Thread by @Brian_Sauve

Many of the ills plaguing the modern American church can be traced to the revivalism and decisionism of the 19th century.

Here are a few of the problems:

First, an essentially Pelagian view of conversion gave rise to a virulent pragmatism.

If you believe (as did Chuck Finney, father of modern revivalism) that man's will was not in bondage to sin, and could therefore be persuaded into conversion by mere human efforts—then you quickly conclude that the right words, the right music, and the right methods can convert.

The light shows, rock concert, flashy camera work, hip preachers in sneakers, Easter giveaways, cheesy sermon series based on TV shows—all of it is just bald pragmatism.

It's marketing, and marketing is about moving someone's will to make a decision you want them to make.

And if you are going to reduce conversion to marketing, then what will you do next? Well, you'll become obsessed with youth culture.

“The Juvenilization of American Christianity” by Thomas Bergler is helpful here. Many of our modern errors stem from youth culture marketing.

He describes this "juvenilization" of the church as “…the process by which the religious beliefs, practices, and developmental characteristics of adolescents become accepted as appropriate for Christians of all ages.”

Doesn't that describe so much of the modern church?

Everything from Mars Hill and Acts 29 to Hillsong and Bethel is basically summed up in that description and formula.

And the problem is that it emphasizes exactly the wrong thing: The immaturity of youth over the maturity of seasoned fathers.

Another result of the fetishization of youth culture is an obsession with activism.

Youth culture is all about rejecting the “errors” of the previous generations, discovering new ways of doing things, breaking out of the rigid boxes of our forefathers' traditions.

This goes along with the despising of what the revivalistic culture saw as the "dead ritualism" and "formalism" of their spiritual forefathers.

And so over the last two centuries, the American church rejected much of their glorious inheritance as "dead tradition."

But the revivalistic culture, in its zeal to combat this "dead tradition," actually succeeded in stripping away all of the transcendence, glory, beauty, and stability of the church.

They replaced "dead tradition" with ephemeral vapidity.

They disenchanted the world.

In their youth-culture-driven obsession with rejecting what they saw as rigid formalism—they ended up throwing out forms all together, turning the church into a hyper-individualistic exercise in freestyle spirituality.

But the loss of forms means a loss of being conformed.

Being conformed—to a catechism, tradition, inheritance—is hard work.

But it's also glorious.

We ought to want to be conformed to the great inheritance of the faith delivered to us through the generations—but instead we jettisoned tradition as a weight that held us back. Folly!

So what happens when you reject forms as too hard?

Well, everything is made easy—served to you, or made up on the spot according to our whims.

"Singing the Psalms in 4 parts is too hard. A first-time visitor couldn't do it."

But hang on!

Most glorious things are actually difficult, not easy.

When we reject the hard, plodding work of learning and growing and being conformed to the mold of faith and life handed down to us over the centuries, we become bored, vapid, individualistic—and depressed.

In stripping away transcendence and difficulty in the emotionalism of youth-culture-obsessed revivalism, we become perpetual moody teenagers, cursed by getting what we asked for.

We need fathers.
We need mothers.
We need forms—even rigid ones.

Reject revivalism.
Love tradition.

We talk about this more in this week's episode of @The_Kings_Hall podcast, which you can find here: kingshall.org/media