Tuesday, June 04, 2019

The Church as a Metaphysical Fitbit


(Linda, in desigual, Soho, NYC)

(Linda and I are still in New York City teaching Presence-Driven Leadership at Faith Bible Church and Faith Bible Seminary [Chinese].

Tonight we give our Relationships seminar.

This is from my book Leading the Presence-Driven Church.)

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In the Consumer Church, matters of the heart have been displaced by the number of hearts. Concerns of the soul have lost out to size of the building. The big questions now are “How many?” and “How much?” (The Church as a metaphysical Fitbit.) 

Os Guinness writes: 

“Nineteenth-century thinkers foresaw the rising domination of numbers, quantity and majority opinion, and warned against it. They regarded it as the overspill of the age of democratic majorities and the triumph of technocratic rationalism, through which everything would be reduced tonumbers, and big numbers would be valued most of all. The pressure would therefore be toward a false notion of explanation through numbers, a dangerous authority for numbers at the expense of the true and the good, and in the end toward a disastrous strengthening of the Leviathan of the state (for what else is “big” enough and “wise” enough to coordinate and manage everyone and everything but the government?).”