Leadership Blog: Out of Ur: Have We Become Crypto-Christians?

This post is from the defunct blog “Dying Church”

Skye Jethani asks some tough questions at Leadership Blog:

Have we, like our processors, become Crypto-Christians? Seeking survival and fearing irrelevance, have we clothed our faith with the forms of our American culture to the point that our Christianity has morphed into something entirely different – a folk religion altogether consumerist in spirit and content? Like the Kakure of Japan, are we holding so tightly to our faith we cannot sense that it is already slipping between our fingers?

By replicating the practices of the nations has the church, like ancient Israel, yielded its imagination to the idols of our day? By heavily adopting cultural forms, like the Kakure, have we forgotten the central teachings and practices of the apostles? Was Walter Brueggemann correct when he wrote, "The contemporary American church is so largely enculturated to the American ethos of consumerism that is has little power to believe or to act."?