Convicting Quote

I'm reading a book (among several right now) titled The God Evaders: How Churches and Their Members Frustrate Genuine Religious Experience by Clyde Reid, a staff member of the national setting of the United Church of Christ. I was pointed to the book by a quote from it in Dallas Willard's book, The Divine Conspiracy. God Evaders is old (1966), but it good have been written this morning. Reid quotes a pastor of the time, John Heuss, and it has been ringing in my ears for the past few days:

The ordinary day-by-day life of the average successful [there were still a few successful ones back then] local parish makes a mockery out of it's world-influencing revolutionary claims.

It is customary for all of us to lay the blame for the public indifference to religion at the door of the secularism and materialism of our age. It is my personal opinion that neither of these does as much harm as does the constant parade of trivialities which the typical church program offers to the public. This program is only rarely related to the real issues which are clawing the soul of modern man to shreds. This program speaks with no commanding voice to the multitudes perishing for lack of certainty. This program gives the distinct impression that it is concerned exclusively with its own preservation.

What most parishes are habitually doing is so prosaic and so little related to anything except their own hand-to-mouth existence that the public cannot imagine in what way they can possibly influence the great affairs of the world. What the local church has become makes it impossible for the average American to take its life-shaking Gospel seriously. Its day-to-day triviality is its own worst enemy.