I have found some striking thoughts from a book that D A Carson co-authored almost 25 years ago. It’s a novel that consists of letters from an older pastor to a younger pastor. I was struck by the timeliness (and timelessness) of the following paragraphs. The movements he is referring to are the various American religious movements on the rise among Evangelicals at that time, like the health and wealth gospel, a return to high church, and the Vineyard movement. The “rapidly changing society” he speaks of is America in 1993, before the Internet really takes off... But there is another sense in which these movements are reaching out to people and giving them a sense of spiritual reality often missing in formally orthodox but rather dead churches. In no country in the English-speaking world are churches fuller and the sermons emptier than in America. Of course, there are magnificent exceptions. But I am not surprised by the flight from evangelical ortho...