Odds and Ends

I have not had time to get too far in the Revelation work due to stuf at home. But a couple fo things have caught my attention lately.

First is how far our culture, even the Christian sub-culture, has strayed from an interest in being edified to a hunger for being entertained. This puts me in mind of what Paul tells Timothy about how in the last days people will turn to teachers who will teach what they want to hear. Traditionally I have taken this to refer to the propensity of people to ignore sound teaching for false teaching because tey prefer the lie to the truth. But it could be that the lie is turned to just because it is more entertaining than the truth.

Ho do we respond to that?

Certainly there have been times when the Christian Church has been out of step with the culture and managed to turn good news into "o.k. news" through being boring in its delivery. I don't think that this can be said of preaching today, though; many churches feature cutting edge multi media presentations on a regular basis.

The church however may be a victim of its own success in this area. We may just be addicting attenders to the medium at the expense f the message. We may be training people to expect entertainment rather than edification. We may wind up altering our services so that they titillate rather than transform.

This is entirely unintentional, but that may be the scariest part. For this to happen without our notice, or perhaps without our forethought, says a bit about the way we are trying to reach the culture. We are simply looking for the next big thing, the next fad that we can ape and imitate. But isn't the Holy Spirit creative, rather than imitative? Does this not mean we should be setting trends in some sense rather than reacting to them?

Something to think about.