Jesus Cropped from the Picture

Jesus Cropped from the Picture

during this period (see Appendix 5, “The Splintering of Western Protestantism”).

Undermining The Local Church During the 1950s, as the Traditional Method was forming, parachurch institutions were created to strengthen the Church. But by the 1970s and 1980s, the same organizations that had once supported local churches began to unintentionally undermine the local church. For example, student-led campus ministries joined in the attempt to simplify the gospel for mass appeal, especially to intellectual college students. During the early 1980s, I was as a leader of two such groups, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. My co-laborers and I pursued new ways to share the gospel and disciple new believers. Our goal was to bring as many as possible to personal faith in Christ, as quickly as possible. Since we did not fully understand the biblical teaching that the Church was Jesus’ agent of the Kingdom, we offered faith separated from Church and made local church attendance optional . Many of us taught that the campus ministry could be the believer’s source of individual feeding and fellowship. Therefore, believers were free to attend a local church if it met their needs and schedule, but as long as they were being fed and growing in Christ, they did not need a local church to live a Christian life.

Because we viewed churches as alternative “feeding” providers, it was not an exaggeration to say that we thought the First Presbyterian Church was to Burger King as InterVarsity was to McDonalds. By the

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