unless we get in touch with our feelings by getting entirely naked. Or, as those in the know say, by becoming “vulnerable.” Beneath the surface of normality, you see, is a car wreck about to happen. Everywhere. In everyone. That is what we are all assuming. And that is how we are now looking at every aspect of life... Quite a few public schools have banned competitive games because they dent the self-esteem of those who do not win. Most schools have so elevated self-esteem over performance, feeling good over doing well, that we have produced a nation of children whose estimate of themselves is sky-high but whose academic performance lags ever further behind that in many other nations... America has become a very s...

Chapter five of Well's book is called simply "Self." In a nutshell, what happened was that our individualism, which had always been a potent factor in American life, turned inward in this decade. It withdrew from the outside world. And during the 1960s a new worldview emerged. To a great majority of Americans, it now became clear that the self had become the source of all values. The pursuit of the self was what life was all about... It is not unreasonable to think that this turn in our culture would have found resistance among the religious. And it did at the more liberal end of Protestantism, ironically enough, but evangelicals fell headlong into this new way of seeing life. It could be heard, in the 1980s and 1990s, every time Robert Schuller’s cherubic countenance appeared on television. He was moving in a new direction, though he also claimed to be traditionally Protestant. He announced that this new self-focused preoccupation was nothing less than a new Reformation....

More on the problems of "marketing" the church by David Wells. Here was the gospel product as sleekly fashioned and as artfully sold as anything in the mall or on television. Here also were churches smelling of coffee and reverberating with edgy music. There were bright and exciting videos. And the professional singers rivaled any one might hear in Vegas. It was all put together in a package to please, entice, entertain, relax, grab, and enfold potential customers, and worm its way into their hearts... What results, all too often, beneath all the smiling crowds, the packed auditoria, is a faith so cramped, limited, and minuscule as to be entirely unable to command our life, our energies, or, as a matter of fact, even much of our attention. One church advertises itself as a place where you will find "loud music" and "short services." It has a "casual atmosphere" but, it wants us to know, it also offers "serious faith." This is always the...

In addition to the older, classical evangelicals whom David Wells identifies in his book, The Courage to be Protestant , he mentions an evangelical constituency which he calls the "marketers." The church marketers are those who have followed the innovations in "doing" church pioneered by Bill Hybels at Willow Creek Community Church in 1975... This approach, it is said, is seeking to preserve the old evangelical message while delivering it in new ways. Its strategies have been borrowed from the corporate world. The key idea is that there is a market for the Christian message. They utilize marketing techniques and proven entertainment formats to penetrate that market. This innovation seemed to be the train that was leaving town three decades ago, and pastors by the thousands scrambled to get aboard. Here was the magic formula for success. Though a genuine passion for evangelism no doubt lay somewhere in the experiment, it was also wrapped in the most stunning cultural...

David Wells continues his explanation of the demise of classical evangelicalism. The capacity to think doctrinally was being lost as new leaders emerged, as the leadership of the evangelical world shifted from the older pastor-theologians to the new entrepreneurial organization builders, and as churches began to reflect this change in their attitudes and worship. The erosion in biblical ways of thinking at first passed almost unnoticed... Campus organizations were undoubtedly reducing Christian faith to its most minimal form. And as serious biblical preaching in the churches diminished, ignorance of biblical truth became commonplace. But the largest factor in this internal change, I think, was that evangelicalism began to be infested by the culture in which it was living. And then Christianity became increasingly reduced simply to private, internal, therapeutic experience. Its doctrinal form atrophied and then crumbled.

The more time one spends reading the Scriptures and searching out the implications of its teaching, the more forcefully this truth impresses itself upon one's consciousness: the Christian faith is not about me and Jesus and my personal salvation. It is, instead, a comprehensive view of life and the world . This reduction of the faith is one of the things David Wells decries in his book, The Courage to Be Protestant . He does so while explaining both the nature and the demise of classical evangelicalism. The first constituency ...is classical evangelicalism. This is what took shape and form immediately following the Second World War, both in Europe and in the United States. What stood out about it, and what still does, is its doctrinal seriousness (p. 2) Wells explains that there were two core theological beliefs that held an otherwise theologically diverse group together: (1) the full authority of the inspired Scripture and (2) the necessity and centrality of Christ's penal su...

I've just started to read David Wells' latest book, The Courage to Be Protestant (2008), and it promises to be a good one. Wells is the professor of Historical and Systematic Theology at Gordon- Conwell Theological Seminary. Writing as an evangelical himself, Wells has published some searing critiques of evangelicalism, beginning with his No Place for Truth; or, Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? in 1993. This was followed by God in the Wasteland (1994), Losing Our Virtue (1998), and Above All Earthly Pow'rs (2005). The Courage to Be Protestant, Wells informs his readers, started out as a simple summary of these previous works, but ended up as a recasting of them in an attempt to get at the essence of what he sees as the chief problems with modern American evangelicalism. He begins by setting forth "The Lay of the Evangelical Land" (title of chapter one). And he divides the evangelical world into "three rather distinct constituencies": (1) ...