{"id":3737,"date":"2006-11-12T17:07:19","date_gmt":"2006-11-12T21:07:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lighthousetrailsresearch.com\/blog\/?p=3737"},"modified":"2026-07-19T13:11:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-19T20:11:11","slug":"does-the-church-have-a-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lighthousetrailsresearch.com\/blog\/does-the-church-have-a-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Does the Church Have a Future?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Does the church have a future in our generation? &#8230; I believe the church is in real danger. It is in for a rough day. We are facing present pressures and a present and future manipulation which will be so overwhelming in the days to come that they will make the battles of the last forty years look like child&#8217;s play.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The liberal theologians in their stress on community speak and act as though we become Christians when we enter the horizontal relationship of community.But this is totally the wrong starting-point. If this were so, Christianity would have no more final value than the humanistic community.&#8221; <strong>Francis Schaeffer<\/strong>, <em>The Church at the End of the 20th Century<\/em>&#8211;1970<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Whenever men say they are looking for greater reality, we must show them at once the reality of true Christianity. This is real because it is concerned with the God who is there and who has spoken to us about Himself, not just the use of the symbol &#8216;god&#8217; or &#8216;christ&#8217; which sounds spiritual but is not. The men who merely use the symbol ought to be pessimists, for the mere word god or the idea god is not a sufficient base for the optimism they display&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;This is the kind of &#8216;believism&#8217; which is demanded by this theology&#8230;. It is no more than a jump into an undefinable, irrational, semantic mysticism.&#8221; Schaeffer, <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20130814033920\/http:\/\/www.crossroad.to:80\/Excerpts\/books\/schaeffer\/who-is-there.htm\"><strong><span style=\"font-size: xx-small;\">from <em>The God Who is There<\/em><\/span><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p><!-- AddThis Button BEGIN --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Does the church have a&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":114,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[191],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-christian-faith","wpcat-191-id"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v28.4 (Yoast SEO v28.4) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Does the Church Have a Future? 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