We’re so bad, we think things are worse than they are. Were I to traipse on down to Quizilla and take the “Who are you in the Hundred Acre Wood?” quiz, I’d surely come up Eyeore. Every single time. My “spirit-animal” is a marshwiggle. I’m the guy who doesn’t much care whether the glass is half full or half empty, because I’m convinced whatever’s in the glass is poison. Love may be like a warm blanket- I’m more of a wet blanket.
I, and those like me, can be especially skeptical, even cynical, about the evangelical church. We don’t like it that in some of our churches pastors dress up in baseball uniforms while deacons, handing out orders of “worship” cry out, “Programs, get your programs here.” We don’t like it that increasingly the rock stars in our universe are young, restless and revoiced. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder, though, if some of us are up in arms because we don’t have a thousand members waiting anxiously to hear part 17 of our sermon series, Turretin and You- Toward an Elenctic Cosmogony, or because our learned articles on the 2nd Temple Rabbinic Tradition of Pre-exilic Rabbinic Traditions don’t reach the audience we hoped. The world, we seem to think, must be going downhill, because our genius has too long gone unnoticed. Which is rather a foolish reason for pessimism.
Doesn’t anybody remember when everyone attended mainline churches, when we were grateful for a pastor that believed in a real resurrection? Doesn’t anybody remember when the most famous evangelical author was Mirabel Morgan? Doesn’t anybody remember when dispensational churches were to Reformed churches what haystacks are to needles? Doesn’t anybody remember when Gordon-Conwell and Fuller were considered hard-right seminaries? Doesn’t anybody remember when most evangelicals, Reformed and otherwise, were embarrassed by Genesis 1 and 2? I remember these things. Which should be a goad to me to remember to be thankful, even though the Bride, just like me, has much about which we should be ashamed.
While the problem with the rest of the evangelical church may be frog-in-the-fry-pan complacency, our problem may instead be even worse. We are ungrateful. As we put on our prophetic mantles, may we remember to give thanks for every knee that hasn’t bowed to Baal, and honor the weeping prophet who told us, “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” And may we remember that we too are those of whom the rest of the evangelical family are rightly embarrassed over.
The problem in the evangelical church isn’t that everybody else fails to be as sound and godly as me. The problem in the evangelical church is that everybody else fails, just like unsound and ungodly me. The good news for me is that Jesus died for me, and the He is washing me. The good news for the evangelical church is exactly the same.