Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Accommodating Christians


This is a brief book report for my evangelical Christian friends that can also apply to those that are politically active.

What makes the following excerpts so significant is that they were written nearly THIRTY years ago! 

Today, there have been several comments about how the Church/Bible/Christians have become irrelevant to today’s culture.  There needs to flexibility to make room for the changes in today’s society.  Unfortunately, the Church cannot bend the truths of God’s Word.  He is unchangeable.  His Word is unchangeable.  His truth is unchangeable. 

Certainly, the methods that Christians employ to share the Gospel will have a great effect.  The problem in my short 40+ years of being a Christian has been the increasing bending over backwards of Christians to be more like the world and less Christlike.  This is what Schaeffer warned against. 

So, I feel, the following passage is more relevant for Christians today than ever before.


Accommodation, accommodation.  How the mindset of accommodation grows and expands.  The last sixty years have given birth to a moral disaster, and what have we done?  Sadly we must say that the evangelical world has been part of the disaster.  More than this, the evangelical response itself has been a disaster.  Where is the clear voice speaking to the crucial issues of the day with distinctively biblical, Christian answers?  With tears we must say that largely it is not there and that a large segment of the evangelical world has become seduced by the world spirit of this present age.  And more than this, we can expect the future to be a further disaster if the evangelical world does not take a stand for biblical truth and morality in the full spectrum of life. For the evangelical accommodation to the world of our age represents the removal of the last barrier against the breakdown of our culture.  And with the final removal of this barrier will come social chaos and the rise of authoritarianism in some form to restore social order.  (p. 141)

But the accommodation we have been speaking of has constantly taken the form of giving in to the humanistic, secular consensus which is the dominant destructive force of our day.  And if no change in this comes, our opportunity will be past.  Not only will the compromising portion of evangelicalism go down in collapse, all of us will be carried down with it.  We cannot think that all of this is unrelated to us.  It will all come crashing down unless you and I and each one of us who loves the Lord and his church are willing to act.  And so I challenge you.  I call for Christian radicals, and especially young Christian radicals, to stand up in loving confrontation…with all that is wrong and destructive in the church, our culture, and the state.  (p.151)
Francis A. Schaeffer
The Great Evangelical Disaster, 1984, Crossway Books


Take some time to think this through and let me know what you think.  Now, more than ever, Christians need to be engaged with the world without compromising the absolute truths of God’s character.