Positive Preaching and Modern Mind Author:Peter Taylor Forsyth Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill The Preacher and His Church, or Preaching as Worship I Have been complaining (in the close of my first lecture) that Christians do not know their Bible... more ». But even if they did, the preacher would still be at a loss in another way. He has to face the modern man's neglect of the Church no less than of the Bible. He meets impatient reformers who take a tone of superior realism, and coarsely speak of Church life and the edification of believers as a mere " coddling of the Saints." He lives in an age when the Kingdom of God engrosses more Christian interest than the Church of Christ, and Christian people are more devoted to the busy effort of getting God's will done on earth than to the deep repose of communion with God's finished will in Christ. It is characteristic of much of the Christian activity of the last half-century that it aims not so much at a Christocracy, where Christ has a household and is master of it, as at a Christolatry—a mere arpeia of Christ, where he is worshipped mainly through the service of the public. It is needless to point out to the student of the New Testament how flatly this contradicts its genius. And it is useless to urge the point with those who treat the New Testament as archaeology. Some of us who are greatly in sympathy with these churchless efforts, like the Salvation Army, may yet believe that if they became the ruling type their end would be lost. We may believe that, by the will of Christ, it is only through a real Church, truly Christianized, that Humanity can be served and saved for the Kingdom. We may feel that the love of Humanity could not survive apart from not only our love of Christ, but also from the personal communion with Christ in a Church which feeds that love. The fiav6p(Oiria is only possible through the tfiaSe(fia...« less