Fortress Mentality

The church in America has been put in a cage by its acceptance of the dichotomy, the view that reality is split into two spheres of sacred and secular. This is a cage of our own making. Like Michael Goheen writes, "The barred cage that forms the prison for the gospel in contemporary western culture is [the Church's] accommodation... to the fact-value dichotomy" (quoted by Nancy Pearcey in Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity).

The fact of the matter is that we like it this way. It provides us with an illusion of safety. One way it does this, I believe, is that the dichotomy is one of the primary reasons (but not the only reason) that the persecution of the Christian Church isn't as severe in western society as it is in other parts of the world. Another way is that it convinces us that we are effectively combating worldliness.

The dichotomy has provided the opportunity for the Christian Church to grow in a relatively hostile environment without much interference. But this has come at a cost, a cost to the Gospel. The Gospel has been severely sidelined and thought irrelevant by our society. The church adds converts to its numbers but its influence in the culture continues to dwindle. The Gospel has no impact on our society because it has been put in a cage and the church is responsible for putting it there.

I call this the fortress mentality. The fortress mentality is the primary way in which the evangelical church in America has accommodated the world spirit and compromised the gospel. In John 17:13-19 Jesus prayed that his church would be in the world but not of it. Unfortunately, we are all to often of the world but not in it.

I want to give you four characteristics of the fortress mentality. I borrowed these points from a lecture given by Professor Jerram Barrs at Covenant Theological Seminary on the culture wars and adapted them for my purposes (I highly recommend you read the transcript of this lecture or download the mp3 audio). Any inconsistencies or errors in relating his points to my topic that you may find are all mine and not those of Professor Barrs.

The church's accommodation of the dichotomy has created a fortress mentality in the church that has these four resulting characteristics:

1. We are afraid and intimidated by the culture.


2. We condemn the world around us.


3. We retreat from the world into the haven of the church.


4. We personally separate from unbelievers to keep ourselves pure.
   

You may look at those things and say "I am concerned about the culture and that seems like the right coarse of action. It looks like the safest way to act." This is an illusion and it will not work. It actually works against the gospel. Let me give you five reasons why this is so.

First, even though it may look like we are keeping ourselves protected from worldliness, in reality the fortress mentality is a deceptive form of worldliness. We are buying into a worse form of corruption then what we thought we were trying to avoid.

Second, the church ends up being cut off and vulnerable like the German forces after the D-Day invasion. The Germans retreated into different towns and villages and fortified their positions, ready for a siege. The siege never came. The Allies were instructed to bypass those positions. They were happy to leave the Germans sitting in their fortresses untouched. Within three months most of these Germans had surrendered. Why? Because they were cut off and vulnerable. The Allies controlled the landscape.

When the church has a fortress mentality it retreats from the culture and gives up control of the cultural landscape to the enemy. We may feel safe inside our fortress because there is no persecution but the world knows it doesn't have to lay siege to us. All they have to do is keep us in the fortress so that we become more and more irrelevant and soon we will just give up. The World likes it when we stay in our fortress. They have the run of the place without our interference.

Third, we start looking at everything outside the walls of our "sacred fortress" as hostile and evil. We become afraid of the world seeing everything in it as something to avoid because of how it might potentially corrupt us. The problem with this is that we will end up being disobedient to passages such as 1 Timothy 4:4-5 and reject God's good creation.

Forth, evangelism becomes a raid into enemy territory where we try to take captives back to the safety of our fortress. The non-believer is looked at as the enemy. We very rarely know any non-believers personally and we pride ourselves on this fact. This sort of view limits evangelism to methods like door-to-door, street preaching, and other confrontational styles of sharing the gospel.

Fifth, our view of ministry and spirituality suffers from the dichotomy. Sacred/secular as it is viewed in relation to the ministry is clergy/laity. We are told from good preachers that all believers are in the ministry. Unfortunately, this is nothing but lip service. We don't know how to be involved in the ministry and we have never been told. The only thing we have come up with is to support our minister's ministry by throwing money at it. The reason this is is because we see the ministry as something that the pastor or the missionary does. The ministry belongs to the sphere of the clergy and we as laity can only be involved in a supportive role.

The sacred/secular split also affects our spirituality. Since in this view the sacred is the sphere of the spiritual and the secular is the sphere of the worldly and profane, we try to limit ourselves to the sphere of the sacred as much as possible. Whenever we are involved in the secular sphere we look at it as something we can't avoid and have to put up with; we see it as something of no value and we are counting the minutes until we can get back to the sphere that really matters. We desire to escape the mundane. If the spiritual resides in the sacred sphere then let us escape from the secular totally.

This view of spirituality has two outcomes: legalism and charismatic ecstaticism. Legalism is rampant and the charismatic movement is one of the fastest growing areas in the American church today. The fortress mentality is the fuel that feeds this fire.

The fortress mentality has many destructive effects. We as the church need to abandon this worldly perspective and correct our vision with the Scriptures. The fortress mentality is no protection that we can trust. I know of only one fortress that we can take refuge in, this is not it.

A mighty fortress is our GOD!