Saturday, July 11, 2009

"Already Gone" is Wake Up Call for Church

Ken Ham, founder of Answers in Genesis, has written a prophetic book that the church will ignore at its own peril. The book is the result of a survey of 1,000 adults who have stopped attending church, but were active in their middle and high school years. The researcher does an excellent job of separating reasons from excuses and modern opinion from actual solutions.

The conclusion of the book is that the church has become irrelevant. Nancy Pearcey, in Total Truth, describes the two-tier theory of truth. Secularism has taken the objective fields of knowledge (the sciences) and left the subjective truth of religion and ethics to the domain of opinion. What Ken Ham adds to the discussion is that responsibility for that dichotomy lies squarely at the door of the church.

When differences between the claims of science and Christianity arose, the church caved. As a result, students never hear the counter-evidence. The stories and the worship, the sermons and the music feed emotions, but not the mind. They never relate to the world outside the church doors. Add to that the distance between our beliefs and our actions and we have a recipe for apostacy.

It is past time for the church to answer the questions of the secular world and reunite the worlds of science and ethics under the lordship of Christ. We must take very thought captive for the sake of ourselves and our children. Are we too late? Francis Schaeffer would remind us, "We are not called to be successful. We are called to be faithful."

No comments: