“The Church itself is going to have to become more authentic morally, for the greatness of the Gospel is now seen to have become quite trivial and inconsequential in its life.
If the Gospel means so little to the Church, if it changes so little, why then should unbelievers believe it?
It is one thing to understand what Christ’s deliverance means; it is quite another to see this worked out in life with depth and reality, to see its moral splendor.
It is one thing to know the Gospel; it is quite another to see it lived. That is when its truth catches fire in the imagination.
That is what makes the Gospel so attractive. The evangelical Church today, with some exceptions, is not very inspiring in this regard.
It is not being heroic. It is exhibiting too little of the moral splendor that Christ calls it to exhibit.
Much of it, instead, is replete with tricks, gadgets, gimmicks, and marketing ploys as it shamelessly adapts itself to our emptied-out, blinded, postmodern world.
It is supporting a massive commercial enterprise of Christian products, it is filling the airways and stuffing postal boxes, and it is always begging for money to fuel one entrepreneurial scheme after another, but it is not morally resplendent.
It is mostly empty of real moral vision, and without a recovery of that vision its faith will soon disintegrate. There is too little about it that bespeaks the holiness of God.
And without the vision for and reality of this holiness, the Gospel becomes trivialized, life loses its depth, God becomes transformed into a product to be sold, faith into a recreational activity to be done, and the Church into a club for the like-minded.”
-David Wells, Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 180.
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