The choice for God now has to become one in which the church begins to form itself, by his grace and truth, into an outcropping of counter-cultural spirituality. It must first recover the sense of antithesis between Christ and culture and then find ways to sustain that antithesis. It is, after all, only when we see what the church is willing to give up by developing this antithesis that we see what it is actually for. If it is for God, for this truth, for his people, for the alienated and trampled in life, then it must give up what the post-modern world holds most dear: it must give up the freedom to anything it happens to desire. It must give up self-cultivation for self-surrender, entertainment for worship, intuition for truth, slick marketing for authentic witness, success for faithfulness, power for humility, a God bought on cheap terms for the God who calls us to a costly obedience. It must, in short, be willing to do God's business on God's terms.—David Wells, God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 223.
Is this how you (or an outsider) would characterize the evangelical church today: an outcropping of counter-cultural spirituality? No such words would come to mind. God help us.
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