How Evangelicalism is Digging Its Own Grave
One of the more prophetic and penetrating books I remember reading in the early years of my biblical and theological education is an often-ignored work by Os Guinness called The Gravedigger Files. It had some cheesy Hardy-Boys-like drawings, but it was profoundly insightful.
Throughout the book were fascinating insights like how people will be doing much of their shopping from the confines of their homes on their computers, and this book came out in 1983!
Written as a narrative to mirror the kind of work C.S. Lewis did in his Screwtape Letters, Guinness’ argument can be summarized as this:
Satan is going to sell the church on modernism, modernism is going to collapse in upon itself, and therefore the church will become its own gravedigger.
We can put the point differently by saying this: Satan’s work to destroy the church in the West is not a straightforward attack, but is much more subtle. It won’t often look like apparitions and visions, but will include savvy tactics to be “next-level” in your worship service. It will be well-meaning people offering advice on how to “crush it” in ministry, while, unbeknownst to them, they are selling snake oil.
Importantly, it is a lot harder to recognize snake oil when the person selling it doesn’t realize what it actually is. This is how well-meaning people get caught up in Satan’s pyramid scheme to sell the church worldliness, trusting that consuming it will warp them from within.
When Jamin and I wrote The Way of the Dragon or the Way of the Lamb: Searching for Jesus’ Path of Power in a Church that has Abandoned It, we were trying to pull the curtain back on this phenomena in the church. The problem is that it is so engrained that these toxic strategies are not only seen as obvious (which is bad enough), but more nefariously, they are seen as necessary. The way this shows up in the lives of pastors and church staff is the feeling that if they don’t do things this way they will fail, lose their jobs, or be seen as faithless.
There is a famous quote from G.K. Chesterton where he claims, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.” We can paraphrase this, somewhat ironically, today, with: “The evangelical ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been rejected and left untried.”
If you have followed my substack for a while you probably know that I have a podcast called Spiritual Formation: An Invitation to Drawing Near, where are I am articulating an evangelical spirituality that is Word-centered, Spirit-empowered, for a whole-life spirituality [here it is on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. This is the vision of evangelicalism that helped fund a movement that transformed the church but that buried itself as it consumed from the world.
There are lessons we have to learn from the ways that the church has become worldly, and none of them are new. We see the same lessons in 1 and 2 Corinthians, in Philippians, in Colossians, etc. But we need to attend to the ways that our movement has been warped, while also not losing the depth and breadth of the vision that fueled it.
There is a Word-centered, Spirit-empowered, and whole-life spiritual vision that a former generation articulated that often is left untried, but mocked, or just ignored. If you want to know more, other than the podcast, my book Formed for the Glory of God: Learning from the Spiritual Practices of Jonathan Edwards is an articulation of the spiritual vision that animated early evangelicalism.
Instead of ignoring our history, or just assuming we’re still on the same path, let’s sit deeply with what our tradition provided for us. As Dallas Willard used to say, if you want to find a rich vision of spiritual formation, go back to the fathers and mothers of your church tradition. I find that not a lot of people take his advice on that. I have, and I hope I can help you do so as well.
Paid subscribers, I want to reflect a bit more on what Dallas told me about this, and in particular, how he said the church is in desperate need of “more folks like John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards,” and what I think he meant by that. I also want to go in a bit on the ways I think warped thinking and even heretical ideas are trying to seep into the spiritual formation conversation. At this risk of alienating my subscribers(!), I think it is important to name these sorts of things.