What would an update of C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters look like?
The Wormwood Archive, by T. G. Brown
Who should read it?
Anyone curious or worried about the state of the Church in America.
Seriously—anyone who fits into that category would benefit from reading this book. It’s short (143 pages) and a quick read. It is deeply insightful about the nature of the modern evangelical church.
C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters is one of the pop classics of the modern church.
If you haven’t read it, it’s typical Lewis. Screwtape is a senior devil giving advice to a junior devil (Wormwood) about how to corrupt a man.
It clever and interesting and mostly good fun.
Brown’s book updates Lewis’ book. Wormwood is now trying to corrupt an entire church. It is an easier task.
The concept is what makes the book so insightful. There are many complaints about the state of the modern evangelical church. Many.
Many of these complaints they fall into the “See how Horrible those Church Growth/Vineyard/Seeker Sensitive types are” category. There is also the opposite: “See how Horrible those Old-Fashioned/Stuck on tradition types are” category.
What Brown does well here is imagines that this isn’t a case of Terrible, Horrible people trying to do Terrible, Horrible things. What if we have a case of good, well-meaning people who end up doing Terrible, Horrible things because they were seduced into thinking they were doing the Right Thing? What would the temptation of the Whole Church look like?
This book is, in other words, a lot like Whitaker Chamber’s masterpiece, “The Devil.” (Life, 1948, reprinted in Ghosts on the Roof). If you haven’t read it, you should.
(That advice is for everyone; the Chambers’ essay is worth reading for anyone who enjoys Great Books and Ideas.)
What tempts the modern church? As the devils in this book indicate, the church is tempted by the desire to become more efficient at what it does.
It wants more customers—because after all a happy customer is a saved soul, right?
It wants a better market image—after all a better image means more customers which means more saved souls, right?
It wants more direction and a better management structure and a more contemporary feel. It just wants to be a better, more improved version of itself.
The Church has to change with the times, don’t you know? It can’t stay stuck in the past. Read the media, won’t you? (And there is another problem—why did I just write “read” the media? Who reads anymore? Watch the media. And add some videos and PowerPoint slides to that church service while you are at it.)
Christians are so old-fashioned, stuck on outdated principles. If we want to reach the modern generation, then we need to figure out what the modern generation wants.
And before you know it, the church is no longer recognizable. Spending all its time thinking about what it looks like, the Church forgets what it is supposed to actually be. It is not that thinking about all the ways to modernize the church are necessarily bad. But, what happens when that is all the Church thinks about?
This idea that the church has been seduced is surely correct. For anyone attending a modern church, evangelical or otherwise, there is a disturbing regularity with which the shock of recognition hits
Who hasn’t felt this temptation, the temptation to help improve the church a bit, just a bit, because God, well, he can be so Old Fashioned sometimes, and if only He were around today, then He would probably want this change too, and after all, I’m supposed to be helping God out with the Church things, aren’t I?
The Road to a Heretical Church is paved with Good Intentions.
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