It's an analogy that I would rather not give....because in my mind NFL football.....from 1933 when it began to primarily be a Lord's Day game....has been a long term curse upon America....and it does not matter how many multi-million dollar contract quarterback idols point to heaven after a TD pass....and then show up on the 700 Club or some such televangelist program to talk about their faith....for they garnered that fame and riches by helping brush hog the hedge of protection that is the Lord's Day. I know that R. C. Sproul was a big Steeler fan....and I think that his view of the Lord's Day was the biggest error in his ministry that he ever made.
The analogy is this....a young #1 draft pick quarterback....gets picked by the worst team in the league. He might look at the talent that will be around him....and knows that they are not going to win right away. The Steelers might help with this analogy. In the 1960s they were real bad. Then with a new coach and a slew of high draft picks....they won four out of six Super Bowls....of which I was celebrating the victories in downtown Pittsburgh. Then they went through some hard times again.....and then came a couple more Super Bowl wins....and who knows where they are right now?The analogy is to evangelicalism....or overall...the church.....not only in America.....but from the very beginning....as the church went through about ten major persecutions its first two hundred years....then Constantine I or Constantine the Great became the new owner....and all of a sudden it was the only game in town. Then came about a thousand years of darkness....and then a whole new team....and Super Bowl wins....one after another for about a hundred and fifty years....my point being that although the remnant is always there....the church in every age thinks itself just fine....but it isn't always just fine....and this is one of those times.
To be America specific....even George Washington upon his retirement was worried about the new country's belief in God. At least the church retained its confession of faith until the Civil War....but the purpose of universities changed after the war....as industrialization took off....and other than a few brief moments of holding the line....it continued on a downward slide....until about 1950 when Billy Graham....and a few other faithful men....made inroads into the increasingly secular culture.
Time Magazine's infamous 1966 cover read....Is God Dead?.....but the same magazine referred to 1976 as....The Year Of The Evangelical. The church hit its peak....opinion here....about 1980....and by 1990 was on its way back down again....as I wrote in a much older post...."the Billy Graham evangelical became the Ralph Reed evangelical.....that became the Karl Rove evangelical.....and is now the Donald Trump evangelical....which has no gospel in it at all"....and where its ministerium....or more aptly magisterium.....consists of talk radio and Fox cable.
My point in this little exercise is that the health of the church is not always the same....just as a football team might have good decades and bad decades. At the time of the persecutions mentioned above....the state of the church was strong.....but the success of the new 'owner' Constantine did not last that long. The questions of the hour therefore are this....'What is the state of the church today.....and evangelicalism....and is it important?"
This matters....particularly to the youth.....because if they cannot see the history of the church....then they will automatically think that today's church and evangelicalism.....and everything they celebrate as related to the church and evangelicalism....must be fine....maybe even exemplary....when in reality.....this is a church age of delusion.
The difference today from the 80s is like the difference between Pat Robertson....and his son who hosts the 700 Club....or even Billy Graham and Franklin....who is a wonderful servant minister with Samaritan's Purse....but helped usher a false prophet right smack dab into the middle of the church....in Donald Trump. It's the difference in a church where the word evangelical once implied 'born again' but now only implores 'vote again'....and that once had the word 'maranatha' emblazoned on it....but no longer even knows what the word means.
So to the young Christian in college....or the young evangelical in a Christian college....they have very little warnings if any to help them plot their course....or navigate the shoals....with a tempest of tempests heading right into them.
