Losing Our Virtue

David Wells is my current favorite b/c he confronts with kind, intelligent, insightful, and helpful language the problems facing the church today. In this volume he discusses how we have gone from the language of virtue (i,e, courage, perseverance, integrity, etc.) to values (fun, amazing, exciting, etc.) in the course of a century. This loss of a moral center has cost not only our culture but the church as we move away from a biblical way of seeing and interacting with our world. The church has become worldly and ineffective. How did we get to this place? How do we get out of it? How do we remain faithful to God and communicate to a world that has does not understand the vocabulary of redemption? Read this most helpful book to help you answer these and other questions raised by the loss of virtue?

This was my first exposure to David Wells, and I'm extremely impressed. His analysis of the cultural situation of our time is extremely perceptive, and his description of the consumer-driven church is very good - slices and dices. He certainly covers his bases in terms of research. This book could rightly be called a Jeremiad for our time, and I highly recommend it.

In his final volume of the three, Wells moves from diagnosis to prescription for healing. Here he admonishes the church to recover. Sum his advice up by this quotation: "Does the Church have the courage to become relevant by becoming biblical?" Great read; thorough and provoking.

Wells is right on with his analysis and diagnostics. While the postmodern, contemporary church will not particularly like his suggestion for change, certainly it has God's mark of approval. Wells sums it up on page 207: "The Church's problem today is simply that it does not believe that, without tinkering, the Gospel will be all that interesting to modern people." Let modern people do whatever, I'm with Wells and the Gospel.

This book is a great place to start looking at the issues raised today by post-modernism. An eye-opening read!