Post-Trib Preacher
R. Loren Sanford, a pastor of a church in Denver, who is post-trib, as you will hear, and also was saved during the Jesus Revolution. He posts a 10-minute messages every day.
As our dear old friend, Simon Peter of radio fame, says, “He is one of the few church leaders I can stand to watch.”
Appointed for Victory, Not Escape
Frank
Interesting article by Rod Dreher, and thought-provoking. I'm not very in touch with the church world in the US (though I have gone to three different nearby churches from time to time), so maybe I'm not qualified to comment on his statements. I would agree that some churches don't seem to demand much of the people who worship there, which leads to weaker Christians, but is this a new problem? I don't recall the church demanding much of me when I was a teenager, when my parents managed to drag me to it every once in a while, and that was more than 50 years ago (and it was a Southern Baptist church, lest anyone think I went to some wishy-washy denomination :-)). Today, I get the impression that churches, at least some of them, are morally *more* demanding than they used to be. But that's just my impression from the material I've read online and limited church experience from the past and present, so I may be wrong. There's certainly one nearby church I've been to that didn't demand anything of me and that'd probably be called seeker-friendly rather than family-friendly. But it was more oriented to young couples with kids and it seemed to do a good job on the kids, while I wasn't among its target audience.
Also, I wonder if some pastors equate discipleship with going to their church consistently, with a lack of discipleship being people who try out different churches or seek out different messages. I guess there's a balance: some of the folks floating from church to church aren't looking for discipleship or commitment, while some of the pastors are a little boring and uninspiring.
There does seem to be a problem with people wanting fewer moral commitments, or people being cultural Christians rather than dedicated Christians. Not sure that's a new problem, though it is a growing one, cause it's pretty visible in the breakdown in parts of American society. But I wonder if it's more prevalent in younger generations which have been more formed by the world than the church anyway--who've grown up without hearing much of a religious message they could relate to, or sometimes in churches where too many moral demands were placed on them without enough love and compassion, so they just decided they'd be spiritual rather than religious. Is that the churches' failure, a failure on the part of individuals, an effect of the very strong pull of the world/media/technology these days, or an effect (a fulfillment) of the falling away in the latter days that the Bible predicts? Maybe all of them to some degree or another.
Anyway, interesting article, and thanks for posting it!