I have been reading Francis Schaeffer’s book, The Church at the End of the 20th Century. Schaeffer, the great evangelical philosopher-theologian who died in 1984, published the book in 1970. It has been on my shelf for years, but I am reading it now for the first time.

Part of the intrigue of reading this book in 2006, more than three decades after it was written, is to see how accurate Schaeffer was in identifying challenges that faced the church then and projecting how those trends would play out during the remainder of the century. In what I’ve read so far, Schaeffer is right on target and in some cases prophetic.

The Church at the End of the 20th Century is a follow-up to Schaeffer’s better known works, The God Who Is There (1968), and Escape From Reason (also 1968). Those books addressed the rise of relativism. This book considers the impact of relativism on the modern church.

Here is one excerpt (from Chapter 3) that caught my eye:

Suppose we awoke tomorrow morning and we opened our Bibles and found two things had been taken out… Suppose God had taken them out. The first item missing was the real empowering of the Holy Spirit, and the second item the reality of prayer. Consequently, following the dictates of Scripture, we would begin to live on the basis of this new Bible in which there was nothing about the power of the Holy Spirit and nothing about the power of prayer. Let me ask you something: what difference would there be from the way we acted yesterday?

It is a powerful question. It is a question for each believer to consider. But remember, Schaeffer’s focus in this book is the church. His question is an especially powerful and timely one for any modern church to consider.

Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost has a good one-page summary of Schaeffer’s life and work. I will post more from The Church at the End of the 20th Century in coming days.