catholicsphere

John MacArthur is an Evangelical pastor of Grace Community Church in California. As such, there are many points of doctrine with which he would disagree with the Catholic Church. But, that is not the reason I’m blogging on him today. The reason is because he’s got a new book, The Truth War.

MacArthur says:

Right now, truth is under attack, and it’s going on within the boundaries of evangelicalism. There’s a lot at stake and there’s no middle ground—no safe zone for the uncommitted in this war.

If this is aimed at the Evangelical community, what relevance does that have to the Catholic sphere, you may ask?

Plenty.

The topics contained in the book revolve around thinking in the postmodern world, the Church’s struggle to find relevance as well as flaws in what’s called the “Emerging Church Movement”, that is drawing thousands of new members each year across the country.

I’ve blogged before about this topic and the popularity of things like “The Purpose Driven Life” and “The Purpose Driven Church”. In the Catholic Church, there are those who complain that the Church is behind the times and the Mass is boring, etc. Groups like “Voice of the Faithful”, “Call to Action”, “We Are Church” and “Catholics for a Free Choice” want to change the Church; bring it into modern times.

G. K. Chesterton said,

The Church always seems to be behind the times, when it is really beyond the times; it is waiting till the last fad shall have seen its last summer. It keeps the key of a permanent virtue.

What the Evangelical community is undergoing is something that Lutheran pastor, Todd Wilken, has called “The Fad-Driven Church”.

MacArthur, like Wilken, target many of the same problems that are claiming Catholic victims: media versus message.

While Rick Warren and his ilk say you don’t have to compromise the message, the mode of delivery is confusing the message. What confuses the message is that people see and hear language and presentation that differs little from the world, and many have trouble distinguishing it from the world. It makes what I call “shallow saints”.

“Shallow saints” are created when a church focuses on being seeker-sensitive, without building up the body of believers, particularly new believers. And getting them deeper into the church in order to receive “solid food” is not without problems and challenges that might never be overcome; or at least not before these “new believers” get bored again and move on.

The question that should be raised is where do we draw the line in order to be relevant? In reality, I think we have to keep the main focus on the Gospel. I believe it is acceptable to throw in something from mainstream, pop culture in order to illustrate the point. However, to make the culture the main focus would be to confuse the point.

I think it would be a mistake to make church sermons and homilies into something akin to the blogosphere, where comments are tossed around related to the whatever the news of the moment is. That’s the kind of problem that the MSM is suffering from; many are getting popular information from blogs and the internet, so news outlets are scouring the blogs to get news and information that is fresh and appealing. The drawback? People become fickle and thus their devotion to any one source quickly wanes.

Certainly not a model that the Church should want to emulate.

Precisely why the Church needs to focus on teaching core Christian principles and ideas, relating those to people’s lives. Instead of taking culture and trying to find parallels to what one wants to teach.

[tags]gospel, church, john macarthur, purpose driven, faith, seeker, unchurched, catholic, evangelical, catholicsphere, religion, news, culture[/tags]