I was talking to my buddy, Nick, today and he was telling me about a discussion he just finished having with his pastor. They regularly discuss the differences in their generations (builder and buster) and often disagree. Their music guy was also there and kicked off a big debate with this statement: “We don’t need another sermon like Sunday’s. We’ve had our “temperance sermon” for the year.”
The pastor began saying that they needed to raise some money for the “Kentucky League Against Alcohol,” which my friend just calls the “Temperance League,” which is what it used to be called. The debate is on whether or not the church should raise money for the political fight against alcohol. This echoes “Evangelical Orthodoxy’s” comment on my last post.
Nick says that it is foolish to try to legislate morality, and I would add that it makes us seem ridiculous to expect that non-Christian people would be willing to live according to Christian values. “But our country was founded on those values,” you might well say, and I agree that it was. It was founded thusly, however, when the culture as a whole shared those values in common. The church’s general failure to be relevant to succeeding generations has caused our culture to move away from those values in an ever increasing way which now results in a sharp division between “Christian culture” and “Non-Christian culture.”
Nick, I think, brings sharp clarity to the conversation with a business analogy. As a former business student, he referenced the “supply & demand” formula that is commonly known to us – taught to me in high school. The basic function of this model is that when supply is short, demand suffers and drives the price high. When demand is less, supply has to drop to keep prices at a level that keeps them in business. When one side lowers, the other has to lower.
Nick suggested that the builder generation solution is to address the supply side of the equation, trying to curb production and availability. We are trying to address the demand side of the equation, convincing people that life is better as God intended it to be lived and ignoring producers. If we are successful, production will have to drop or even cease.
I thought that was a great way to put it. His pastor, though, is still trying to raise a little money for the Temperance League.
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Kdawg
on Feb 2nd, 2006
@ 5:08 pm:
I don’t drink and never want my staff to drink. But there are bigger issues for churches to be concerned about then alcohol. .