What do the disillusioned think when they look at our churches? Do they look at our churches?
"The first place to which they should be able to
turn is the one place which they normally ignore, namely the church. For too
often what they see in the church is not counter-culture but conformism, not a
new society which embodies their ideas but another version of the old society
which they have renounced, not life but death. They would readily endorse today what Jesus said of a church in the first century: 'you have the name of being alive, and you are dead.'
It is urgent that we not
only see but feel the greatness of this tragedy. For insofar as the church is
conformed to the world, and the two communities appear to the onlooker to be
merely two versions of the same thing, the church is contradicting its true
identity. No comment could be more hurtful to the Christian than the words,
‘But you are no different from anybody else.’"
John Stott, The Message of the Sermon on the the Mount, BST (Leicester: Inter-Varsity, 1978), pp. 16-17.
