The failure of Protestantism

Peter Sellick (always a challenging and insightful writer) asks why Protestant churches insist on upholding the divisions created in the wake of the sixteenth-century Reformation when most of the reasons for their separation from the Catholic Church have disappeared.

My immediate response in reading this question was one word: individualism. Sellick agrees, but adds considerably more. Here's a sample:

The fragmentation of Protestant denominations has produced a spiritual marketplace in which churches compete for believers and in which believers may choose which suits them best. The balance has thus swung from God addressing us to ourselves choosing which denomination best satisfies our needs. Because self assertion is the essence of Enlightenment thinking we experience no anomaly in this.

Not only does this situation throw the emphasis onto the believer it also distorts the life of the church that now looks to its own survival. The Holy Spirit is replaced by the techniques of the church growth movement and those nauseating signs that we find in the front of Protestant churches. The capitulation to modernism has become the capitulation to market forces and the biblical notion that the church is a charismatic body is obscured....

Online Opinion 7 Dec 2007