Ziklag F6.21 - Fear-Killer

Scarcity, Impurities and Substantiality

SOS Discipline - Daily Proverb and Red Letter Reader

What you have is what you have got. cf Pr. 10:15

Trust is the fear-killer. cf Mt. 9:22

The power of secrecy is scarcity. cf Sun Tzu 6.14

From Today’s Stac

A Change in Substance

from Without Flesh

Today, our knees quake at the first thought of a dip in our numbers. We chase efficiency as if it were a god. We pander after technology as if it were a spiritual gift. We whimper and cajole about passion, wondering why no one wants to listen to us. Every year the body is weaker. Every year, individual Christians are more timid. Every year, our hope is more atrophied. We ignore these failed results of all our changes and throw on still more spit-polish, more elbow grease and more sacramentally entrepreneued enthusiasm for modern measures.

It has been well over a century now that salesmen hocking “change” for the churches have barked their now-tired pitches. Thy same song and dance repeated ad nauseum has not slowed us from buying what they’re selling. But the tragic diagnosis is that all our decades upon decades of changing like gangbusters has done nothing to stop the soul from being sucked right out of visible western Christianity. In fact, far from improving our situation, changing even the outer forms of Christianity has had the opposite effect.

That today we are still hearing calls for “change” shouted with such passion ought to boggle our minds. How many times does a village return to a poisoned well before they decide to stop drinking? How many times may a snake-oil salesmen visit the same town before the people finally remember his face and decide to run him off?

“Change” has been enacted for generations now, constantly boasting of the promise to make things better for the churches. But the results have been catastrophic. Today’s renewed promises that we can halt our cultural slide into chaos by yet again reinventing a Christianity more relevant to the culture is the brandishing of a wild-eyed unawareness for just how desperately our many previous attempts have failed.

No one out there is listening to us anymore. We’re talking in an echo chamber.

Which is getting smaller.

And smaller.

I believe that the reason people are not listening is because the pursuit of relevance is the admission of irrelevance. A religion that hungers for change only proves that it has already changed too much to survive. The belief that you need a better style with which to sell your substance is a confession that you have no substance at all.

People are not listening to us because we have nothing to actually say. All that we market, and all that we strategize, and all that we mimic amounts to a gibberish babbled on the wind.