Page 8 - Empowering Missional Artists - Jim Mills.pdf

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There is a sense of drift, in which people yield to a meaningless determinism, as if their
efforts do not matter and as if they have no control over their lives . . . there is . . . a sense
of guilt, self-loathing that comes from their moral abandon . . . a promiscuity . . . the
indiscriminate acceptance of anything and everything . . . an unfocused eclecticism and
uncritical tolerance. (Veith 1994, 45)

He went on to accurately describe that we have entered into a season of “escapism” where

people are “seeking to avoid their problems by retreating into their own worlds of distraction and

entertainment.” (Ibid)

The state of our western civilizations where the “inner cities are war zones . . .

pornography is manufactured unchecked…and…the prison population is exploding” (Galli 2007)

demonstrates the consequences of the western world’s fatal embrace of philosophical pluralism

(I.e. relativism). Also, in our d ay “the most helpless and powerless are aborted not just by the

thousands, but by the millions.”(ibid) We discard life before birth (even up to the moment before

birth), and then at the other end, in the not so distant future western society may well cast off the

burden of carrying for the aged and the dying through various forms of euthanasia.

The killing of a child in the womb used to be considered a horrible, almost unspeakable
evil. Today, abortion is not just legal, it has been transformed into something good, a
constitutional right. People once considered killing the handicapped, the sick, and the
aged an unthinkable atrocity. Today, they see euthanasia as an act of compassion.
(Ibid, 17)

We need not dwell on these obvious symptoms of the truancy of our civilization alone rather, “if

any confirmation is needed, go to the films, read the books, of today, walk around a modern art

gallery, listen to the music of our time - hear see, open your eyes and ears to the cries of despair

. . . the collapse of this world.” (Wilson 1981, 103)

Sometimes the Christian response has been to get angry at the decadence, immorality,

and spiritual bankruptcy of the hour. However, we need to ask ourselves, what role - if any -

have we, the church, perhaps played? In our meaning and value eroded cultures where hope is

diminishing and where anger now is beginning to erupt, we must realize that to some degree, the

blame lies with our Christian conspicuous absence in culture. And by this I do not mean street

and TV evangelism. By absence, I am referring to an often intentional or even un-intentional