When former US president Bill Clinton was running for high office, he did not want to be diverted from what he considered to be the critical political issue: the state of the domestic economy. Clinton therefore had the words “It's the economy, stupid!” framed and hung on the wall of his office. It seems to me that every Christian could do with a similar framed epithet somewhere highly prominent in homes; one which reads: “It's the Word, stupid!”

If any single truth needed to be kept before the eyes of every Christian, and restored at the heart of every church, it is this: there is a power in the Word of God and the body to whom that Word is entrusted, against which not even the gates of Hades can prevail (Matthew 16:18). If we wish to be reminded of the nature of this power, then we have only to look to the sweeping spiritual changes brought about by the Protestant Reformation, what many perceive, as I do, as the greatest move of the Spirit in recent centuries. For the Reformation did not just galvanize an apostazing church, it also empowered that church to impact the world and culture around it. Missionary endeavour and revival, with the consequent salvation of a harvest of souls, became a reality during the following centuries; educational freedom took place on an unparalleled scale, with the establishment of universities and schools by the hands of Christians; the legislative authority of government, based specifically upon biblical values of justice, religious tolerance and freedom, were established through men like Wilberforce. Scientific enquiry was sponsored as never before. All this, by courtesy, not of secular humanism, but of the Word-restored, God-reformed, culture-engaging, Spirit-led church of God. But none of this was achieved by working in Christian party ghettoes, isolated from the real world.

As Francis Schaeffer said, what this all comes down to in the end is a wholesale return to Word-centred faith in a renewed confidence in the authority of the Bible and to the very different worldview such a church can offer to a culture increasingly desperate for certainty and answers.

But if we continue to fight the good fight only in sporadic, splintered, pockets of resistance, it is hard to perceive how the modern church can regain its divine, as well as its cultural, significance and credibility. We have ceded the ground too often to humanism. We have allowed ourselves to become schismatics, separatists believing we can do the work of the Great Commission as individuals, not as church. But it was not to individual Christians that the Great Commission was given: it was a commission given to the church.

In yet another era of deformation for the household of God, there will always be great heroism shown by a saint here, a leader there. But this is not how God ordained things. Neither is it how we are to suffer them. The problem is that we have come to see revival, the direct intervention of God, as our only hope, such is the state of decline in the church. Revival historically, however, has been granted in the wake of restoration of the Word and the reformation of the church, the third of the three R's. We may feel ourselves confused at why God appears to be standing idly by, failing to intercede on behalf of his ailing, allegedly “Bible-believing” church. But, as we have seen, why should He intercede – in the face of our practical faithlessness in our abandonment of His Word, and our lack of concern for the body of the church to which the Word was, primarily, given? We began our review by returning to the evangelically prophetic words of Dr. Francis Schaeffer, and his unheeded modern warning. It is only right that we leave the final thoughts and assertions here then to him. At the opening of his A Christian Manifesto, Francis Schaeffer writes:

The basic problem of the Christians in this country in the last eighty years or so, in regard to society and in regard to government, is that they have seen things in bits and pieces instead of totals. They have very gradually become disturbed over permissiveness, pornography, the public schools, the breakdown of the family, and finally abortion. But they have not seen this as a totality – each thing being a part, a symptom, of a much larger problem. They have failed to see that all of this has come about due to a shift in worldview – that is, through a fundamental change in the overall way people think and view the world and life as a whole. This shift has been away from a world view that was at least vaguely Christian in people's memory (even if they were not individually Christian) toward something completely different – toward a world view based upon the idea that the final reality is impersonal matter or energy shaped into its present form by impersonal chance… These two world views stand in complete antithesis to each other in content and also in their natural results – including sociological and governmental results, and specifically including law. It is not that these two worldviews are different only in how they understand the nature of reality and existence. They also inevitably produce totally different results. The operative word here is inevitably. It is not just that they happen to bring forth different results, but it is absolutely inevitable that they will bring forth different results.

Schaeffer went on in the same opening chapter of the book to blame the advent of Christian Pietism in the 17th century for causing a split where none existed before. He depicts Pietism, which began as a “healthy protest against formalism and a too abstract Christianity” as culminating in the creation of a defective view of Christianity, one that set up a false antithesis between the “material” and the “spiritual”, giving little importance to the former. Thus, according to Schaeffer,

the totality of human existence was not afforded a proper place. In particular it neglected the intellectual dimension in the Christian life. Christianity and spirituality were shut up to a small, isolated part of life. The totality of reality was ignored by pietistic thinking.

