A reader sent me this link, and I think it would be worth your time to listen to it. It may well be an irritant to those who object to "second books", but I think it will be a help to those who want an accurate depiction of our present circumstance.

David Wells is discussing his book The Courage to Be Protestant at the White Horse Inn, and he tells us that there has been a disintegration of God-centered, Christ-honoring, truth-loving piety and that foul waters have seeped into the church. He also laments the loss of classical preaching and the trivialization of the religious impulse.

I think this is profoundly true and naively overlooked.

We have heard fundamentalists repeatedly telling us that the crux of the problem was the threat of heterodoxy and the failure of separation. That turns out to have been one of those partial truths that, like rat poison—which is 98% corn meal—is far more harmful than the proportion of healthy food to active ingredient might suggest. As it turns out fundamentalists now sit around giggling at Oscar Wilde and worshiping out of Majesty Hymns, a dizzying monument to trivialization. Separation seems to be the first thing they lost sight of; factionalism never left their side.

(If the report we heard last week is true—and I see no reason to doubt it—some fundamentalists counsel parents not to have serious conversations with their own children. Can we imagine a corruption of Scripture more relevant to our problem?)

We have heard evangelicals incessantly jabbering about the church's responsibilities in the public square only to suffer the humiliations of Ted Haggard, Jan Crouch, Benny Hinn, Amy Grant, Joel Osteen, Camerin Courtney...and the long, hallowed evangelical tradition of commercialization and trivialization. Gravitas is not a word anyone associates with the Billy Graham, Christianity Today or the NAE. Evangelicalism and public scandal go together like cuff links.

I think this interview is worth your time because, first, you would be hard-pressed to find a mentally competent person who will argue that the church is healthy. No one says it is healthy, but everyone blames the disease on someone else and then smoothly transitions to his tribal spiel.

It is not just the things we have done but the things we have left undone. And an awareness of our degrading culture, a commitment to contending for the truth is not a thing that should ever have been left undone. No amount of posing as militant defenders of the sacred Scriptures and no conspicuous prancing about as zealous exponents of evangelization has spared American churches from the greatest blasphemy since Avignon.

You really must think about this.