Tenacity and Intransigence

In the golden era of the Roman Empire, Pliny the Younger advised Emperor Trajan that Christians should be executed solely for their tenacity and intransigence. “Whatever the nature of their admission, I am convinced that their stubbornness and unshakeable obstinacy ought not to go unpunished.”…

Would we be convicted today for being stubborn, tenacious, unbending and obstinate? It is surely undeniable that only rarely in Christian history has the lordship of Jesus in the West been treated as more pliable or has Christian revisionism been more brazen, Christian interpretations of the Bible more self-serving, Christian preaching more soft, Christian behavior more lax, Christian compromise more common, Christian defections from the faith more casual, and Christian rationale for such slippage more spurious and shameless.”

Os Guiness in Impossible People

Techno Gnostics

…there will always be natural limits to the humanity and size of our churches. The optimum size of human communities that are bonded by face-to-face relationships, we are told, is around the magic number of 150 to 200. So as soon as any human community goes above that number, whether in the direction of a megachurch, with its tens of thousands, or a megacity with its tens of millions, it requires coordinating in ways that are other than face to face and fully human – whether lightly through the interconnections of the social media or more heavy-handedly through authoritarian political control. The nature and impact of that form of coordination then become critical.

For better or worse, these different ways of bringing and holding people together have their own identifiable dynamics that in the end will always determine the quality of the larger community. Modern megacities have reached a size that creates intrinsic problems of their own, and there can be grandiose hi-tech forms of the church that have similar problems. They will appeal to the techno-gnostics who lionize the brilliance of disembodied video images and abstractions and disparage what St. Francis humbly called “Brother Ass.” But they will never prove to be the wave of the future. The neighbourhood parish church is not just the church of the past but the church of the future. Scorned and overshadowed though it may be at times, it will never be outmoded while humans are humans and have bodies.

Os Guiness in Impossible People

A Weightless Culture

When cultures reject God, they cut themselves off from the ultimate ground of reality, and in the end they do indeed become weightless, insubstantial, light as air, ephemeral or, in the terms used by the prophets, “weighed in the balances, and found wanting” (Daniel 5:27 KJV). They give birth “only to wind” (Is 26:18), and like tumbleweed before the hurricanes of history, they are eventually “gone with the wind” (Is 57:13). The judgment over their end is the verdict “Ichabod” – the glory, the reality, the weightiness has gone (1 Sam 4:21).

Os Guiness in Impossible People

A Field of Mushrooms or Oaks?

Historians say that the sacred music of the Christian church, such as that of Palestrina, Allegri and Tallis, is one of the greatest gifts of the gospel to Western civilization and on par with the splendor of the magnificent European cathedrals, such as Chartres and Lincoln. yet this rich treasury is an unknown world to many Evangelicals, whose worship music often draws from songs written after 2000…But much of the run-of-the-mill renewal songs, which are repeated endlessly and constructed more on rhythm than melody, confine Evangelicals within a shallow theology, threadbare worship, fleeting relevance and historical amnesia. Along with soft preaching and a general rage for innovation, such music is another reason why many Evangelical churches resemble a field of quick-growing, quick-disappearing mushrooms rather than a longstanding forest of oaks. Again and again I have been regaled with the church growth maxim, “You have to sacrifice one generation to reach the next.” But this turns on a false assumption, and it leads to the telling fact that the fatal weakness of Evangelical church growth is succession. Church growth “success” without succession will always prove failure in the end.”

Os Guiness in Impossible People p176