Sunday School at 9 am | worship at 10 am

There's a Problem, But It's Not What You Think

Once upon a time there lived a very devout man. As he looked all around him he saw the most intelligent people, the leaders of the culture, the cutting edge educated class rejecting Christianity in droves. This concerned him. He wondered, "What could be the problem?" And so he wrote a series of lecture called, "Lectures on Christianity to Its Cultured Despisers." His name was Fredrick Schleiermacher and he lived in Germany about 200 years ago.

Schleiermacher was sure he had identified the problem: Christianity was not sophisticated enough in the eyes of the leaders of the culture around him. Christianity didn’t seem to be up to date, it didn’t seem to be answering the questions that the culturally elite were asking. To Schleiermacher, Christianity didn’t seem to be an adequate form of belief which was sufficient for modern educated people. So Schleiermacher set out to correct the problem as he saw it. He wanted to update Christianity and to make it more relevant and appealing to his peers. But there was a problem. He changed the gospel in the process. That happened because Schleiermacher misdiagnosed the problem.

The problem wasn’t with the gospel. It didn’t need updating. It didn’t need to be made more relevant. We hear a lot these days about the need to make the gospel more relevant to this sophisticated age so that people will accept it. We don’t need to do anything to make the gospel relevant. The gospel is painfully relevant. That’s because it speaks to sin. But Schleiermacher never recognized that. Instead, he thought the problem was with the message or with the way the message was communicated. That’s why he ended up changing the message in the process.

Now, you might be saying to yourself, "I’ve never read anything by Fredrick Schleiermacher. In fact, I’ve never even heard of the man, so what relevance does the stuff he wrote some two hundred years ago have on my life today?” Actually, it’s very relevant, and here’s why. Some of you have brought friends to church to hear the gospel and they’ve been offended by something. They may have been offended by not being welcomed, or they may have been offended by the worship service. It wasn’t traditional and they wanted traditional, or it wasn’t contemporary and they wanted contemporary. Or the pastor preached on a passage of Scripture that they found very offensive. It happens, doesn’t it? So you’ve thought, well maybe we need to change the church. Maybe we need to change the presentation of the gospel to make it more appealing. If this is what you think, you’ve located the problem in the wrong place—which is precisely what Schleiermacher did.

It’s true that many people today do not find the church appealing or relevant. But the problem with the church isn’t with the gospel. And it isn’t even ultimately with the church, even though the church has problems—lots of problems. There are more problems in the church than you know about. The problem is somewhere else, and in Romans 10:14-21 Paul is going to put his finger right on the place where the problem is. And then we’re going to see what the solution is for those who do not see the relevance or the appeal of Christianity in the world today.