Saturday 29 November 2014

Daily Devotional

Church Attendance

Screwtape expands on developing church participation for evil ends:

C S Lewis

Surely you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that ‘suits’ him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.

The reasons are obvious. In the first place the parochial organisation should always be attacked, because, being a unity of place and not of likings, it brings people of different classes and psychology together in the kind of unity the Enemy desires. The congregational principle, on the other hand, makes each church into a kind of club, and finally, if all goes well, into a coterie or faction.

In the second place, the search for a ‘suitable’ church makes the man a critic where the Enemy wants him to be a pupil. What He wants of the layman in church is an attitude which may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful, but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not appraise—does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment that is going. (You see how grovelling, how unspiritual, how irredeemably vulgar He is!)

This attitude, especially during sermons, creates the condition (most hostile to our whole policy) in which platitudes can become really audible to a human soul. There is hardly any sermon, or any book, which may not be dangerous to us if it is received in this temper.

From The Screwtape Letters
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters. Copyright © 1942, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright restored © 1996 C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

We were talking about the great Christian revivals at home group the other evening (the revivals had cropped up in a sermon recently) and in the course of that the IVF movement and Billy Graham were mentioned as part of a revival in NZ that began in the 1930's and appears to have petered out in the 60's. My retired Anglican vicar friend blamed the charismatic movement for the decline in fellowship as the great devotional, creeds and beliefs were replaced with the "experience" service where feelings and expression of those replaced quiet contemplation of our position. It was an interesting opinion but reflecting upon the church today generally I tended to think it has merit. Satan masquerades as an angel of light.

3:16