“Our hereafter is non to be found in our saving but in our investment” ( 19 ) . “The best manner to foretell the hereafter is to make it” ( 20 ) . “Fewer people are go toing church because of the decreasing influence of Christ on the church itself. ” “We equated being a good citizen with being a good Christian. We lived without persecution and shortly found ourselves without strong belief. We didn’t lose America ; we gave her off! In our terror and impotence we turned to political agencies to seek to recover what we one time had through religious waking up.
Yet as a moral bulk we could non carry through what God could through Gideon’s few” ( 28 ) . “Once we were called Christians by an atheistic universe and now we call ourselves Christians and the universe calls us dissemblers. Is it possible that it wasn’t the state that was going perilously secular but the church? We were neither relevant nor surpassing. We have become. in the worst of ways. spiritual. We are the laminitiss of the secular nation” ( 29 ) . “The church became a safety from the universe instead than a force in the universe. Predictability and stableness became dominant themes… .
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The Gospel shifted from a church on a mission to a church that supported missions” ( 30 ) . “How could we of all time think that the Christian religion would be safe when its cardinal metaphor is an instrument of decease? It is non a happenstance that baptism is a H2O grave picturing decease and Resurrection. It is no less important that the on-going regulation of the Lord’s Supper is a reminder of forfeit. How did we of all time develop a safe divinity from such a unsafe religion? ” ( 33 ) “Institutions preserve civilization while motions create culture” ( 34 ) .
“For old ages the majority of American Christians who were committed to missions could merely take part through giving and praying. Today. the call to crosscultural ministry doesn’t even necessitate traveling ; it merely requires remaining with a purpose” ( 45 ) . “Where one time the heathen lived in the state and the danger of the metropolis was to be Christianized ; now Christians tend to populate off from the metropoliss and view the urban inhabitant as the true pagan” ( 46 ) . “Gideon was focused on mass ; God was focused on momentum” ( 69 ) . “It’s difficult to believe that a motion Born of visionaries and dreamers would go dominantly known for its traditions and rituals” ( 138 ) .
“Just because a individual can non read doesn’t intend she lacks the capacity to larn. One’s present status is non an indicant of possible. but of development” ( 211 ) . III. SALIENT POINTS/ANALYSIS 1. The Need for the Church to Connect with this Generation The writer speaks about how in the past 40 old ages communities have changed dramatically yet many local churches have stayed the same. This explains the irrelevance and bankruptcy of the church in respects to being salt and light and functioning as agents of alteration for civilization.
Even the manner the Gospel is communicated has to be changed if we are traveling to make this present coevals. One of the dramatic alterations in our environment is the displacement from words to images. To make church in a manner that is wholly textdriven is the buss of decease. Peoples don’t read. they merely observe. Beyond the outgrowth of a postliterate society. we have a civilization raised on amusement ( 17 ) . As McManus provinces. “While non many churches perform their services in Latin today. our linguistic communication. manner. music. and methods are reasonably much Latin to the unchurched population” ( 81 ) .
