Visions of Success and Prosperity

Heard on the October 23, 2009 Issues, Etc. segment on "The Reformation Today" with Dr. Laurence White, Pastor of Our Savior Lutheran Church in Houston:

We have allowed ourselves to be lured into visions of success and prosperity and institutional growth and bucks and bodies and so forth. Instead of recognizing that all these things are trivial and irrelevant in the eyes of God, what’s essential here is the faithful proclamation of the Gospel and the message of salvation, that it alone can convey. And we need to recognize once again that that message, and that faithfulness to Bible truth that it entails, has never been, and cannot be, popular in the world or acceptable to the world. And we’ve got to be ready, and eager, to face the challenge of making that unpopular presentation, and the scorn and the rejection that will go with it, because whenever the Church and the world manage to co-exist comfortably, it’s not because the world has become Christian, it’s because the Church has become worldly. And that’s what has happened to Christendom in America today, and even, most tragically and ironically, to Lutheranism in America today.