Sublime

While these charismatic evangelicals continued talking about a personal relationship with Jesus and seeking ecstatic experiences in worship, they nevertheless made faith formation about commitment to the idea of Jesus, stripping formation, ironically, of its transcendent encounter with divine action, making conversion an epistemological shift rathe

Yet when cultural deism is added to the moralistic and the therapeutic, faith formation becomes bastardized.

As industrialization took hold, we needed pastors to check our secular excesses and to encourage us to live upright lives, particularly now that most of us were living in new urban centers, where temptation was ripe. We needed pastoral exhortation not to keep us from hell (as Edwards would believe) but to allow us to flourish, as an end in itself.

To call the church and its leaders to be disruptive innovators is simply to adopt Silicon Valley’s vision of the good life.