He didn’t say preach the gospel word for word.
He is giving the failed emergent church blather. It sounds right enough on the surface because everyone focuses on the entertainment-church criticism. Don’t let that fool you. He wants to take advantage of a real flaw to bribe the church into bigger destruction. I say “bribe” because he is taunting with the promise of his and his generations return.
Appreciate the criticism but beware of whose advice you are listening to. He is an admitted doubter who has never really embraced the church. He needs more real Truth than he seems willing to admit. He comes to church saying he is the teacher, not the student.
That generation is VERY VERY vulnerable to false doctrines and false teachers. Maybe they will grow up and really learn what they are rejecting and the error they are embracing. Or maybe they will just arrogantly stick around and try to destroy whatever good is still left in their churches while they strut around like pharisees praising their own humility, liturgy,, charity, etc......all for others to see. Because they are the generation who sees everything as ALL ABOUT THEM.
He didn’t but I did. If that is what they hear then if they choose to not submit then it is because they are chaff and cannot use the excuse of the rock church or whatever. They stay lost because of them, period. Right now they have excuses (partially valid) in not liking the party atmosphere in some churches and the tepid feel-good motivational seminar messages.
Not that we can be sure, but religious enthusiasm has ebbed and flowed even since the English settlement of this country. Roanoke was founded by Ralegh who was both an adventurer and a zealous Protestant. Virginia is not remembered for its religious zeal, but large numbers of Puritans settled in the Chesapeake area, although they were scattered all over the place. New England was colonized by Puritans, of course. Until 1690, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was ruled by Puritans. After wards, the zeal flagged especially after Enlightment ideas began to have an impact. But in the 1730s, a reaction took place and we have the beginning of the first Great awakening. That fervor diminished in the 1760s, but in New England at least, the Quebex Act, which gave the French Roman Catholics religious Freedom, which erased New England, who had been had war with the French for a hundred years. The possibility of the Church of England setting up a bishop in the colonies also angered many colonials and not just in New England. Nonetheless the Revolutionarygeneral was not as religious as the one before, although the Congregational, Baptist, and Presbyterian clergy were among the most zealous Whigs, Without the Presbyterians, Washington could not have hung onto New Jersey. The French revolution, who was so unreligious provoked a New Religious awakening in the colonies, and while only a minority of Americans belonged to a Church, the Second Great Awakening adoused great enthusiasm and by the 1850s, most Americans belonged to one “denomination” or another. A Protestant Establishment ran the country and continued to do so until after 1960.