I recently was asked to write a short essay on D.M. Lloyd-Jones' book of lectures Preaching and Preachers which Zondervan is slated to re-issue in 2012. This afforded me an opportunity to re-read the book and to discover that I had been more helped and shaped by it than I had remembered. Most of what I discovered would not fit in the essay and so I decided to spread a bit more of it out in some blog posts.

In his unpublished biography of his brother C. S. Lewis, W. H. “Warnie” Lewis related how in late 1951 his brother received a letter from Prime Minister Winston Churchill. In it, Churchill offered to recommend him for a C.B.E. (Commander of the British Empire). 

In Japan, in Western Europe, and in Russia, the birth-rate has fallen precipitously, to below replacement levels. If this does not change, the economic and cultural impact will be very great on those nations. Many have pointed out that interest in child-bearing is lowest in the most secular countries and sectors of society, while it is the highest in the most religious countries. Why is this? One explanation is that more educated people put off child-rearing until later in life and that means fewer children. However, educated religious people have more children than educated secular people, and therefore the socio-economic answer isn't the most basic answer. I don't think anyone can be completely sure that they have a handle on this complex phenomenon, but I think it creates an interesting backdrop for the consideration of the unique Christian view of the family.

I was recently invited to attend a forum where Os Guinness spoke on “A World Safe for Diversity,” essentially on the importance of “civility” in public life. About the same time I began reading a new book, American Grace: How Religion Divides Us and Unites Us, by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell. They said many of the same things, and it was very convicting.
 

How do seasons of revival come? One set of answers comes from Charles Finney, who turned revivals into a "science." Finney insisted that any group could have a revival any time or place, as long as they applied the right methods in the right way. Finney's distortions, I think, led to much of the weakness in modern evangelicalism today, as has been well argued by Michael Horton over the years. Especially under Finney's influence, revivalism undermined the more traditional way of doing Christian formation. That traditional way of Christian growth was gradual – whole family catechetical instruction – and church-centric. Revivalism under Finney, however, shifted the emphasis to seasons of crisis. Preaching became less oriented to long-term teaching and more directed to stirring up the affections of the heart toward decision. Not surprisingly, these emphases demoted the importance of the church in general and of careful, sound doctrine and put all the weight on an individual's personal, subjective experience. And this is one of the reasons (though not the only reason) that we have the highly individualistic, consumerist evangelicalism of today.