Jesus's teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did. If our churches aren't appealing to younger brothers, they must be more full of elder brothers than we'd like to think.
Tim Keller in The Prodigal God, 14-15.
Hard to hear the truth. Probably true though. I wonder how we change.
Posted by: Seth McBee | 11/07/2008 at 11:23 PM
I like this book and Keller's teaching. I think he says that elder brother-ism is more dangerous because it is harder to discern so I guess it can grow and spread in a very imperceptible way in our churches. Rod Rosenbladt has an interesting sermon on this theme of people who were 'broken by the church' - the moral requirements of elder brother-ism...the old bait and switch...offer freedom with the gospel and then burden them with the Law once they are in.
Posted by: srvdove | 11/08/2008 at 01:15 AM
Wow. I read that just yesterday. Huge.
Posted by: Jim U. | 11/08/2008 at 09:34 AM
I honestly cannot believe how much awesomeness he packed into that little book. It has been awhile since I was affected by a book so much
Posted by: Matt Redmond | 11/09/2008 at 07:08 AM
I'm so excited about this book. I used to live in NYC and am still a member of Redeemer. I'm thrilled to see Tim's really starting to write more - I loved hearing him on Sundays and still listen to downloaded sermons on a regular basis. "The Reason for God" was fantastic, and so far I've been hearing great things about this next work as well.
Posted by: Deb | 11/10/2008 at 09:24 AM
This statement by Tim Keller is very discomforting. I believe it is a true, typically brilliant insight. But it is so true that puts most every ministry I know about under a fairly severe judgment. I wonder if any credible voices would dare to disagree with the statement and find fault with the premise? I wonder if this statement is true in most cultures and ethnic expressions of Christianity.
Posted by: Hawk4grace | 11/10/2008 at 11:02 AM
I've been wanting to read this book for quite a while but my studies at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary are keeping me busy.
As far as this particular point...I totally agree. Sometimes I wonder why more people and pastors in the churches don't have friendships with neighbors and the unchurched? Our calling is not to pastor churches or even plant churches...our calling is to make disciples. Don't get me wrong, I have been involved in leading and planting churches but that's secondary to the primary role of making disciples.
Making disciples of churched people is not what it's all about...we have to start with those who are "outsiders" and disciple them into mature Christ followers.
Posted by: Nathan Creitz | 11/10/2008 at 12:51 PM
I haven't read this book, and I probably won't, but I want to respond to something you wrote.
"The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did."
Perhaps this is what the author of this book is saying, or maybe it's your thinking on the subject. It's pretty easy to see that our Christian witness both as preachers and congregations doesn't have anything much to attract the world's attention, but I don't think that it necessarily means that we're not declaring the same message that Jesus did.
Though the Bible says that Jesus was followed around by multitudes of people, we don't know exactly how many in most cases, and the overall population of Palestine was probably what, three million or even more at the time of Christ, yet I doubt His audiences were anything as large as the following that most modern evangelists and church leaders have. On a percentage basis, Christ's message probably didn't attract more than 5 or 10 percent, of the total population of Palestine. Most of Christ's authentic followers are even named in the New Testament. Just because Jesus was followed by "crowds" doesn't mean that they were even attracted to Him for the right reasons. Notice, there were only about 120 disciples immediately after Christ's ascension. It wasn't until the day of Pentecost that 3000 were added, all in a single day.
What we see in America and other modern cultures is a population that by and large functions out of religious habit, or out of irreligious habit. Most of us are educated enough to know who Jesus is and what the claims of Christianity are, and we just don't need it. I have known people who are very intelligent and yet joined groups like the Mormons because their system "works," that is, because it helps create successful (I won't say healthy) family life, even though they did not believe the mythology or any of the doctrines behind it! They just go thru the motions. Since it is impossible to know what is really true, they grabbed what simply "works." In the same way, our sophisticated but spiritually dead neighbors can afford to be indifferent, and actually slightly hostile or contemptuous, to Christ, because they've "made it." As an old Jesus Freak comix put it, "Who needs God? I'm independently wealthy!"
Churches are stuck at all different places.
Some churches function as though they're still in a Christian world—in fact, whether or not they admit it, I think that's what most Christian churches do. They are usually houses of worship surrounded by unbelieving neighborhoods that they never even attempt to evangelize, and most of their members live elsewhere. This, I think, is a remnant of "Christian world" mentality. All the territory has been claimed, so there's no need to go out on forays into the hinterlands anymore. But the reality is, it just ain't so.
Still, can you imagine your church, pastor or preacher and congregation, engaging in the evangelization of the neighborhood around your house of worship? How would you do it? The neighbors aren't primitive barbarians living in the forest, to whom you can bring the light of the gospel to teach them not to keep killing each other and stealing each other's wives, or material improvements to alleviate their low standard of living. No, for most of us, the neighbors are pretty affluent and either belong to a church out of habit, or take Sunday morning walks with their significant others, their families, their pets—or just sit in the sunroom with a cup of coffee, a sweet, and the newspaper, until they fall asleep.
Even those of us whose house of worship is in a working class or poor neighborhood, what would it cost us as congregations and as individuals to evangelize our unsaved neighbors? Here, we really could do some good, we might find souls that need help, but the help might be too costly for us to deal with. And then, the resistance when it occurred might not be very polite.
Our world is in some ways very different from the world that Jesus and the first generation of disciples lived in. For one, they lived in an age when if you could convince a man of something, he would give in. Nowadays, you can convince a man, but he won't give in. If he loses the debate, he protects himself from being convinced by saying, "It's just your opinion." Our education system has failed us miserably, by taking away the certainty that there is a real right and real wrong, not only in morality, but in almost every other field, sometimes even in science.
I think the Church (now I'm using capital C, meaning all of us) has to realise that its responsibility is not to save the world, but to make disciples of all nations, starting with ourselves, and that making disciples cannot mean that we force our neighbors to be disciples. If it turns out that where we live, our honest efforts to share the good news with those around us is met with disinterest or hostility, so be it. But if it turns out that the good news is given a hearing and is accepted by some, but at a price, we have to be content to share what we have with them. Finally, we have to realize that the populations around us are not static, but that there is a rate of turnover. That means, we don't just try to evangelize for a year and then give up. The work of sharing the good news goes on 24/7 because it is the responsibility of every member of the Body of Christ. There is no one who cannot share the good news with at least one person, acquaintance or stranger, every day. The sharing needn't be an overt or verbal testimony. It can be so much as a smile or a kind word outwardly, and a prayer "Lord, give the increase" inwardly. Since it is all the Lord's work, not ours, we needn't trouble ourselves either about the visible results. This is where, I think, we run into trouble the most, and to no avail.
Sorry for this long comment, but I hope that I may have written something of value to add to this discussion. Go with God, brethren.
Posted by: Romanós | 11/18/2008 at 02:59 AM