Safe Haven

An e-mail I sent to a pastor friend of mine: (Name witheld to protect the unwittingly famous) Hey Friend, Today in Religious Studies, we continued our discussion of Robert Wuthnow's book, After Heaven: Spirituality in America since the 1950s. Where we are right now, we were trying to contextualize the rise of evangelicalism in the 70s and 80s. You and other leaders know better than anybody how shallow segments of evangelicalism have become. Some people hijacked our way of speaking, of giving God His rightful place, and turned Christianity into an enormous self-help program, designed to provide people a "comfortable" place in culture. Personally, if I see a copy of Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People today, I'm gonna lose my mind. I don't want to be "effective," or fulfilled, or driven, I want to be a Christian. Please tell me that I'm not a statistic, that you and I are not just the products of a shallow cultural counterrevolu...