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| The River Raisin |
Recently X told me his family left one of our local churches and is now going to a church because his kids are more "entertained" there.
I wanted to say, but didn't: "You are kidding, right?"
X would not like our church, since I am 0% concerned with entertaining anybody. But we are (like some of our local churches) 100% concerned with abiding in Christ and worshiping the one true God. Imagine the first church in the book of Acts meeting in that room worrying about how to keep the new Jesus-followers happy and entertained! When the people left those meetings they were talking about God and Jesus, not evaluating the "service." God, when actually encountered, is not "entertaining." That, precisely, is not the word to describe him.
Roger Olson, in Against Calvinism, agrees with the new Calvinists when he writes:
"The new Calvinists are reacting to what they regard as a general decline of theology and especially emphasis on God’s glory in contemporary American church life. His subjects, he says, are reacting against the “feel good theology” of many contemporary evangelical churches....
Far too many Christian youth grow up with almost no biblical or theological knowledge, thinking that God exists for their comfort and success in life even if he lays down a law nobody can really live up to. Like a kindly grandfather who dotes on his preteen progeny while decrying their bad grades, God may be disappointed in us but his whole goal is to make us fulfilled anyway." (Roger Olson, Against Calvinism: Rescuing God's Reputation from Radical Reformed Theology, p. 17)
I agree, as does Olson, with the new Calvinists. The Entertainment Church is brainwashed by Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.
