The Bride of Christ as Hot Mess

Douglas Wilson, bringin' the heat.

...we need to come to grips with the fact that in North America, the bride of Christ is a hot mess.

Wow.

...if the Spirit didn't actually do anything, then our systematic theologies are nothing but printed kits for organizing smoke.

*shifts uncomfortably in seat*

In the meantime, we do not need for the bishop to process up the central aisle, like the biggest crow in the gutter. We do not need another message from Doctrine Man, with ten rivets in each subpoint. We do not need the worship leader to take us through yet one more orgasmic chord progression. We don't need a doctrine of responsible stewardship and sustainability that worries more about how many times we flush than how many babies we kill. We do not need any more cardboard cut-out celebrity pastors, grinning at us, as smug as all dammit. In short, we don't need any more of what we currently have. A.W. Tozer once cuttingly observed that if revival means more of what we have now, we most emphatically do not need a revival.

Dang.