schaeffer on revolution

Never wanting to miss an opportunity to quote Francis Schaeffer, here is an excerpt from The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century. I think it still applies.

...the church today should be getting ready and talking about issues of tomorrow and not about issues of thirty and forty years ago, because the church is going to be squeezed in a wringer. If we have found it difficult in these last years, what are we going to do when we are faced with the real changes that are ahead?

We already are ... losing many of our young people, losing them on every side. ... these young people ... are smart enough to know that they have been given no answers. They have simply been told to believe. Doctrines have been given them without relating them to the hard, hard problems which these young people are facing. ... they have not been given reasonable answers to reasonable questions [and] they have not seen beauty in the Christian group they were in. This matter of “beauty” is related to the orthodoxy of community...

One of the greatest injustices we do to our young people is to ask them to be conservative. Christianity today is not conservative, but revolutionary. To be conservative today is to miss the whole point, for conservatism means standing in the flow of the status quo, and the status quo no longer belongs to us. ... If we want to be fair, we must teach the young to be revolutionaries, revolutionaries against the status quo.

I don't know about you but I am worn out by the organization we call church. In that, I do not find the Kingdom. On the other hand, I find life in community with believers searching for real answers to real questions and in that, experiencing God breaking into our every day lives.

I have lost the way (once again) in my longing to find rest in a broken and contrite life. I hunger for more solitude and simplicity - a place where I can focus all of my attention on my living Savior. I hunger to find real answers in Him and to watch Him demonstrate His transforming power in my life and in the lives around me. And I believe that out of that quietness, revolution comes - His Kingdom comes.

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