Many people today like to talk about how great things USED to be. Even my little sister, who has a slight obsession with books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, continually wishes she could go back to being a pioneer on the prairie. Many people regularly do the same thing with the church, continually complaining that the church today should just get back to the way things used to be. After all, the early church had it right, didn’t they? WRONG! So many people seem to forget about all the epistles written after Acts. There Paul and Peter warn about selfishness, pride, sexual immorality and a host of other sins. Even Peter, the “Rock” of the church was confronted by Paul for favoring the Jews over the Gentiles.

Marc Cortez, a professor at Western Seminary in Portland, OR has written a wonderful blog about this very issue, titled “There Was No Golden Age”. You can read his personal blog here. Ultimately, when we look at Church history, there has never been a “golden” time where the church was as “good as it’s gonna get”. This is similar to a post I wrote a couple weeks ago on Propaganda asking why do Pastors continually quote the Puritans when they owned slaves? As I said there, I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water, every generation has certain sins they’re blind to, even our generation today will eventually be critiqued for the areas we fell short in.

One of the best lines from Marc’s blog is when he says, “I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Our Age isn’t as bad as we think it is. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying this generation is perfect, or even great. It’s not hard to look around and see all the problems and challenges we face. But, as we’ve seen, that’s been true of every generation.” What areas do you see us being blind to right now? What areas are we doing well that previous generations didn’t do as well?

(HT: Challies)