An interview with Bill Hogg.
Ed: It’s hard to deny that we are living in challenging times culturally. The church’s influence is fading, and we are struggling to find answers to some hard questions. What’s your take on the health of the church today, especially as it relates to our witness?
Bill: These are wild, weird, and wonderful days. Life in the homeland is turbulent with bipartisan vitriol, economic disparity, immigration, refugees, and growing xenophobia, gun violence, and deepening racial division to name but a few issues that call for a gospel response.
We can celebrate a few bright spots, especially in church planting. I’m encouraged that in Quebec—the least-reached chunk of real estate in all of the Americas—that churches are being planted, the gospel is being announced and lost people are encountering Jesus.
However, we do need to wake up to our challenging times.
In Canada, there seems to be a collective loss of nerve when it comes to making much of Jesus. Canadians need to recover apostolic confidence in the gospel and step up and speak up with bold humility.
You mention that the church’s influence is fading, that’s not entirely a bad thing. The New Testament church, and the church down through the ages, has exercised the greatest redemptive influence from the margins, not when she is intent on pursuing political power.
In the U.S., it seems that evangelicals have not grasped this lesson or learned from the failed experiments of the religious right in decades past. The gospel can be subverted by partisan political agendas and this tarnishes our witness. Paul could say:
Brothers and sisters think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; ...
from
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