Trying to Beat the World at the World's Own Game
26 Aug 2006
According to today’s church growth gurus, the only way to reach our postmodern world is by speaking its language, adopting its ways, and taking advantage of its techniques and technology. Apparently, no one has bothered to tell this to today’s Muslims. Islam, the Muslim faith, is not only postmodernism’s fiercest foe and worse nightmare, but also the world’s fastest growing religion. Posing such a repudiation of today’s prevalent church growth philosophy, one cannot help but wonder how Islam’s phenomenal growth is being explained away by today’s church growth gurus, especially in light of the fact that it can’t be written off as a mere Third World phenomenon, since Islam is not only the fastest growing religion in undeveloped countries, but also in industrialized nations like our own.
To be perfectly honest, I presently see no useful purpose being served by today’s church growth gurus. Yet, I must admit that I do believe they have tremendous potential as possible secret weapons in our nation’s war on terrorism. If they can sell Muslims, as easily as they have Christians, on the idea of winning the world by becoming like it, we may have finally stumbled onto something to stymie the worldwide spread of Islam.
It was our Lord Himself who warned us that we could never beat the world at the world’s own game. In Luke 16:8, Jesus said, “The children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.” Despite this infallible word of warning, today’s church incessantly attempts to win the world by mimicking it. Rather than confining ourselves to divine means, which are “mighty through God” (2 Corinthians 10:4), we employ worldly methods in our grandiose plans to win over a Christ-rejecting world. It’s as though we actually believe that all it takes to persuade men to lay down their enmity against God is the right Christian novel, film, CD, video game, or marketing technique.
A few years ago we began foolishly pointing sinners away from local churches and to the local Barnes & Noble. Rather than getting them into the House of God and under the preaching of the Gospel, which is the “power of God unto salvation” and the divinely ordained way for men to be saved (Romans 1:16; 1 Corinthians 1:21), we sent them to the fiction section of Books-A-Million to pick up the latest installment of Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ Left Behind series. Believing that the old, old story of how a Savior came from glory was no longer sufficient to reach the sophisticated sinners of a postmodern world, we encouraged postmodernists to get their religious faith from works of fiction.
Finding it far easier to get modern-day sinners to bookstores to buy fiction than to church to buy into the Bible, we concluded that getting them to theaters to watch the big screen would be a whole lot easier than getting them to church to hear a boring sermon. I mean, after all, how can the preaching of our local church’s pastor possibly compete with a big budget Hollywood production filled with special effects? Thus, today’s church eagerly climbed on board Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ” bandwagon, even to the point of predicting that Gibson’s film would strike the spark that would ignite worldwide revival. Of course, revival didn’t come, Gibson has been arrested for DUI, and moviegoers have moved on to Snakes on a Plane.
With today’s church having done all of the legwork for him, by pointing people to bookstores and theaters to get their religion from fiction and films, Satan has now come out with his own bestselling book and blockbuster movie—The Da Vinci Code. Taking advantage of the readership and viewership created for him by an unwitting church, Satan has been able to deceive millions into believing, as author Dan Brown asserts in The Da Vinci Code, that Christianity is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated upon the human race. As a result, many readers and moviegoers are not vowing, as one has on Dan Brown’s own website, “I’ll never be able to enter a church again.”
In spite of being continuously snared by the fowler and hung up by our heels, as well as forewarned by our Lord that we’ll always end up outdone by the world when we attempt to do God’s work the world’s way, today’s church unconscionably plods along playing right into the world’s hands. Just consider the Jesus action figure now being marketed by Train Up A Child Incorporated or Left Behind Games’ new Left Behind: Eternal Forces video game due out in October. The latter, based on LaHaye and Jenkins’ bestselling books, challenges players to either convert or kill unbelievers left behind after the rapture. In multiplayer mode, a player can even choose to command the armies of the Antichrist against the so-called left-behind Tribulation Forces.
Having turned the blessed hope of our Lord’s return into a video game to be played by teens along with Grand Theft Auto and Sonic the Hedgehog, having reduced our Lord to an action figure to be played with by tots along with their GI Joes and Barbie dolls, and having confused the Gospel with Tom Clancy-like fiction and a film inspired by the mystic writings and supposed visions of a Catholic nun named Anne Emmerich, I can’t help but wonder how much more today’s church will cheapen the Gospel and profane the sacred in its foolish attempts to convert the world by conforming to it. One thing for sure, we can’t sink much lower without bottoming out spiritually. In which case, we’ll be just like the world.
Don Walton
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