At last year's Third Lausanne Congress in Cape Town, South Africa, one of the speakers was Christopher Wright. In a stirring address, Wright compared in detail the sate of the church today and the church in the generations before Luther.
"What is the greatest obstacle to God's mission in the world?' Wright asked. "It is not other religions or a resistant culture. Our idolatry is the single biggest obstacle to world mission. We are a scandal, a stumbling block to the mission of God. Reformation is the desperate need of our day, and it must start with us. If we want to change the world, we must first change our world." He called for a new reformation beginning within evangelicalism.
Stirring words!
[Source: Christianity Today magazine, December 2010 – p.38]
I’m interested in this post Mark, I wonder however if the reformation that Christopher talks of includes a radical evaluation of what we call evangelicalism today. Our structures and institutions that we so often refer to as ‘the Church’ are HUGE stumbling blocks which seem so distant from the rugged, disorganised, organic movements of God’s people in the past. Don’t get me wrong I love slick services, great music and engaging media however I think that there needs to be a significant excavation of the institutionalized mindset of the ‘church’ today to really understand why we are producing mostly ‘cultural Christians’ rather than people who are turning the world upside down by their radical scandalous desire to be a Christ follower…
Hi Dave. I wonder whether Chris is including that aspect in his statement? I think so.
Surrender all your life to Christ daily, at times moment by moment, when you need to ask for grace to carry out God’s will in a particular circumstance.
To have true reformation we must have true surrender.
The Apostle Paul was a life constantly surrended to God…you know what he said,
pray without ceasing. I think a major key to reformation (revival) is increasing our level of prayer personally.(building yourself up in your most holy faith. Jude 20).
“The price we are having to pay today in the shape of the collapse of the organised church is only the inevitable consequence of our policy of making grace available to all at too low a cost. We gave away the word and sacraments wholesale, we baptised, confirmed, and absolved a whole nation without condition. Our humanitarian sentiment made us give that which was holy to the scornful and unbelieving… But the call to follow Jesus in the narrow way was hardly ever heard.”
Dietrich Boenhoeffer (Cost of Discipleship)
How original of you Richard to quote a Lutheran 🙂
John – sorry I just couldn’t find a relevant Gandhi or Bill Gates statement on this topic to quote like a Contemporary Churcher! 🙂