I visited a local Baptist church for four weeks, attending a different senior-level Sunday School each time. Despite grand mission statements, each class had one leader/reader sharing a parcel of pre-packaged Pablum to a room full of bored and listless listeners. Says I to myself, says I, if THIS is the end product of 50, 60, or 70 years of systematic Christian instruction – THEN the ladder’s leaning against the wrong wall.
You’d think that after a lifetime spent walking with God, folks could be writing cantatas, sonatas, and symphonies, rather than stuck singing the Alphabet Song over and over and over! I like the way a wiser man than me put it:
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Much of evangelicalism is today incapable of creating a culture. It either surrenders to the world, or flees from it, or both. In the 1950s, I spoke to a group of evangelical students at a major university. The meeting actually began and continued, until I spoke, with the singing of childish preschool courses, such as “This little light of mine.” After I spoke (I had been suggested as a speaker, and none knew me), the group, unwilling to recognize the division between a Christian view of education, science, and culture, and fully committed to accepting the rank humanism and atheism of their studies and ignoring all conflict, happily revived itself by singing more choruses. Such people can build large neo-evangelical churches, but they cannot establish a Christian culture.
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R. J. Rushdoony