A reader sent me this request from a prospective churchgoer.

Bill Kinnon is a demanding sort, and this is what he sees as the proper approach to worship. After 100 years of evangelicalism, this is what it comes down to.

He wants what he feels he needs, not what the church tells him he should have. He wants what is modern, comforting, entertaining and free. He wants what satisfies. His experience is that God moves promptly to satisfy his demands; why can't the church?

Of course, Kinnon's tongue is in his cheek and he is flogging evangelicalism for its many and obvious sins, and I'm sure his church will be facing the same criticisms in far less than 60 years. But for now it amuses us to read it.

And it illustrates a point addressed by Francois Fénélon a century and a half ago.

It is true that all holy souls are not capable of exercising this explicit preference for God over themselves, but there must at least be an implicit preference; the former, which is more perfect, is reserved for those whom God has endowed with light and strength to prefer Him to themselves, to such a degree as to desire their own happiness simply because it adds to his glory.

Men have a great repugnance to this truth, and consider it to be a very hard saying, because they are lovers of self from self-interest. They understand, in a general and superficial way, that they must love God more than all his creatures, but they have no conception of loving God more than themselves, and loving themselves only for Him. They can utter these great words without difficulty, because they do not enter into their meaning, but they shudder when it is explained to them, that God and his glory are to be preferred before ourselves and everything else to such a degree that we must love his glory more than our own happiness, and must refer the latter to the former, as a subordinate means to an end.

It's ironic that what Kinnon wants is exactly what evangelicalism told us it should provide. All this time it was telling us it was providing for our felt needs. Now this!

Must be tough.