Dumb Will Do: Why Satan Doesn’t Need Heresy

 By Tim Challies - Posted at @challies:

There is one memory of my earlier years as a Christian that I’ve never been able to shake. It’s a formative memory that I actually don’t think the Lord means for me to shake, for it has often reminded me that, when it comes to the local church’s worship, the stakes are sky high.

One Sunday we were worshipping at a church that was connected to a serious tradition but now dabbling in what some have labeled the attractional model. The leaders of that church had become convinced that to interest prospective attenders and grow the size of the congregation, they needed to make their services more appealing. They needed to remove some of the traditional elements of worship and replace them with ones they deemed fresh and attractive.

Sadly, what they deemed fresh and attractive proved to mostly just be unserious. By the time we attended, the prayers had become perfunctory, the preaching focused on felt needs, and the music relied on bad adaptations of modern hits. It wasn’t all bad: Bland coffee had given way to boutique coffee but, sadly, at the same time, sound principles of worship had given way to pragmatic ones.

After the preacher had told us how to be better people by trying harder and after the pastor baptized a man who told the congregation he was still co-habiting with his girlfriend, the band struck up yet another badly-rhymed and badly-performed adaptation of a pop song from the 80s—a song about partying and drunkenness that they had modified to ostensibly be about Jesus. By this time I was cringing with second-hand embarrassment and constraining what I was certain was righteous anger. I whispered to my family, “This is just so dumb. I’m never coming back here.” I didn’t know how else to describe it. It was just plain dumb. And we never did return.

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