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One of the problems with the “me-centred” gospel is that it only works well as long as everything is rosy in one’s life. But as soon as the wheels fall off and you encounter significant hardship of some kind, you can easily decide that Christianity “doesn’t work”. When the self-actualising hype that is fed to people from the pulpit doesn’t align with their experience of reality, they conclude that Christianity isn’t true.”
(Kevin Simington – My Christian Daily) There is a crisis of faith formation in the modern church. It has produced a generation of Christians with an emotionally based faith that is ill-equipped to respond to the intellectual challenges and objections raised by an increasingly secular society….
The recent faith renunciations of several high-profile Christians are indicative of an endemic lack of rigorous philosophical and theological grounding.
Four weeks ago, Joshua Harris, pastor and author of “I Kissed Dating Goodbye”, announced in an Instagram post that he was no longer a Christian, and that he and his wife of 20 years were separating. More recently Marty Sampson, the prolific Hillsong songwriter and worship leader, also announced his loss of faith on Instagram.
These two instances are merely the tip of the iceberg of a problem that has been brewing for decades and which is now reaching crisis point. The level of theological understanding of the average Christian today, as well as their ability to defend their faith with articulate, robust theological answers, is significantly diminished compared to thirty or forty years ago. For those of us who have been Christians for more than a few decades, the difference is stark and, quite frankly, shocking. And the problem is not confined to the Pentecostal church: it is endemic across all denominations.
Research