From Ravi Zacharias

A secular mindset seems to have invaded the church. What has been the result of this for the church?

Zacharias: A secular mindset is manifested in some forms — not all forms — of the emergent church. This is a dangerous phenomenon, and some of its protagonists undervalue its end results. When you think that every generation tends to move away from the previous one, some forms of the emergent church today are flirting with the extinction of the gospel, at the heart of which is the cross of Jesus Christ.

Two things have happened in the secular mindset. First, secular-minded people do not take the church seriously because the church is not answering their questions. Second, those within the church are timid and unable to sustain the supernatural side of their beliefs in a highly naturalistic world.

What remains, then, in this kind of religious belief system is a spirituality that does not need to defend itself because it is purely a private thing that does not moralize or pontificate for anyone else. It becomes a feel-good, be-quiet, and get-a-better-state-of-mind-at-the-end-of-the-day religion. Moral absolutes? One revelation from God who has moral boundaries for us? No, that becomes untenable. So the church, when it did not respond to the secular mindset and did not prepare its own people, became secularized. In the end, it became spirituality without truth, and experience without objective reference.

The average church member today is unprepared and ill-equipped to face the attacks that are coming at us full-force. We are leaving our young men and women who are attending universities as lambs led to the slaughter. We have fought symptoms, like the issues of the Second World War. We were shooting at rubber dummies while the real attack was taking place elsewhere.