“A church with a creed or confession has a built-in gospel reality check. It is unlikely to become sidetracked by the peripheral issues of the passing moment; rather it will focus instead on the great theological categories that touch on matters of eternal significance” (Carl R. Trueman, The Creedal Imperative, 168).

 Reaching the Millennials: An Interview with Thom Rainer from Preaching Magazine, Vol. 27 No. 4

Preaching: You mentioned church starts. It seems that a lot of the best and brightest young ministers coming along are saying, “I’m not going to inherit the problems of a previous generation of churches. We’re starting fresh with new churches.”

Rainer: You’re absolutely right. I have one son of my three who is involved in a church plant. These millennials, these young adults, many of them are frustrated with church as usual, with local church actions, business and what they perceive as irrelevancy. So they’re starting churches.

Yet I would have a challenge for some millennials as well. Keep planting churches, have that attitude; but we’ve got about 400,000 established churches in the United States that we cannot give up on. I would say not only start churches, but prayerfully go into these churches to try to revolutionize them even if it takes a lifetime of ministry, because we’re not planting enough churches to sustain the fall off of the established churches. I hope we’ll see both groups rise up, more church planters and more church people as millennial leaders going to established churches to turn them around [CCS, underline added].

 Reaching the Millennials: An Interview with Thom Rainer from Preaching Magazine, Vol. 27 No. 4

Preaching: You mentioned that probably as many as 85 percent of this generation are not Christian. You’ve taught evangelism; you are an evangelist yourself in terms of sharing the gospel. How do churches go about seeking to evangelize the millennial generation?

Rainer: Here’s the irony: This is the smallest generation of Christians, we think, in America’s history. We could begin to lament that reality and say there’s absolutely no hope. The irony is that this is the greatest opportunity to evangelize [CCS, underline added].

“In all genuine conviction of sin, the great burden of pollution and guilt is felt to consist not in what we have done, but in what we are–our permanent moral condition rather than our actual transgressions [i.e. our estate of sin and misery]. The great cry is to be forgiven and delivered from “the wicked heart of unbelief,” “deadness to divine things, alienated from God as a permanent habit of soul.” “O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” Rom. vii. 24; Ps. li. 5, 6. It hence necessarily follows that original sin, as well as actual transgressions, deserves the curse of the law. Everything condemned by the law is under its curse” (A.A. Hodge, The Confession of Faith, 116-117).

Also see Question XXVIII from The Shorter Catechism:

Question: Wherein consists the sinfulness of the estate whereinto man fell? 

Answer: The sinfulness of that estate whereinto man fell, consists in the guilt of Adam’s first sin, the want of original righteousness, and the corruption of his whole nature, which is commonly called original sin, together with all actual transgressions which proceed from it.

With a sobering subtitle–“The Men who Destroyed the Christian West”–this book accomplishes a few things. First, excluding the chapter on Aquinas, the author walks through the past 400 years of Western Civilization and identifies key Apostates, from Descartes to Locke to Rousseau to Bentham to Emerson to Marx to Darwin to Nietzsche to Dewey to Sarte, and then the author applies the Biblical principle of judging a tree by its fruit. The end result–a very bleak 200+ pages that follow the demise-trajectory of the West. Second, while providing this high overview of the West’s demise-trajectory, the author observes/comments several times that this rebellious-apostate experiment is about to end; the West is most certainly running on fumes, i.e. “The heyday of humanism is long gone. This experiment with godless materialism is almost over” (154). Thus, a society that sows death will eventually reap death, and we are most certainly in the latter reaping stage, e.g. the great wars from the prior century, legalization of on-demand abortion, etc. Third, the West is going to crash and burn, however, the author encourages Christians to prepare, engage, and build the next Christendom: “If we train our children in the knowledge that is rooted in the fear of God, and in the firm hope of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, then our children will be the ones motivated and equipped to rebuild our broken-down systems. Our children will plant gardens in the ashes of what used to be called “Western Civilization” (301).

“A biblical social view maintains the delicate balance between the individual and his society. The state cannot provide human relationship and community. Without the covenant bodies of family and church society will err to the side of either anarchy or tyranny. In a humanist social situation, anarchy and tyranny play off each other until the system unravels. Four hundred years ago, the church took about 10% of a family’s income, the state took 5%, and the family itself retained about 85%. Today, the church gets 1-2%, the state takes 60-75% [This may be a little high, but I suppose it depends on how one calculates it, e.g. some countries have in addition to set tax rates a tax on capital gains. However, he isn’t off by much. And to think, the prophet Samuel warned Israel, when she demanded a king, that a king would take a “tenth of your seed, and of your vineyards, and give to his officers, and to his servants” (1 Sam. 8:15).], and the family retains a paltry 30%. The relative importance of family and church in people’s lives is fairly minimal, thanks to the influence of Rousseau, Marx, and Dewey. Contrary to what Dewey believed, the true prophet of God speaks only what God tells him to speak. The salvation message preached must be the gospel of Christ, and the church elders are held responsible for “preaching the Word.” The family and church are the fundamental social units, and the family is responsible for the education and upbringing of children (Eph. 6:4, Deut. 6:7, 1 Tim. 5:8). Then, the state is responsible for prosecuting crimes like murder and robbery (Gen. 9:6, Exod. 21:1-5). This is the biblical social theory rejected by John Dewey” (Kevin Swanson, Apostate, 164-165).

“The loneliest countries in the world as measured by percentage of people living alone, are the United States (#1), Australia (#2), Sweden (#3), Canada (#4), and Japan (#5) [Reference Citation: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/peo_one_per_hou-people-one-person-households]” (Kevin Swanson, Apostate, 185).

“There are two kinds of humanism. The first turns the individual into god, and the second turns the social unit into god” (Kevin Swanson, Apostate, 177).

“[W]e must remember that liberalism is not primarily a rejection of the supernatural; it is a reconfiguration of the nature of Christianity in such a way as to highlight religious psychology or experience and downplay or marginalize doctrine” (Carl R. Trueman, The Creedal Imperative, 142).

“The school has replaced the church as the center of the community in most urban and rural areas today. . . . Over a 120 years later, we see the consequences of this vision. The average high school graduate is barely literate, but he knows how to use a condom. He is far more likely to support socialism and homosexuality than his parents and grandparents in their generations. But he can’t name two men who signed the Declaration of Independence, and he probably can’t tell the difference between Groucho Marx and Karl Marx” (Kevin Swanson, Apostate, 164).