Mark Gonnella is a Masters student at Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis. As a recent convert to the faith, he writes with a 'schoolboy' affinity for the Catholic faith. He is grateful to C.S. Lewis for showing him that high-churchmenship is 'rad,' and to Chesterton for reminding him that there are two ways to get home.
We have thus far seen (part 1, part 2, part 3) how Mr. Lyons’ vision for Christianity is not a centering vision but a centrifugal one. By removing Christ’s visible Church and replacing it with an amorphous one, Mr. Lyons’ ‘next Christians’ are not going toward the Promised Land but away from it. He has […]
Thus far, in evaluating Mr. Lyons’ ‘Next Christian’ vision (part 1, part 2) we have seen how his vision fails to include the Church that Christ established. His vision precludes the Mystical Body of Christ, and supplants it with ecclesiastical amateurism: a weakly-structured, free-floating Christianity that lives and dies on spontaneity. His low-churchmanship does not […]
Gabe Lyons has constructed a new vision for Christians, a vision that is sustained by the desire to restore God’s Kingdom on earth. However, as we have seen, his vision is not a complete vision, but rather it is a half-vision inflated and masquerading as a whole one. It is as if a man took a […]
There is much merit in Gabe Lyons’ book, The Next Christians: The Good News About the End of Christian America. In fact, in the second chapter of this book, Mr. Lyons offers his readers a lucid and accessible account of the cultural state wherein Christians find themselves today (23). Although he attributes the beginning of […]
