Found Alan Roxburgh's new book waiting for me when I got back from Seattle tonight. Got ambushed by something in the preface. I noticed the popularity of Joel Osteen's book, "Your Best Life Now." I can't help but mention that Oprah Winfrey popularized the phrase, "Living Your Best Life!" Then here comes Roxburgh in his preface:
Throughout Western societies, and most especially in North America, there has occurred a fundamental shift in the understanding and practice of the Christian story. It is no longer about God and what God is about in the world; it is about how God serves and meets human needs and desires. It is about how individual self can find its own purposes and fulfillment. More specifically, our churches have become spiritual food courts for the personal, private, inner needs of expressive individuals. The result is a debased, compromised, derivative form of Christianity that is not the gospel of the Bible at all. The biblical narrative is about God's mission in, through, and for the sake of the world and how God has called human beings to be part of God's reaching out to that world for God's purpose of saving it in love. The focus of attention should be what God wants to accomplish and how we can be part of God's mission, not how God helps us accomplish our own agendas. -Alan Roxburgh
In our desperation to connect to a lost and fallen world, is part of the Church pandering to the self-centered, self-fulfilling humanism made popular by celebs like Oprah?
No comments:
Post a Comment