On the Danger of Respectability

Dean Hoge once wrote:

“For the typical Protestant church member middle class commitments to family, career, and standard of living are so strong that the church commitment is largely instrumental to them and contingent on whether the church appears to serve them. As a result, many local churches tend to become instruments for achieving middle class interests, whether or not these interests can be defended in New Testament terms.” 

Most American “church people” look for a church that will entertain and comfort them. As soon as it challenges their most basic values and lifestyles, they either protest or leave.  Here is the heresy stated by Karl Barth:

“When the gospel is offered to man, and he stretches out his hand to receive it and takes it into his hand, an acute danger arises which is greater than the danger that he may not understand it and angrily reject it. The danger is that he may accept it peacefully and at once make himself its lord and possessor, thus rendering it innocuous, making that which chooses him something which he himself has chosen, which therefore comes to stand as such alongside all the other things that he can also choose, and therefore control. … Wherever the gospel is proclaimed…it is exposed at once to the danger of respectability.” (Church Dogmatics II/1, p. 141) From Patheos