The Reformation Project: Thesis 1

1. The Church’s message is not dictated by those outside the Church, but by the risen Lord, to whom all authority in Heaven and on earth has been given. 


Before launching into these theses, I should note that this part of my project was a joint effort engaged in along with my wife, Lanette.

Regarding the above thesis, most evangelical church leaders would contend nowadays that they are not changing the church's message; rather, they are merely changing the packaging in order to communicate it better to a modern audience. 

However, this hardly seems correct or even possible. That is not to say that these evangelical leaders are being dishonest, though one might suggest that they are too frequently more than a little naive on this issue. The truth of the matter is that taking a marketing approach that places audience interests at the forefront inevitably alters the questions that the church will be required to answer. Changing the questions of necessity alters the nature of the answers that will be given.

This is not to say that the church may comfortably practice irrelevancy, for that is also not consistent with the message of the Bible. To the extent that modern churches are reacting to irrelevant worship and preaching in their church experience, they have rendered a correct diagnosis of error on the part of those churches.

However, the trend has been for churches to focus almost entirely on temporal matters addressed in ways that make scripture's priorities and approach to be of tangential importance, while the redemptive history that functions as the priority of Scripture is mostly ignored. This thesis asks the church to consider that the risen Lord, not the tastes of audiences inside or outside the visible church, is the One who dictates the message that his ambassadors are instructed to proclaim.

The table of contents for this project can be found here.