The Bleeding of the Evangelical Church

Here are some amazing quotes from The Bleeding of the Evangelical Church written by David F. Wells regarding the Evangelical church and today:


"..what people who are coming in these church doors today are thinking about, and what they want, is not primarily personal salvation. What they want is a sense of personal well-being however momentary and fragmentary that personal sense of well-being is and our churches are beginning to cater to this. I have no doubt at all that they are going to become very successful. Indeed, some are successful already and they are going to become more and more successful because marketing in America is what makes the wheels go around. They are, in other words, simply doing what Pepsi has done, what self-help groups have done, the auto maters, the makers of jeans, the makers of movies, and what Madonna herself has done. Why shouldn't churches do this? Why shouldn't they want to be successful in the same way Pepsi and Madonna are? The answer is that marketing will produce success but not necessarily the kind that has much to do with the Kingdom of God"

His response to WHY this is happening:

"The reality that we have to face today is that we have produced a plague of nominal evangelicalism which is as trite and as superficial as anything we have seen in Catholic Europe. Now why is this? Well, I would suggest that it begins with the crumbling of our theological character. I have spoken of this in my book, No place for Truth, in terms of the 'disappearance of theology.' It is not that theological beliefs are denied, but that they have little cash value. They don't matter. I likened the situation to that of a child who is in a home but who is ignored. It is not that the child has been abducted; the child is there. The child is in the home, and research which I have conducted strongly points to the fact that where this kind of theological character is crumbling, there the centrality of God is disappearing."