Michael Horton adds,

Today, 'pietism' has become a shibboleth for an inward piety that ignores the world, except as a target for evangelism and mission.

It should immediately be said (as Schaeffer himself was at pains to point out) that,

in one sense Christians should be pietists in that Christianity is not just a set of doctrines, even the right doctrines. But the poor side of Pietism and its resulting platonic outlook has really been a tragedy not only in many people's individual lives, but in our total culture. True spirituality covers all of reality.

Once again, he brings us back to the clash between the Christian vs. Humanist worldview: the same issue (we earlier noted) that Edward Norman identified when he observed that,

Christianity and modern materialist Humanism ought to be at war with each other, and they are not.

The modern church, including the evangelical church, has all but lost its “total” Christian worldview. Schaeffer understood this. We need to understand it too. What I am saying here is that this is the natural corollary of failing to hold fast to a confessional pattern of biblical belief which governs the whole (or at least, large parts) of the church in any generation.

Every so often, voices call for Christians to “take on” the secular authorities on issues such areas as the parent's right to discipline children, the right not to work on a Sunday, abortion, human genetic research, schools teaching the evolution faith, lately gay marriage, and so on. As a result, from time to time, various pragmatic or short-term “ecumenical unities” are forged to bolster the church's position on this and that. But such unities cannot last because of powerful, underlying theological differences. Only rarely are Bible-believing Christians so galvanized to act in unison, in communal sword-rattling action. Would it not be far better if the church were “one”? Already agreed upon most, if not all, of its biblical mandate? A church which was already pulling in the right direction and well able to respond with a powerful voice, if not in worldly power? But the reality today simply is this: that which calls itself “biblical” is often less than biblical in practice, nor does it even have an expressed biblical pattern of belief upon which it rests and by which it addresses the world. Nor is there the will among its leaders to court controversy and persecution by speaking out publicly on key issues; nor for cleaning up our churches by exposing the false teachings and-false teachers currently sheltering within it. Schaeffer's “accommodation” to error and the consequent rise of a new, non-biblical, superspirituality, are all too plainly the reality in today's church, including the evangelical church.

Strangely, when the church has on rare occasions attempted to speak with a single voice, even the civil authorities are forced to listen. The only House of Commons defeat inflicted on Margaret Thatcher's powerful 1980s administration in the UK was (amazingly) not engineered by powerful business lobbies, but by the Lord's Day Observance Society (LDOS) over various proposals for repealing Sunday trading legislation. The LDOS, against all the odds, succeeded in orchestrating a defeat upon a Government at its most powerful. It is doubtful today that such a schismatic, disparate evangelical church could again muster anything like the vocal support it did then; support that frightened the legislative powers into doing the right thing.

A power revealed in terms of numbers and pragmatism is one thing. A power revealed in terms of a confessing church, holding in common its apostolic form of doctrine and the Christian worldview derived from it – rejecting all others – may yet recover its own soul. It will require a reawakening to the duty each of us has to the church and, above all, to the manner by which we worship our God through it.

Nothing matters more than the twin holy priorities of faithfulness and obedience. In this all of us have a role to play.

If we are not worshiping our God as He has ordained and playing our collective part in the new society that He formed, as well as our part out in the world He made, then all is mere spiritual flummery. A church and people reformed and re-envisioned, speaking in a biblical, confessional “oneness”, by the power of the living God, what could it not achieve in the 21st century world? I hope that, for all the hard things I have had to say here about the modern church (and there is always a need for us to re-assess ourselves spiritually), that this overriding and positive message, is that which is heard. If we are familiar with Schaeffer's fine work and prophetic biblical thinking and work it is, after all, ultimately, no more and no less than he himself said and warned. It is just that his warning has been, largely, forgotten. I hope this work may provoke some to go back and examine his invaluable thinking once more. He knew it well, but there is a glory in Christianity that can be found nowhere else in life. It touches on everything, it has something to say about everything. A lost world needs to hear what the Bible has to say it; for it carries the voice, instruction and guidance of our Maker. And it is the church alone which can speak it and 'tell it like it is'.

If Christianity is true, it touches all life, and it is a radical voice in the modern world.Francis Schaeffer, from A Christian Manifesto