One Side Entertains Itself, the Other Side Prays to Plants: Where’s the Middle Ground?

One Side Entertains Itself, the Other Side Prays to Plants: Where’s the Middle Ground? September 18, 2019

This is what Union Seminary in New York tweeted out yesterday.

I’m not concerning myself with the obvious idiocy of confessing sins to vegetation. Lots of folks beat me to it, anyway.

 

Over the past five years or so, I’ve spent a good deal of time and effort in calling out the scandal of evangelical worship on this blog. Its gluttonous consumption of entertainment, the obvious emotionalism, and the self-referential pseudo-liturgies have disfigured the movement beyond recognition.

And here is the other side of the post-Reformation coin. Confessing their sins against plants, for God’s sake. Both the bloated evangelicals on the one side and the gaunt mainline Protestants on the other are showing how malnourished they are.

If you want to have a healthy church, you need a liturgy that loudly and boldly preaches the gospel of Christ and him crucified. The kind of justice to which the church is called must flow from that wellspring, not gutter runoff from the kooky whims of hipster cultural outrage.

These ad hoc liturgical preoccupations of mainline Protestantism, though most not as blatantly stupid as this one, are pointless, banal barkings of a church that has hopelessly lost its way.  This isn’t Christian worship in any sense, and coming from an institution pumping out fresh mainline clergy, I think we will be calling time of death pretty soon.

With the narcissistic theological bankruptcy on one side, and the Christ-less weirdness on the other, the population in the middle ground is growing sparser. Who in their right mind would want to be a Christian these days? And what’s a hard-lining moderate like me to do?

Almighty God, please show us a middle way.

Photo:
wikipedia


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