David Wells, On the ‘Unworldiness’ of the Church

“Churches that want to influence their culture are so often tempted to think that to be effective they must hide their otherworldliness and become slickly this-worldly. They think they must identity with their culture as if there were no impediments to doing that. They imagine that their chief tool, if not their only tool, of influence is friendship with the world. Churches that actually do influence the culture – here is the paradox – are those that distance themselves from it in their internal life. They do not offer what can already be had on secular terms in their culture. They are an alternative to it. They stand outside of its life. They stand over against it in their preoccupations, because their preoccupations are with the God of their salvation who in his holiness and grace is completely unlike anything we find in life. In life we find preoccupations that are thoroughly this-worldly. The preoccupations we should find in the church arise from the knowledge of God in Christ and from his written Word. Because of this, they are necessarily ‘otherworldly.” (David Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant)