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Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Church

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Every person who is thinking through issues of Church and culture needs to read this book. Between doing nothing in culture and fighting unwinnable culture wars, Merrill finds a middle ground, a third way.
Especially helpful to me was the section on the mythical "good old days." Those who believe in the notion that America was once a "Christian Nation" and solving our problems means getting back to that place would do well to read this short, challenging, highly engaging book.

In this book, Merrill presents an overview of today's culture and points out effective and ineffective methods of influencing the people of today. He does an excellent job of assessing the wrong Christian responses while at the same time giving the correct way to respond. He points out that Christians usually are apathetic, anxious, or angry when dealing with today's problems when they should really be gently defending their faith. He then gives some excellent suggestions for Christian responses, such as praying for our government, censuring, attaching negative stigmas to sinful practices, and calmly sharing the hope that they have. Merrill is very reassuring in that he reminds us that God can work just as powerfully now as he did long ago, even though we may disagree with his timing. Overall, this book gives a clear, concise direction for defending the Bible and for witnessing to others in this sinful world.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Church is a must read for Christians who struggle to relate to a culture that has lost respect for their faith. This book debunks the long-accepted myth that God's followers are supposed to be angry at sinners. The title is a play on words from a popular 18th century sermon by Jonathan Edwards in which he vividly describes God's impending wrath on sinners. The author openly questions whether a scorched-earth policy towards the unconverted is really God's plan for catching their attention. He details how most Christians react to societal decay [with anxiousness, anger, or apathy] while giving an alternative to the shrill rhetoric that is often expressed. Merrill chronicles how 1st century believers reacted to their culture and explains how their reaction can benefit Christians who want to find a better way to influence their culture without alienating its followers. The final chapter, along with a "to-do list" for Christians, challenges those who claim to follow Christ to stop blaming their culture and start relating to it.

I have read a few books in this category of social decline and the role of the church today in light of history. This book is defintely my favorite in this category and one of my all-time favorites. Merrill uses specific examples from history to show that the 'Good 'Ol Days' are largely a myth. Enacting more laws will not change hearts and neither will painting our Bibles red-white and blue (metaphorically) by trying to Americanize the gospel with revisionist history. Of course we have problems today...There have been problems ever since the Fall. Unbeleivers still act like unbeleivers. Why are we surprised? Some Christians act like unbelievers - that should surprise us.

Merrill is always reverent and uses our Lord as the prototype He's meant to be. This book reminds Christians to really be salt and light with practical ideas that sometimes call for sacrifice and always require reflection. We are meant to be much more than moralizing custodians of the culture. We are to transform it with love, involvement and yes, with standards of behavior - that we apply first to ourselves - just like Jesus did. Merrill is on target to tell the Church that romanticizing the past is just a distraction keeping us from really engaging the culture by "speaking the truth in love." I love this book - we can be conservative and not be mad about it.

Some earlier reviews of this work by Dean Merrill actually miss the point. It is not a call to be more docile, or even should be used by "humanists," but, in fact, it is a rallying call to help Christians understand their historical and biblical call to their culture.

Dean Merrill speaks with authority. He spent 32 years in the Christian media, and the focus of this book is, "...about living out our convictions in a Christ-like manner instead of bullying our way into the system like any other loud and selfish government lobby."

He uses biblical history - prophets such as Jonah and Elijah to make his point, as well as Ahab and Jezebel as analogies. He states that a "culture war" model has limitations, and head-on confrontations are external and do not make the opponents want to change. He writes that you cannot shout people into holiness. Then he points to the early church -

"Whatever early believers thought and did about Caligula's disgraceful antics, it wasn't considered significant enough to make it into Luke's history. What was the early Christian reacion to Nero? What was their view of an immature, immoral, ruthless megalomaniac at the head of their government? Paul said that 'prayers and thanksgiving be given for...kings and all those in authority.'"

"Christians are engaged in titanic struggles," he writes, and it is primarily against flesh and blood. The enemies have names, phone numbers, faxes, and photos. But the Apostle Paul and other apostles seem to stand quietly by, wishing we would realize that the Christians' real enemies are Satan and his minions.

Merrill writes that frontal resistance to evil regimes does not always win the day, and that the view of the 1st century church was to trust in the All Powerful One. The Christ-Following Minority has no choice but to understand the present reality - "there is no moral majority," and he points to some interesting facts, that in the 1760's, 1 out of 3 babies were conceived out of wedlock, and pre-marital sex was alive and booming.

In his analysis, he points out four reactions to minority status that Christians exhibit - Anxiousness, apathy, anger, and apologetics. He states that the more we sidetrack ourselves with doing the job we prefer, trying to get non-Christian neighbors and acquaintances to act Christianly without the divine life of Christ inside, the more time and energy we waste. And he provides examples - biblical examples - such as Daniel, Esther, young Jesus, and the early church and New Testament leaders.

