The Downgrade and Seeker-Sensitivity

What liberalism did to the gospel and the church is Spurgeon's day we now see the seeker-sensitive movement doing. The focus now on making church comfortable, the gospel palatable, and Christianity tolerant has proved that the seeker-senstitive movement in truth destroys the very gospel itself. Here are a few quotes from Spurgeon and a few of his fellow ministers that deal with the dangers and evidences of a downgrade in the church. While they were written almost 120 years ago, they have fresh relevance today.

October 1887

The Gloucestershire and Herefordshire Association of Baptist Churches

We live in perilous times: we are passing through a most eventful period; the Christian world is convulsed; there is a mighty upheaval of the old foundations of faith; a great overhauling of old teaching. The Bible is made to speak to-day in a language which to our fathers would be an unknown tongue. Gospel teachings, the proclamation of which made men fear to sin, and dread the thought of eternity, are being shelved. Calvary is being robbed of its glory, sin of its horror, and we are said to be evolving into a reign of vigorous and blessed sentimentality, in which heaven and earth, God and man are to become a heap of sensational emotions; but in the process of evolution is not the power of the gospel weakened? Are not our chapels emptying? Is there not growing up among men a greater indifference to the claims of Christ? Where is the fiery zeal for the salvation of men which marked the Nonconformity of the past? Where is the noble enthusiasm that made heroes and martyrs for the truth? Where is the force which carried Nonconformity forward like a mighty avalanche? Alas! where?"

Dr. David Brown, Principal of the Free Church College, Aberdeen

This is a very covert form of scepticism, which is more to be feared than all other forms combined; I mean the scepticism of ministers of the gospel—of those who profess to hold, and are expected to preach, the faith of all orthodox Christendom, and, as the basis of this faith, the authority of Scripture; yet neither hold nor teach that faith, but do their best to undermine the sacred records of it.

The one thing common to them all is the studious avoidance of all those sharp features of the gospel which are repulsive to the natural man. I should not have said so much in this strain were it not that all our churches are honeycombed with this mischievous tendency to minimize all those features of the gospel which the natural man cannot receive. And no wonder, for their object seems to be to attract the natural mind. Wherever this is the case, the spirituality of the pulpit is done away, and the Spirit himself is not there.

From Charles H. Spurgeon

Our lament; was not, however, confined to vital doctrines; we mentioned a decline of spiritual life, and the growth of worldliness, and gave as two outward signs thereof the falling-off in prayer-meetings, and ministers attending the theater. The first has been pooh-poohed as a mere trifle. The Nonconformist, which is a fit companion for The Christian World, dismisses the subject in the following sentence: "If the conventional prayer-meetings are not largely attended, why should the Christian community be judged by its greater or less use of one particular religious expedient?" What would James and Jay have said of this dismissal of "conventional prayer-meetings," whatever that may mean? At any rate, we are not yet alone in the opinion that our meetings for prayer are very excellent thermometers of the spiritual condition of our people. God save us from the spirit which regards gathering together for prayer as "a religious expedient"!

Increased difficulty only brings out increased faith, more fervent prayer, and greater zeal. The weakest of minds are those which go forward because they are borne along by the throng; the truly strong are accustomed to stand alone, and are not cast down if they find themselves in a minority. Let no man's heart fail him because of the Philistine. This new enemy is doomed to die like those who have gone before him; only let him not be mistaken for a friend.