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I read an interview yesterday that Ken Meyers, the founder and host of Mars Hill Audio journal, gave to “The Christian Post” wherein he talked of the biggest challenge facing the Church today being “the culture within the church”. He spoke of our having reduced the Gospel to an abstract message of salvation that requires no necessary consequences for how we live. “Redemption”, he said, “is not just a restoration of our status before God”, nor only “of one invisible aspect of our being (our soul)”, but is “our life as lived out in relationship with our Creator”. When asked as to how believers have been influenced society around us, he gave four examples: (a) the dominant role of technology promoting a deep assumption that we can fix anything; (b) the proliferating mechanisms of convenience eroding our virtues of patience and longsuffering; (c) an elimination of public propriety standards and manners undermining our assumptions about the legitimacy of authority and our deference to the needs of others; and (d) the high prestige we give to celebrities creating the conviction that every experience should be entertaining. It’s a blanket coverage he throws over us, of course, yet one wherein it seems to me that it would benefit us all to at least consider concerning ourselves. It is not so much “the evils” outside our door that we must guard against, but those familiarities which we allow to enter our homes, those which slowly “swallow us up from the inside out”. When Christ becomes no more than a product we have formed out of chapter and verse, instead of a Reality who indwells us, all we possess is religion. He, alone, is our best defense against our own humanity……