By the middle of the 1960s, America’s churches had settled into a weary stillness. The evangelical, fundamentalist, full-gospel, and holiness people had long mocked the “Mainline” churches for compromise, yet they themselves were perishing from a different version of the same disease: a cramped and shortsighted vision of the Kingdom of God on earth. Convinced we were more spiritually precise, we treated difference as defection and change as heresy. We clothed holiness in an outfit, mistaking the cut of a jacket and the fall of a hem for the contour of a sanctified life. We made standards of appearance into sacraments, though they were as misleading as they were outdated. So when the Jesus Movement came shambling in with its barefoot prophets, its bearded oddballs, its holy fools and flower-children, many resisted them as one might resist a fever dream. Yet when it became clear that these wild new bodies might fill pews and swell ministries, resistance softened. And as God moved through the confusion, the respectable and the unruly, the civilians and the crazies, were melted down together into one bright and improbable river. For me, that was the glory of the Movement.

God does not change. His Word does not change. But religion, as men live it, is forever taking on the hue of the soil in which the Vine takes root. Christianity, in that sense, is chameleonic, reflecting the culture that surrounds it even while it claims allegiance to another country. So it is not change itself that I mourn, nor do I pine for some painted, mythical past. My concern is focus, because focus shapes reality. As a man thinks, so is he. Scripture speaks of this drift as the loss of a first love, that original blaze cooling to embers while the machinery of religion keeps clanking onward. And I cannot help but wonder whether my generation has not institutionalized that loss, content to customize religion rather than be consumed by it. Others before us voiced the same grief, yes, but the cultural force of the Jesus Movement, that Spirit-filled tide of Baby Boom idealism and rebellion, seems to have fused those old complaints into something sturdier, something normalized, something perilously close to permanent.

Even the exquisite agony of preaching has nearly vanished from among us. The Jesus Movement brought with it a flood of untaught extroverts, each one brimming with opinions hot enough to set the furniture on fire, and the Church, quite naturally, felt obliged to fold them into the Body Proper. Teaching became the great necessity, and then, little by little, the ruling affection. Soon we were crowning Doctor So-and-So and Professor Such-and-Such, dressing the platform with credentials while the raw, inconvenient, prophetic voice began to fade. There are no Billy Sundays now, no young Oral Robertses, no Billy Grahams shaking the rafters and men’s consciences with them. Perhaps history will judge that as an improvement. I do not think so. In our effort to become gracious, palatable, and politically correct, in our determination never to bruise a feeling or offend a preference, we have lost our appetite for candor. We hippies were spoiled, after all. If we did not get our way, we scorched something, smashed something, sneered at whatever boundary stood in the path of our agenda. And that American spirit of entitlement followed us into the sanctuary. It remains with us still. We do not want our lives examined too closely. Teachers explain. Preachers wound and heal.

And somewhere along the way, we traded the anointing for entertainment. Ours was a generation raised on rock stars and revolution, on Woodstock and Attica, on noise, spectacle, and upheaval. We entered the churches of America already convinced of what good music ought to sound like and what effective ministry ought to look like. In a strange reversal, we evangelized the Church, and the Church, seeing growth in the new sound and swagger, allowed itself to be converted. And when some congregations refused our preferences, we did what Protestants have always done best: we split off and formed our own congregations, our own communes, our own enclaves of purity and style. Yet in doing so, we gradually lost the outward thrust of the gospel. In too many places now, the burden is no longer to win the lost, but to improve the experience of the found. The mission is not the wandering soul but the installed believer, comfortably bathed in the glow of a quarter-million-dollar sound system. Yes, yes, I know these sound like old-man grievances, the kind every generation eventually mutters into its coffee. So be it. One day the young will say the same. Every generation imagines itself a bit more spiritually correct than the one coming after it. But this feels different, because the drift has hardened into system, into habit, into institution.

The anointing, in plain language, is grace made manifest. It is the holy oil of God upon the machinery of the soul, the unguent that quiets our grinding and turns our hearts toward Him. The anointing changes us. It does not merely stir us. Fine harmonies may lift the hair on the arm. A perfect modulation may raise gooseflesh. A polished production may sweep the room into a single emotional sigh. But none of that is the same thing. Much of contemporary worship, projected from glowing walls, has turned entire congregations into background singers for songs they do not know. The people on the platform appear radiant, carried along by their own delight, modeling the approved gestures of the hour. But where is the weight of God in it? Where is the anointing?

We have lost, too, our sense of urgency. And urgency is the pulse of evangelism. Once, the words of Christ — ready or not, I am coming — landed upon believing hearts like a trumpet in the dark. Now they scarcely seem to quicken the blood of those who claim to believe them most. Abraham pitched a tent and built an altar. What he made for himself was temporary; what he made for God was enduring. In the prosperity-cursed churches of America, we have reversed the order. We erect monuments for ourselves and offer God what remains. We have forgotten that we are pilgrims, merely passing through the land, and have instead set our minds on possessing it. Instant gratification, mated with class envy, has blunted our awareness of the eternal altogether. Souls still hang in the balance, but one would hardly know it from the things that excite us. We no longer compel them to come in. Indeed, many would struggle even to explain what that means. Yet whatever else it means, it certainly demands that we examine our focus, our priorities, and the hidden allegiance of our hearts. And now, half a century later, my generation — the Jesus People, the barefoot revivalists, the Spirit-drunk dissenters — stands in danger of becoming the very thing we once despised in Christ’s Kingdom.

Our objectives have been compromised. Politics and money were the chief instruments of change our generation understood, and so politics and money became the tools we trusted to advance the Kingdom of God. But those tools have bent the needle of our compass. If the billions of Christian dollars poured into television ministries, conservative political machines, and celebrity empires had instead been planted in the soil of local churches, in neighborhoods, on sidewalks, in kitchens and shelters and forgotten streets, the shape of this nation might be altogether different. We have outsourced obedience. We have farmed out our Biblical responsibilities to institutions with better lighting and larger mailing lists. The local church was meant to be two things at once: a barn for lambs and a barracks for soldiers. It is that second calling, the harder and less sentimental one, that my generation has steadily pushed aside.

And if I read the Christian Scriptures rightly, the earliest church was born not as a spectacle but as a shelter — a living answer to the needs of the poor, the broken, the overlooked, the ones most bruised by the machinery of empire. Yet I submit that the widows and orphans among us are scarcely being ministered to at all. The aged saints who can no longer make their way to services have drifted beyond the edge of our concern, as though distance had annulled our duty. It is a shame upon us. Why does my congregation exist? That is the question beneath all the others. For where our treasure lies, there too will be our heart, and dollars, unlike slogans, do not lie. What do our budgets preach? What do our buildings confess? We have created a monster, and now it consumes everything simply to keep itself alive, impressive, and well-lit.

When the surge of interest stirred by the Jesus Movement finally ebbed, local congregations began chasing anything that might mimic its electricity. The work of growing a church by winning the lost quietly slipped to second place, then third, then perhaps off the list entirely, displaced by whatever promised a fresh burst of excitement, a stronger emotional rush, a louder chorus of approval. The humble labor of each one reach one, each one teach one — slow, sacrificial, unglamorous — is no longer modeled with conviction or preached with force. It is far easier to trust the logic of spectacle: build it beautifully enough, polish it brightly enough, and surely they will come. But I cannot believe I am alone in sensing that something essential has been traded away. Our objectives have been compromised. Our vision has dimmed. Our mission has been left standing somewhere behind us, unattended and unfinished, while we busy ourselves with the maintenance of a kingdom of our own making.