Yesterday (10/24/21) The Atlantic published an article by Peter Wehner who wanted, “to understand the splintering of churches, communities, and relationships” that has occurred in the “Evangelical” community over the past few years. The article makes a lot of good points and I want to respond to a few of them here.
A perennial struggle in Christianity is the struggle between preserving the old and adapting to the new. On the one hand we have a faith that we must preserve and hand on to future generations, but on the other new discoveries and advances are constantly being made, especially in the areas of science and technology. How much of the old do we change or reformulate in light of the new?
One of the fields that has been part of this debate is psychology.
One of the more difficult things in life, I think, is learning when to stick something out and learning when to walk away from something. Sometimes the choice is obvious. Sometimes it is not. When the decision is about whether or not leave a local church the decision can be even more difficult.
The local church is not an impersonal entity, like a stock that you can buy or sell shares of based on what you think the market will do.
