Through the centuries many a religious congregation has worshiped with its back to the future. Too often it seems easier to venerate a past revelation than face up to a present need.
When the need becomes overwhelming, however, the result is sometimes a wild scramble to adapt to the new situation and prepare for the threatened shock of further change. In such a scramble, revealed truth may be thrown out along with obstructive tradition—the essential be lost in the expedient, the spiritual in the psychological, the timeless in the merely current.
This is the situation faced by many of the Christian churches today. In the rush to make religion relevant, they have tended to find God irrelevant. Yet the initial impulse in their effort to modernize has been a good one—to bring religion down from the sky and focus it on the actual needs of men.
