Many of you have written from out of town expressing appreciation and inquiring about current or future projects. Those contacts have been encouraging to be sure, but I would be remiss if there was no honest expression of where things stand. Getting right to the point, while American Christianity suffers under an effeminate, anti-intellectual malaise, the Treasure Valley in southwestern Idaho may be the ultimate microcosm of that phenomenon. There is not much spiritual health here. It’s the sort of place people move to get away from it all. Yet the consumers of apologetic, doctrinal, and other instructional material are disproportionately high. If we believe the numbers, then there is a significant chunk of most churches where thinking is actually a priority, but where the sources are expected to come from outside the local congregation. Thousands of believers in every town now treat their “meat” as a kind of product that can be disassociated from the life of the church, and those who minister in the parachurch justify this by saying that they are “equipping the body” more effectively from their independent positions. The trouble with this is that the whole reason to engage in parachurch “thinking and doing” is that the local church is ill-equipped and, quite frankly, uninterested; but then who are these equippers equipping if such activity is not a churchy thing? When does all this artillery translate into a sustained military campaign? The more one looks at it, the more the parachurch, whether it has intended to or not, looks a little bit like a pyramid scheme. It simply creates an army of consumers and producers, hacks and peddlers, who will always be disaffected from the local church. In part, I am writing to you to recognize this, put a halt to it, and recapture your passion for the local church, no matter where you live in the country (or the world).
A recent bit of reminiscing has also gotten me writing. I just got finished reading a book entitled Upstream: The Ascendancy of Modern Conservatism, by Alfred Regnery. The author is the son of the founder of Regnery Publishing that printed many a conservative tome, and so was well qualified to write such an account of the movement. One particular thing that struck me was the power of a handful of clear thinkers—and even clearer communicators—to take profound truths from the ivory tower to man on the street. If this can be done for a temporal movement concerning things which are passing away, how much more can (ought) it be done by those aflame with the Spirit to take the whole of the biblical worldview seriously. And to do so where it was meant to be done: the local church [cf. Eph. 3:9-11]. It pains me to recall all those nights on the college campus spent solving all the world’s problems—though it was a pipe dream—and to know that it was the closest thing any of us will ever see to some of the scenes in the book of Acts. That scene should be true about the church.
Finding other comrades in arms may be the biggest initial challenge. Like any of the more everyday elements of the church, this requires our time, our talent, and our treasure. But if we care about these things then we are obliged to support the cause. To be a Christian is to be a world changer—each person in his or her own vocation. If only a dozen rebel thinkers could start a movement of ideas that eventually captured the majority of the American electorate, then why shouldn’t a dozen or more Christian thinkers do the same? A number of objections just popped into my mind, which are easy enough to anticipate. There is no time or space to answer them all here; but one such answer does move me very nicely into my last point about why an e-newsletter. Whatever peculiarities of secondary doctrines each reader may have, I take it that one thing we can all agree on is this: that anti-intellectualism in the church is scandalous and harmful. Much study over the past eight years has gone into discovering the causes of that condition. I want to make that case in little sound-bytes, as that’s all I have at the moment. I want to suggest to you—and beg your patience to be convinced—that God’s design for the local church is still authoritative; and that design is universal. The church is the city of God expanding within the city of man. Nothing is left out, and no one is exempt.
A recent bit of reminiscing has also gotten me writing. I just got finished reading a book entitled Upstream: The Ascendancy of Modern Conservatism, by Alfred Regnery. The author is the son of the founder of Regnery Publishing that printed many a conservative tome, and so was well qualified to write such an account of the movement. One particular thing that struck me was the power of a handful of clear thinkers—and even clearer communicators—to take profound truths from the ivory tower to man on the street. If this can be done for a temporal movement concerning things which are passing away, how much more can (ought) it be done by those aflame with the Spirit to take the whole of the biblical worldview seriously. And to do so where it was meant to be done: the local church [cf. Eph. 3:9-11]. It pains me to recall all those nights on the college campus spent solving all the world’s problems—though it was a pipe dream—and to know that it was the closest thing any of us will ever see to some of the scenes in the book of Acts. That scene should be true about the church.
Finding other comrades in arms may be the biggest initial challenge. Like any of the more everyday elements of the church, this requires our time, our talent, and our treasure. But if we care about these things then we are obliged to support the cause. To be a Christian is to be a world changer—each person in his or her own vocation. If only a dozen rebel thinkers could start a movement of ideas that eventually captured the majority of the American electorate, then why shouldn’t a dozen or more Christian thinkers do the same? A number of objections just popped into my mind, which are easy enough to anticipate. There is no time or space to answer them all here; but one such answer does move me very nicely into my last point about why an e-newsletter. Whatever peculiarities of secondary doctrines each reader may have, I take it that one thing we can all agree on is this: that anti-intellectualism in the church is scandalous and harmful. Much study over the past eight years has gone into discovering the causes of that condition. I want to make that case in little sound-bytes, as that’s all I have at the moment. I want to suggest to you—and beg your patience to be convinced—that God’s design for the local church is still authoritative; and that design is universal. The church is the city of God expanding within the city of man. Nothing is left out, and no one is exempt.
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