This is compelling reading, and a little later in the book, he points out that the Founding Fathers of our country gave very little official favor or protection to Christianity. They set religion on its own in a free society to make its own mark, win its own converts, and pay its own bills.

He writes, "Our society is a post-Christian one, and has been for more than 300 years - circa 1684. The King of England finally revoked the Massachusetts Bay Colony Charter and installed his own governor and opened up voting to every land owner (white male, that is), whether they were Congregationalist, Anglican, Quaker, Jew, or even infidel. This meant the end of 'The Righteous Empire' for the Puritan leaders for the preceding 64 years, and it was partly their fault, because they'd already given up on of their core values back in 1657 with the adoption of 'Halfway Covenant' - people could join the church without a personal confession of faith."

Merrill then quotes Richard J. Mouw, who states "I am wary of efforts to establish Laws whose primary purpose is to force non-Christians to conform to Christian sexual norms," and I wholeheartedly agree with him.

As the book comes to an end, Dean Merrill has chapters dealing with the news media, and What Does the Lord Require, as well as How to truly change a culture, and he lists these five things:

-Calm Down;
-Major on the Majors;
-Appreciate the difference between Statute and Stigma;
-Keeping Looking for Allies;
-Be prepared to Lose, because sometimes even then you can win.

This is a provocative book, intended for those who Think and wish to apply the ideas within. Not everyone will agree with some of his premises. There are those in the Christian community, I am sad to say, who really want to shove the Truth down the throats of those who disagree with them, as well as try to take over the power bases of government, society, culture, and the church. We need to be wary of these, no matter what they call themselves, or even the rhetoric they espouse, even if it is politically, theologically, militarily, or culturally correct. Fascism has a friendly face in the beginning, until most of the freedoms of a land are gone. We'd best beware.

A great book. Read it and think. If it makes sense, lend to a friend, and keep it going. We might yet save the church from the church, and help it to be "pure and holy in the sight of God."

This book was recommended at a biblical counseling training conference as suppport for the outreach ministries of the church sponsoring the conference. It was a welcome relief from the constant push by so many Christians today that we have to return to our "Christian Nation" past in order to stem the tide of moral decay in our society.

Merrill points out that there has always been sin and immorality and that the solution is not an angry denuciation of the culture by the church or the effort to change the culture through social or policial activism. He spends most of the book showing how the idea that returning to the "good old days" will not work nor is it even reality. He then offers the solution: the gospel and the planting of churches. It was good to see that he didn't just criticize the wrong approach but gave a clear biblical alternative.

I highly recommend this book to the person who finds themselve frequently angry and frustrated at the condition of our society and is tempted to, or frequently finds themselves lashing out verbally at it and the people in it, or gets sidtracked by boycotts and protests. As Merrill says, you can never shout people into holiness.

I have odered a number of copies to give to people in my congregation.
I also ordered his more recent book, Damage Control, How To Stop Giving Jesus a Bad Name and am looking forward to reading it. If it is as good as this one it will also be one to pass out to my congregation.

Sinnners in the Hands of an Angry Church is a must read for Christians who struggle to relate to a culture that has lost respect for their faith. This book debunks the long-accepted myth that God's followers are supposed to be angry at sinners. The title is a play on words from a popular 18th century sermon by Jonathan Edwards in which he vividly describes God's impending wrath on sinners. The author openly questions whether a scorched-earth policy towards the unconverted is really God's plan for catching their attention. He details how most Christians react to societal decay [with anxiousness, anger, or apathy] while giving an alternative to the shrill rhetoric that is often expressed. Merrill chronicles how 1st century believers reacted to their culture and explains how their reaction can benefit Christians who want to find a better way to influence their culture without alienating its followers. The final chapter, along with a "to-do list" for Christians, challenges those who claim to follow Christ to stop blaming their culture and start relating to it.

This book is fantastic! It addresses both the current ineffectiveness of the 'angry church' and how we as Christians can affect this society by trusting God to be God.

For every Christian believer who is excessively angry at the evil in the world, there are at least 10,000 who are excessively docile towards the same. There are many times when our Lord and the Apostles were very angry at evil. This book encourages Christians to be even more docile than they already are. So this book is a service to the humanists, even though the author surely did not intend it this way. Christians should be much more angry than they currently are about such things as baby killing (abortion), the growing war against public Christian expression, etc. It is also fallacious to state that the only way to change society is to change human hearts. God instituted a system of civil and religious laws to regulate human conduct, without waiting for changed hearts. For instance, we did not wait until all hearts changed in order to see headhunting die out. We simply outlawed headhunting. So it goes for such evils such as abortion and the abolition of God from the public schools.