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Church is No Place for Mediocrity. As I listened to an interview between Reza Safa, a former Muslim and
now a Christian evangelist to Muslims, and a Muslim evangelist on KFAQ’s
DelGiorno show, I was disheartened at how eloquently the Muslim defended
his belief in Islam. Quoting verse after verse from our own Bible and
the Koran, he made the case that Jesus never really died on the cross,
and that there is no such thing as the Trinity. Yet when Safa asked
him if he was going to heaven, the he could not say for certain that
he was. Theodore Roosevelt, our 26th President from 1901 to 1909, said the following: “There are those who believe that a new modernity demands a new morality. What they fail to consider is the harsh reality that there is no such thing as a new morality. There is only one morality. All else is immorality. There is only true Christian ethics over against which stands the whole of paganism. If we are to fulfill our greatest destiny as a people, then we must return to the old morality, the sole morality. And if we are to do that, then the church must prepare us for such a task.” “In the pioneer days of the West we found it an unfailing rule that after a community had existed for a certain length of time either a church was built or else the community began to go down hill. In those old communities in the Eastern States which have gone backward, it is noticeable that the retrogression has been both marked and accentuated by a rapid decline in church membership and work; the two facts being so interrelated that each stands to the other partly as a cause and partly as an effect.” It has been over ten years since I began to focus my architectural practice on churches. I have met with perhaps twenty or thirty churches every year since then, and it has been my observation that the majority were in a state of decline. Many of them hoped that a new building or an addition or a minor remodel would help their church grow or would keep young families from going elsewhere. In congregations that are in fact growing and that have a vibrant faith, that may be the case. It is a real joy to work for those congregations. But in many other cases, the real problem is not their building, it is the spiritual condition of their congregation. Some denominations are literally dismantling themselves as they substitute their own human wisdom for the truth found in Scripture. To the informed observer, the gradual disappearance of churches in Europe is a recognizable pattern, and is one that could easily happen here if we do not reject mediocrity in our own churches. G.K. Chesterson said that, “there are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions” and that “these are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.” But perhaps Theodore Roosevelt said it best when he said, “A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.” No devout, properly educated Christian would fail to recognize the frauds in life, whether it be an enlightened humanist or a Muslim, and our country would be all the more safe.
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