1928

Passing one of our big churches today I ran across this significant slogan, calculated to impress the passing wayfarer: “We Will Go Out of Business. When? When Every Man in Detroit Has Been Won to Christ.” Of course it is just a slogan and not to be taken too seriously, but the whole weakness of Protestantism is in it. Here we are living in a complex world in which thousands who have been “won to Christ” haven’t the slightest notion how to live a happy life or how to live together with other people without making each other miserable.

Yet the church goes about the business of winning people to Christ—that is, pulling them through some kind of emotional or social experience in which they are made to commit themselves, or in which they really do commit themselves, to the good life as it is symbolized in Christ, and imagining that this is the end of the task. I do not say that such commitments do not have their value. But surely one must be very blind to live under the illusion that the desire or even the will to live a Christ-life is automatically fulfilled in present-day society or in any society.

The church which conceived that slogan is really better than the silly advertisement might lead one to suppose. I think people receive some light and leading there. Nevertheless, most of its energies go into the business of “winning others.” The saddest part about these highly evangelistic churches who put everything into the recruiting task is that they generally tempt those who are already “won” to imagine themselves perfect, or at least “saved.” I know one lawyer in that church, and not a bad man either, who needs to be “won” to several ideas in the gospel of Christ about which he hasn’t the faintest glimmer of light. But he is too sure of himself to get a new idea.