Failed Church: Restoring a Vision of Ecclesial Victory

Covid lockdowns, the George Floyd killing and subsequent riots, Black Lives Matter, cancel culture, Critical Race Theory, the #MeToo Movement, the pervasiveness of gender dysphoria — these and other recent spectacles have exploded on the social scene. They have been such an unremitting part of our social environment over the past 2 to 5 years that they have insinuated themselves into our social currency, and it is difficult to objectively assess the state of recent culture while ignoring them.

The church has not eluded their impact. In some cases — the lockdown orders for all “nonessential” services come to mind first — they have drastically shaped the very life of the church. Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, and the #MeToo Movement have almost equally stamped themselves on a wide swath of Western Christianity, including conservative Christianity.

Church 2022 looks significantly different from its 2015 iteration, though even then signs of impending infection were not absent.

This present essay collection aims to assess the present state of the church from numerous perspectives. The writers (theologians, pastors, educators, scholars, thoughtful laymen) reflect a degree of theological diversity one might expect. All of them, however, are committed to biblical authority and historic Christian orthodoxy, including, specifically, historic Protestantism.

This is not a tiring, run-of-the-mill jeremiad on the lamentable state of the church. It is an urgent statement by devout and intelligent Christian leaders sobered by what the church in our time has become. It is not only a diagnosis, but also a prescription: the specifics of ecclesial illnesses and their cure.

This is a wide-ranging book. It deals with topics as diverse as prayer, economics, authoritarianism, environmentalism, and eschatology. The book is necessarily diverse because the illnesses infecting the church are diverse. Each of the writers of is a Reformational thinker, and a crucial aspect of Reformational thinking is the application of the Faith to all of life. If you’re a productive general medical practitioner, you need to carry many different instruments and meds in your bag. Reformational practitioners cart around a big medical bag.

225 pages, paperback