The temptation arises for a church to change, or at least hide, who they are so that they appeal to unchurched Harry. Additionally, the church is tempted to alter its message to correspond with what Harry wants to hear and thinks he needs. The end result is a felt-need gospel that appeals to Harry’s fallen nature in an effort to entice him to come to Christ, the ultimate felt-need supplier, so that he is fulfilled and feels better about himself.

– Gary Gilley

While we do not affirm that everything modern is evil or that everything ancient was excellent, there is no doubt that the greater part of the boasted “progress” in Christendom of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a progress downward and not upward—away from God and not toward Him, into the darkness and not the light.

– Gary Gilley

The gospel is not about helping [un-churched] ‘Harry’ feel better about himself and his circumstances; it is about his rebelliousness against a holy God who will ultimately condemn him to Hell if he does not repent and trust in Christ for the forgiveness of his sins. The distinction between the market-driven approach and the biblical approach lies largely in understanding this fundamental difference.

– Gary Gilley

Give Christians the need-oriented pop-psychology that they had grown to love, . . . just alter it a bit with some verses and some references to Jesus–they would never catch on that what they were swallowing was not biblical Christianity at all, but an almost unrecognizable perversion. Whether this approach was calculated or naively taken matters little. The result is the same: a psychologized Christian community which no longer recognizes the difference between the teachings of the Bible and the teachings of Carl Rogers and no longer cares.

– Gary Gilley