CADRE Comments

In his book What's So Great About Christianity? , Dinesh D'Souza discusses the explosive growth of what he calls "Traditional Christianity" (which he acknowledges is the same concept as C.S. Lewis called "mere Christianity" in his book by the same name) in much of the world. He compares it to the withdrawal that he sees in the mainstream churches in America which are rapidly shrinking. In the course of this discussion, he sets forth a quote that I found both interesting and accurate which I would like to share. Here in the West, there are lots of liberal Christians. Some of them have assumed a kind of reverse mission: instead of being the church's missionaries to the world, they have become the world's missionaries to the church. They devote their moral energies to trying to make the church more democratic, to assure equal rights for women, to legitimize homosexual marriage, and so on. A small but influential segment of liberal Christianity rejects a...

For at least the past decade, many churches have been turning to a process that is called visioning for the purposes of planning the future of the church. Personally, I believe that this process is contrary to the manner in which God would have us deal with the church, and so I have decided to set forth my thoughts in this blog entry. I have been through these visioning processes at least three times that I can recall. On two of the occasions, I was on the church council at the time of the visioning. Without exception, each visioning was a failure. Each of the churches that turned to these visioning processes were in decline, and contrary to the hopes of the councils involved, the visioning process ultimately added to the decline. In my view, there are several reasons why these visioning processes fail, but the primary reason is that it is an effort to place man's principles on the church. You see, the visioning process is a good one in a business environment. After all, the purpos...