What We’re Looking For

I am going to attempt my first little series of entries on a similar topic for the first time on my blog. Will have to see how well I actually pull it off.
The basis upon which I will embark on this series is a desire to articulate (in my words) what I think the generation we are a part of is looking for from the Western church. The church can often be criticised for being behind the times and without any anti-church motive I think I can see why.

In the realm of apologetics the author Francis Schaeffer noted that it was not that trained seminarians did not have the answers it was that they did not know the questions being asked. He was trying to say that because times have moved on people are burdened by different things affecting their souls (at their roots they are all the same but they are understood through different lenses of the current postmodern mileu that is our world) and so are asking different questions than they were a generation ago.

This is true of what people are expecting, wanting, or needing from the church. They have different but equally painful soul destroying issues at work than people did 30 years ago. Intensifying that is the rapid secularisation of Western culture that blinds them from the transcendent nature of their ‘issues’ and so the church needs to be a very different ‘anti-culture’ then it needed to be less than a generation ago. I will start in due course…

Simon