Is the Church today Man-centered? Before I tackle the issue at hand, let me thank all of you who have either sent me letters, or called to confirm what I have written. I am well aware that many readers are abreast of the issues which I am raising and your encouragement is greatly appreciated. As I take an overall view of the contemporary Christian scene, and survey what have become the key characteristics that make up evangelicalism in the United States, I believe it is accurate to say that much of the church has not only adopted a pragmatic philosophy in the effort to reach unbelievers, it has also done this to try to keep those within our churches "entertained." However, the underlying problem behind this goes much deeper than pragmatism. The root problem is that we have embraced a man-centered form of Christianity. In the introductory essay to John Owen’s classic work, The Death of Death, J. I. Packer accurately summarizes American Christianity when he says that the predominant message which is being preached today seeks to focus on man, rather than on God. He believes that what we are currently observing is a "new gospel." He then explains that this new gospel "conspicuously fails to produce deep reverence, deep repentance, deep humility, a spirit of worship, a concern for the church. Why? We would suggest that the reason lies in its own character and content. It fails to make men God-centered in their thoughts and God-fearing in their hearts because this is not primarily what it is trying to do." He continues by adding that "one way of stating the difference between it [the new gospel] and the old gospel is to say that it is too exclusively concerned to be ‘helpful’ to man—to bring peace, comfort, happiness, satisfaction—and too little concerned to glorify God. The old gospel was ‘helpful,’ too—more so, indeed, than is the new—but . . . incidently, for its first concern was always to give glory to God. . . . Whereas the chief aim of the old was to teach men to worship God, the concern of the new seems limited to making them feel better." Then Packer adds this stinging statement: "The subject of the old gospel was God and His ways with men; the subject of the new is man and the help God gives him. There is a world of difference. The whole perspective and emphasis of gospel preaching has changed." In the event that this point is not clear enough, let me now refer to another writer, a self-professing "mainline-liberal-Protestant-Methodist-type," whose name is William Willimon. If anyone understands the folly of a man-centered gospel, it is Willimon, who says, "I’ve always had this fantasy that somewhere . . there would be preachers who preached it all . . . without blinking an eye. I took great comfort in knowing that, even while I preached a pitifully compromised, ‘Peeled’-down gospel, that somewhere, good old Bible-believing preachers were offering their congregations the unadulterated Word, straight up." He further states: "Do you know how disillusioning it has been for me to realize that many of these self-proclaimed biblical preachers now sound more like liberal mainliners than liberal mainliners? At the very time those of us in the mainline, oldline, sidelined were repenting of our pop psychological pap and rediscovering the joy of disciplined biblical preaching, these ‘biblical preachers’ were becoming ‘user friendly’ . . . and taking their cues from the ‘felt needs’ of us ‘boomers’ and ‘busters’ rather than the excruciating demands of the Bible." The motivation he says, was/is to try to be "relevant." That is what has gotten us to where we are today: trying to be relevant. The belief that being relevant is good for Christianity has caused us to draw our eyes off of God, and put them on man. And, Willimon continues, the goal of many preachers today—in their effort to preach relevant messages—is to find a "felt need" and then "rummage around in the Bible for a relevant answer." Willimon then asks, "Where did we get words like depression, anxiety, self-esteem, felt needs? Not from the Bible. In regard to depression, I can name you passages where the Bible appears to provoke depression rather than cure it! And my ‘felt needs,’ before I meet the Bible, are usually the result of sin rather than the path to salvation." This, keep in mind, is from the pen of a liberal Methodist! It has always intrigued and saddened me that the church is attempting to preach a gospel which even someone like William Willimon can look at and see as folly. As I read Willimon, what strikes me is that at least some liberals have been abandoning what many conservatives are now embracing. Why? Because we have succumbed to the old lie of the Enlightenment that truth has no value in and of itself; that modern man will not be interested in our message unless that message has some type of "application" (in another word, "usefulness"). This is what has influenced liberal Christianity over the last couple of hundred years, and it is now what is influencing the "conservative" church. What I would urge all believers to do, is to ask, Is our church preaching a message which focuses on man?, or, Is it preaching a message which focuses on God? The former is unacceptable; the latter is what is biblical.