christianity on Modern Religion

Jesus, as always, gets caught in the middle—along with a good number of his followers. Many people in America today were brought up in strict Christian homes and churches of one sort or another. There...

The United States retains a basic respect for religion though it may be following European trends: surveys show a steady rise in the “nones” (now one-third of those under the age of thirty), that is, ...

American religion is conspicuous for its messianically pretentious energy, its embarassingly banal prose, and its impatiently hustling ambition.

Christmas in May I’m pretty sure it was Stephen Covey, back in the day ( The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People ) who originally said, “The main thing is to let the main thing be the main thing...

I’ve served on staff at a few different churches throughout Silicon Valley for the last decade and a half, including a medium-sized church, a young church plant, and a multisite megachurch. At each, w...

Christianity is without doubt the earthiest of all religions. Unlike most other religions, it doesn’t call you out of the physical, out of the body, or out of the world. Rather it tells you that God e...

American Christianity is a story of perpetual upheavals in churches and individual lives. Starting with the extraordinary conversion experience, our lives are motivated by a constant expectation for t...

Official Christianity, of late years, has been having what is known as a bad press. We are constantly assured that the churches are empty because preachers insist too much upon doctrine—dull dogma as ...

The contemporary American church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that is has little power to believe or to act.

Today, unlike almost any other earlier period, the money and the strong educational institutions of Christianity are in one part of the world, while a majority of the active believers are located else...

If one looks at the world scene from a missionary point of view, surely the most striking fact is that, while in great areas of Asia and Africa the church is growing, often growing rapidly, in the lan...

When Christianity first arose in the world it was not called a religion. It was the non-religion. Imagine the neighbors of early Christians asking them about their faith. “Where’s your temple?” they’d...

The current context of cultural and religious pluralism magnifies this development. After the disintegration of Christendom-a historical topical apparatus that gave cultural pride of place to Christia...

Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body—which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body ...

We are not producing worshippers in this country. Rather we are producing a generation of spectators, religious onlookers lacking, in many cases, any memory of a true encounter with God, deprived of b...

To those who only know it outwardly, Christianity seems desperately intricate. In reality, taken in its main lines, it contains an extremely simple and astonishingly bold solution of the world. In the...

The Christian religion as a religion is not of God. It is on the contrary another example of a mortal road to God like the Buddhist or any other, although of course different in form. Christ is not th...

We are settling for a Christianity that revolves around catering to ourselves when the central message of Christianity is actually about abandoning ourselves.

Yes, religion is a crutch. But it’s not my own personal crutch. It is Adam’s crutch. It’s the human race that walks (if it walks at all) with a limp. And so when Sunday morning comes around I drag old...

The typical late twentieth-century Christian was no longer a European man but a Latin American or African woman.

Far too many people, especially within evangelicalism, think that the individual is all that matters, and that the corporate dimension is a distraction or diversion. Of course Christianity is deeply p...

Every other religion and philosophy says you have to do something to connect to God; but Christianity says no, Jesus Christ came to do for you what you couldn’t do for yourself. Every other religion s...

During a British conference on comparative religions, experts from around the world debated what, if any, belief was unique to the Christian faith. They began eliminating possibilities. Incarnation? O...

If we were to set out to establish a religion in polar opposition to the Beatitudes Jesus taught, it would look strikingly similar to the pop Christianity that has taken over the airwaves of North Ame...

Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete.

A missionary family who has started organic churches in some of the most dangerous fields in the world once returned to the states for furlough. On the first Sunday back, they visited a large Baptist ...

True Christianity is a fight. . . .There is a vast quantity of religion current in the world which is not true, genuine Christianity. It passes muster; it satisfies sleepy consciences; but it is not g...

In Vanishing Grace , Philip Yancey examines the growing negative perceptions of evangelicals. Although the book was written in 2014, these dynamics have only intensified in the era of MAGA and Ch...

Christianity is the only major religion to have as its central focus the suffering and degradation of its God. The crucifixion is so familiar to us, and so moving, that it is hard to realize how unusu...

I consider that the chief dangers which confront the coming century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration...