Wells on Status of "Church"

David Wells composes an important post for church leaders on the 9marks blog. He writes:

A recent Barna report offers an interesting snapshot of the current mood.

Surveying those who are “Christian” by self-designation—which, we know, is not of much use as a category—Barna found that a majority of adults believe that there are six alternative ways to attend a conventional church service that are biblically acceptable:

• worship at home (89%),
• active in house church (75%),
• watching religious TV (69%),
• radio broadcast (68%),
• special ministry event (68%),
• and participating in a marketplace ministry (54%).

Assume for the moment that Barna’s numbers are correct and that they really do identify a prevailing mood. This mood will be in our churches. How are we going to respond to it? It seems to me that this has become a central question and we need to be careful that we are not caught fiddling while Rome—the reality of the Church—gets burned down. The problem, though, is that the consequences in our churches of increasingly vapid biblical teaching, personality-centered pastoring, invasive individualism, contempt for the past, and an egregiously non-theological kind of evangelicalism have now been accumulating for years. And this makes for easy-pluckings by anyone who seems to have a better idea or who offers more for less.