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In this new video series Tim Keller looks at each book of the Bible and finds threads of the story of the gospel.
…Increasingly the culture doesn’t believe in facts or truth. It believes that people create their own truth, they create their own facts. There’s no certainty on what the right take on reality is. And so here we have the Christian church of all things being the center of emphasis on the idea that there are historical facts that can be verified.
For almost twenty years after the end of WWII church attendance surged to its highest levels in history, and Christianity seemed to be thriving in the U.S. But it was in the last 15 years that what Kuyper foresaw and what Europe experienced seems to have begun here. Church attendance began to decline across the board, especially among younger people. And the cultural institutions began to take an overtly hostile and adversarial stance toward traditional Christian faith.
It is clear that for some people ‘faith deconstruction’ is just that. They have come to see the historic teachings and doctrines of the church as crafted to make us pawns and suppress our personhood. They are walking away from both the church and the traditional Christian faith altogether. For them, deconstruction—a dismantling—is the end-point of the process.
A short talk from Tim Keller on How the DNA of the Gospel Applies to Cultures All Over the World and how global leaders are using the DNA to share the gospel globally.
The vision cannot be simply for a restoration of churches and Christian institutions to their former states of strength. That is to mistake means for ends. Our vision should be that the astonishing biblical possibilities for the church as the community of the Spirit would be realized in U.S. society in ways it never has before.
In the past two years during COVID, I’ve read a number of helpful books ranging in categories from understanding culture, to Biblical and theological studies. I’d like to preview and recommend a few of them to you.
Christians must recognize that they do have things to do to prepare for renewal, but that ultimately it is God’s wise sovereignty that will determine whether and how the church is renewed. Many see a metaphor for this concept of renewal in Elijah’s confrontation with the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel in 1 Kings 18. The prophet builds an altar, but it is only God whose fire can ignite it. Christians looking for revival, then, are “building the altar,” praying that God will use their efforts to bring a fire of revival with a movement of his Spirit.
Since 2007, evangelicalism has begun its own decline. All indications are that in the coming years an unprecedented number of younger Americans will be leaving churches and institutional religion of all kinds behind. But why?