Guest Blogger: Dying on the Evangelical Hill

An extended and insightful comment if you will...my friend Ron accommodated my request for him to be a guest blogger today.

Sometimes there are those days that really illuminate the grandness of being a Christian. Today is one of those days. I’ve been asked to guest blog on Burn the Ships. I’d like to expand on Pat’s most recent post “A Collapsed Evangelical Identity”

When I read the post I started to think of Francis Schaffer’s book “How Then Shall We Live?”. Schaeffer spent his life pondering the decline of Western culture, and declared that the only viable answer to combat this was to accept God’s revelations, and live a life according Christian ethics and biblical morals. I think he was right on. The bigger question becomes how is that being worked out in the Evangelical Church today? It also begs the question of what is the Evangelical Church? It encompasses so many different lines of thought and behavior that I think it’s reasonable to wonder what to do with the label itself. The one that my brother Pat has become so disenchanted with.

There are constantly movements to confront what many would say are the problems of Evangelicals. One that we keep hearing about is the Emergent Church. It has its own issues, but the fact is it is a response to some weighty problems in the Evangelical sphere. So, instead of casting Pat into a “Oh, he’ll be okay in a few days” line of thought, I think it would be good to consider his concerns and ask questions like:

Does it even matter to be linked by name to the Evangelical Church?

Is this just the way it is? (i.e. we are all sinners and until Jesus returns we should just deal with it?)

Is there an example in Scripture/history to teach us how to handle this issue?

Are American Evangelical Christians any more off base than other Christian cultures in how we operate?

Or is it a matter that we must each in our own way being linked to the local church Body work out our salvation with fear and trembling, while praying with earnest that we grow more to love Christ, and that our church and churches grow in love, truth and obedience to our King, and that we love and serve others as He did?