Am I Being Squeezed?

Listen to this argument from David Wells in Above All Earthly Pow'rs and see if it doesn't make sense about many of the problems we face as Christians and churches who seek to live lives that honor Christ and the difficulty we face:

"...the kind of world in which we live, and the kinds of ways which we have for engaging it and negotiating it, will often mean that our consciousness and our habits will reflect that wold which is outside of ourselves, regardless of generational, gender, or ethnic particularities. The habits which have emerged in the productive order of our modernized world tend to become ubiquitous, regardless of how different we may be in some other ways. ... Thus, those who gaze at a computer screen by day and television screen by night may well feel awkwardly obsolete in church if there is not another screen on which to gaze. The demands of efficiency, and the rational, impersonal workings of bureaucracy, are so much a part of who we have become that many of us also want our churches to have the feel of a smoothly run corporation. Our capitalism has been so virile and abundant, filling our lives with goods in quantities unknown in any previous age, that it seems only natural -- at least in middle class, white churches -- to expect that same range of choice in programs and services as we experience in the commercial world. The norms of the workplace so easily and so unknowingly become our own internalized norms. And this is true of most people" (22-23).

I believe truly effective and life-changing ministries will challenge these kinds of things in the hearts and minds of those attending.

I know I have to watch the lure of these things in my own heart. The world has so squeezed me into it's mold that many times I don't even know it until I read a book like this one that exposes me and encourages me to be transformed, metamorphisized, by the renewing of my mind according to God's Word.