The Problem of the Gifted Speaker

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Quotations

The logic of an idea, once it has gained a foothold in the human psyche, has a tendency to work itself out with a relentless consistency to its ultimate con-clusions even among men of disparate cultures who have little or no contact with or knowledge of each other, but more especially so where that idea is widely accepted by a community—unless it is effectively challen-ged. And so it has been with sacerdotalism and prelacy, which even the Reformation was not able to expunge entirely from the minds of Christian men, and so the wretched harvest produced by these ideas began to grow once more before the dust thrown up by the ploughing of the Reformation had settled on the ground. And this is all the more remarkable because, as Max Weber pointed out, “every consistent doctrine of predestined grace inevitably implied a radical and ultimate devaluation of all magical, sacramental and institutional distributions of grace, in view of God’s sovereign will.”

— Stephen Perks,
The Christian Passover:
Agape Feast or Ritual Abuse?, p. 46

The Officials of the Roman Empire in time of persecution sought to force the Christians to sacrifice, not to any of the heathen gods, but to the Genius of the Emperor and the Fortune of the city of Rome; and at all times the Christians' refusal was looked upon not as a religious but as a political offence.

— Frances Legge,
Forerunners and Rivals of Christianity,
Vol, I, p. lvi.

The history of Eastern Christianity under the rule of Islam has already been written. The story is a depressing one. The history of Western Christianity under the rule of Islam has yet to be written. Whether it will ever be written may well depend on how seriously the Church in the West takes the Great Commission in the next few decades and on whether the zeal and self-sacrifice of Muslims for their jihad can be matched by the zeal and self-sacrifice of Christians for the Great Commission - indeed, whether Muslims, with their zeal and self-sacrifice, can be converted from jihad to the Great Commission.

— Stephen Perks,
"From Jihad to Great Commission"
in Christianity & Society, Vol. VIX, No. 3

Thursday

Jul282011

ISBN: 978-0-9522058-5-2

One of the problems facing the Church in the Western world today is the problem posed by the “ministry” of those who are considered “gifted speakers” and consequently idolised by the Church. Stated in its most simple form this is the problem posed by the prioritising of the personality, charisma, “profile,” popularity, stage presence and ability of the speaker as an orator and entertainer over the content of the message being delivered—in short, the triumph of style over content, the consequence of which has been the creation of an intellectually feeble-minded and theologically malnourished generation of churchgoers who are over stimulated by sentimental and mindless entertainment worship masquerading as spiritual edification. The problem has a long history, but it is made particularly problematic today by the intellectual dumbing down process that currently afflicts British culture generally and has produced a semiliterate society. That the Church should also have fallen into this ditch is particularly problematic because her role in providing spiritual, moral and intellectual leadership for society is vital to the health of the nation. Without the leadership of the Church the nation cannot recover from its present descent into cultural degeneration and the neo-paganism that is its inevitably accompaniment. While the Church is obsessed with the mindless prioritising of style over content that is vitiating the cultural life of the nation as a whole she will remain useless and irrelevant to society, and therefore unable to provide the leadership that the nation so desperately needs.

Author: Stephen Perks

Paperback | 28 pages | £3.50 plus postage | ISBN: 978-0-9522058-5-2

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