- “We are undoubtedly living at one of the great turning-points of history. I sometimes have a fear that we who are Evangelical, of all people, are most guilty of failing to recognize this.”
- D. M. Lloyd-Jones, 1969
The Puritans: Their Origins and Successors
(Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1987), 217 - “The biblical Word is self-authenticating under the power of the Holy Spirit. This Word of God is the means by which God accomplishes his saving work in his people, and this is a work that no evangelist and no preacher can do. This is why the dearth of serious, sustained biblical preaching in the Church today is a serious matter. When the Church loses the Word of God it loses the very means by which God does his work. In its absence, therefore, a script is being written, however unwittingly, for the Church’s undoing, not in one cataclysmic moment, but in a slow, inexorable slide made up of piece by tiny piece of daily dereliction.”
- David F. Wells
Above All Earthly Powers: Christ in a Postmodern World
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 9 - “America is tuned in to spiritual matters but not to religious formulations. This makes it very easy to gain a hearing for what is spiritual but hard to maintain a genuinely biblical posture because that becomes a part of ‘religion.’ It is very easy to build churches in which seekers congregate; it is very hard to build churches in which biblical faith is maturing into genuine discipleship.”
- David F. Wells
Above All Earthly Powers: Christ in a Postmodern World
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 119 - “By our uncritical pursuit of relevance we have actually courted irrelevance; by our breathless chase after relevance without faithfulness, we have become not only unfaithful but irrelevant; by our determined efforts to redefine ourselves in ways that are more compelling to the modern world than are faithful to Christ, we have lost not only our identity but our authority and our relevance. Our crying need is to be faithful as well as relevant.”
- Os Guinness
Prophetic Untimeliness: A Challenge to the Idol of Relevance
(Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2003), 15 - “[P]reoccupation with style reinforces the trend toward trendiness. If change and choice are the two absolutes in modern society, then we slip toward a state described by French critic Roland Barthes as ‘neomania.’ This is the cult of the-latest-is- the-greatest and the- newer-is-the-truer. The pursuit of relevance for its own sake quickly leads to superficiality, anxiety, burnout, and compromise.”
- Os Guinness
