Remember Christian singer/songwriter Keith Green? Here’s a line from the song How Can They Live Without Jesus: “…he’s not just a religion/With steeples and bells/Or a salesman who will sell you/The things you just want to hear..”That first line in particular. It was clear that Green – born in 1953 – had that Boomer suspicion of all things structured about the faith. For him, sincerity lay in a lack of structure.

The more structure the less real. The less real the less likely to be how Jesus would have done it. By stating that Jesus is not “just” a religion with the familiar markings of a church building, and the calls to worship that bells ensued, he was seeking to distance the gospel from the conservative formalism that so many Boomers had rejected in the culture, not just in church. Green gave tens of thousands of his albums away for free, and refused to charge for his concerts. He practiced what he preached.

Note an irony about those two lines I just quoted.The rejection and removal of the former was often accompanied by the uncritical adoption of the latter. Enter the “seeker sensitive movement” in the church. How did this play out? Blogger and pastor Stephen McAlpine joined us to explain.

https://stephenmcalpine.com/keith-green-bill-hybels-and-the-loss-of-steeples-and-bells/