By Pastor Carmen Rizzo

35 For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel's will save it. 36 For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own soul? (Mark 8:35-36)

We read these words and understand them to be a stern warning from Christ against pursuing wealth, materialism, and hedonism, to the point where, who we are at the center becomes fragmented and indeed re-defined. Few, have taken the time to see how this very same warning applies to not only individual members of the Body of Christ, but the corporate body as well.  

I study sociology and various different subjects that most people find to be very boring, because I have seen something in the Church that has frightened me for many years. So, this study, now in its 21st year has been one that I have undertaken not because as some have said that I have "No life," but because, God's Spirit has not allowed me to rest in what would on the surface seem like a random, disconnected, disjointed, fragmented series of movements and events that are bearing full fruit in the culture that we have come to know as Western Civilization. God's Spirit has driven me to see that indeed everything is connected.

It is almost beyond the horizons of our comprehension to see how by way of example, the methods that Thomas Aquinas used to defend the Faith against the humanists of his day are deeply connected to current mundane events such as grocery shopping, going to the doctors, recreation. In fact, everything is connected, nothing is disjointed and everything that has happened is indeed calibrating that which is happening today, and what happens to today will calibrate tomorrow.

We don’t live in a vacuum and the culture that we live in is the product and result of choices, decisions and priorities that were set long ago. "Culture," now that’s a term and concept that has taken me 5 years of hard study just to begin to grasp its meaning and significance for our lives. I have studied and continue to study the ebb and flow of social history and anthropology to see how it is that culture, modernization, the Industrial revolution together with the Enlightenment have calibrated, and depleted us of our identity and recalibrated us from a center in which "Character" was the coin of the realm to a new center in which "Image" is the new coin of the realm. In this paradigm shift, we moved from a "Morals" centered culture to a "Values" centered culture. The two are often confused but are very much different. Morals are static, as understood in Orthodox Christianity and are based upon an objective, external, propositional truth source that transcends man. Values on the other hand are subjective, internal and suppositional, and are derived from within man. And it is thus that Modern Man has been cast adrift on the ever shifting seas of changing values that are always being recalibrated by the "Culture." Culture is never benign. Thus as the culture shifted from being a morals centered culture to a values centered culture, that shift has resulted in the emphasis being moved from internal development and peace to external development and wholeness. This has reoriented man to a consumer driven mentality as the answer to the resulting emptiness of his soul.

That Christ warned His Church that this would be its greatest foe, and that the Church in the 19^th and 20^th century has failed to recognize this peril is astounding. And thus, the Modern Church most especially as it is being expressed in Western Civilization has become hollow, vacant and as some have said very "Light." Culture as I have been saying for years is ubiquitous. However the Church was warned that it was to stand apart from the culture. (By Culture, here I mean in all of the very subtle ways in which it is undermining God’s center in the lives of His people.) This is what it means to be "In the world, but not of the world." Indeed the Church of Jesus Christ was established to be "Counter-Culture" the place, the organism where Christ would lead those whom He would call out of the world and of necessity, a fallen culture.

While the leaven of culture has been present in the Church right from the beginning in various forms and expressions, it is in the 19^th century that its impact upon American Christianity began to express its full force. It coincides and is directly related to the so called "Second Great Awakening." This revival was galactic in its differences from the "First Great Awakening," which moved primarily on the theology and preaching of men like Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield. The shift was one from a Theological starting point where God was the Sovereign of the universe to one where man was capable of solving many of his own problems. Thus the shift was one where theology was center to where humanism became the new center. With humanism at the center, un-intended as it may have been, (I and many others do indeed question the motives of Charles Finney, as he was for the most part its fountainhead), the inevitable result has been to shift the Church from a "Moral" center to a "Values" center. Thus the church as well has been set adrift on the ever changing sea of cultural values, And just as this has played itself out in society in general, so too in the Church. The emphasis and focus of "Doing Church" has been shifted from internal, upward development and peace to external development and wholeness. Many in the Modern Church would disagree with this, but the proof is not in words, but the life that the Church is now living out before the world.

It is inevitable that this change should have resulted in the shift from a theological center, to a new "Therapeutic" center .Because as the Church has abandoned its theological center, it as I have already have asserted, has become, hollow, vacant, and very "Light."  Abandoning, the very thing entrusted to it by Christ: "the propositional truth of Scripture," it must find a way to deliver the goods which it promises; healing, wholeness and a sense of well being. And thus its only solution, having abandoned the Theology entrusted to it, it has no choice but to turn to the Humanism, anthropocentric tools held out to it.

Thus we arrive at the central question that more and more are asking in our time:  If the Church can only deliver what the world has already delivered, what’s the point of "Doing Church?"