4. The world's methods. What are the world's methods? The world's methods are politics and money, and this is where the thinking of the secular church is today. That's why the secular church doesn't care much whether evangelicals proclaim an evangelical theology. They don't care much about theology one way or the other. What they're interested in is power and money, and the two go together.
2. The world's theology. We can deal with this second point more briefly because the world's theology is perfectly obvious. It says that there's nothing much wrong with men and women and that we don't need a savior, perhaps only a little bit of help. The church has begun to buy into this theology as well. This does not mean that the church of Jesus Christ, going by that name, necessarily abandons the terminology. It'll still speak of sin and salvation and faith and evangelism and Jesus and all these things, but it doesn't mean by these terms the things that the church has traditionally meant.
I think there are four significant results of this kind of thinking. The first result of the abandonment of the wisdom of the church in the Scriptures is that it creates a pitiful uncertainty and insecurity on the part of church leaders.
What we have is a secular church, one that may use the terminology that has been characteristic of Christendom, but which does not mean the same things by the terminology. A secular church is a worldly church, and the aspects of its worldliness are these: the world's wisdom, the world's theology, the world's agenda, and the world's methods.
In thinking about this idea of the secular church, we need to consider a view that has cropped up in relatively recent history. It concerns the twin ideas of the sacred and the secular. This view maintains that they both operate in the same field, which, so far as Christianity is concerned, entails that Christianity should in a sense be secular. In other words, here you have not a contrast between the church and the world, but rather a view that says that the church should be the world, or at least should be actively engaged in and be characterized by the things that mark the world.
