Many would disagree. In this postmodern day, many churches have adopted the popular seeker-sensitive model. A watered down gospel (if gospel at all) coupled with high-tech gadgetry and ever-shrinking attention spans gives birth to a service that caters more to what unbelievers need than what God desires. Some churches have even split their services, with one service for unbelievers, and another service for Christians.
Morganthaler does not like this at all. She believes (and this author agrees) that worship is a witness to the world of what a relationship with God looks like. She points to Barna who points to the fact that people of the world are looking for the church to be the church, to be a place of refuge from the chaos and immorality of the outside world.
Now there's a paradox. In this age of relative morals, people are looking for a stable foundation. Does it make sense for the church to cater to their needs? To deny them the one thing they may be looking for? Have we forgotten that the reason the church exists is to point people to God, to be the hands and feet of Christ, his emissaries to the world?
The only thing we should be watering down is the soil of the soul in which we plant the seed of truth.
Yet sometimes we try to hide our relationship with God. Like Peter the night before Jesus' trial, we deny ever knowing the one we say we live our lives for, and our churches suffer for this. Fearful of treading on toes and making people feel uncomfortable, the church walks too lightly on the roads of America. Is there another explanation for why the church has lost its authorial voice in the latter decades of the twentieth century?
We've lost the foundation we once had, and, one might argue, that that foundation was strong, but not strong enough to last forever. The foundation used to be a morality that everyone agreed upon. Now that that foundation has cracked into a million pieces of moral relativism, the only foundation we can wholly rely upon is the one we should have built our houses on a long time ago - the foundation built with the cornerstone of Christ.
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