More questions...are we in trouble?

Another "Letters to Emerging Christians" from Scot Mcknight's blog....go to the page and read the comments as well.......

clipped from www.jesuscreed.org I’ve been struggling with some similarities that I have seen with several Hebrew Scripture passages and our current church culture. My struggle is that I read Isaiah 58 or Amos 5:21-24 (among others) and I see a people that is obsessed with worship, traditions, going through the motions. I then see God’s displeasure with outward displays of worship and His urgent desire for us to seek justice. What I cannot shake is this feeling that God views many of our American churches today in this way. With the obsession with musical worship, programs, churches run as businesses and so on, I get this sense that we are in danger of looking like the ancient, unfaithful Israelites (with the exception that we are not being threatened with imminent doom).

Looking for answers again......an old problem

Scot McKnight quoted an author that stated something that sounds like it was written last week:

“Hostile to the church, friendly to Jesus Christ.” These words describe large numbers of people, especially young people, today. They are opposed to anything which savors of institutionalism. They detest the establishment and its entrenched privileges. And they reject the church — not without some justification — because they regard it as impossibly corrupted by such evils.

That sounds very 2005ish; but it's older. How old?
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Try 1958!

The author? John Stott, Basic Christianity.

But here's the questions I have:

1. Is the church impossibly corrupted?
2. Does the church deserve another chance?
3. If we abandon the institutional church, will the thing we create in it's place get institutionalized as well?

Hmm..

Emerging Wednesday- motives for evangelism?

clipped from www.jesuscreed.org First motive: evangelism; secondary and apparent motive: helping out. Some see through the thin skin of that secondary motive and think they’ve been used or had. There are two possibilities here as I see them: either one does everything for a chance to evangelize or one sees all acts of kindness “a new kind of evangelism” or “the goodness of the gospel itself.” Let’s add a third: do all things with the hope that one can evangelize but waiting patiently for that chance. Let me suggest something and it comes from this Christian conviction: God redeems in Christ and our vocation is to live in that story of Jesus by performance and proclamation.