“Through modern invention and outright apathy, our present Western world has grown more and more passive. We have developed a TV-obsessed, entertainment-prone, and spectator-minded generation which seems to be largely content to watch life rather than live it” (Wilson, p. 136).
This is not only an apt description of American cultural life, but of the American Christian church, as well, which, sadly, has, to a large degree, become a mirror image of the surrounding secular culture. The typical church service in the First American Church, in Anytown, America has become a spectator sport with chairs (or pews) arranged theater-style facing a stage where often paid professional performers titillate emotions and the tickle ears of their fans for an hour or two on Sunday morning.
The churchgoers, on having received their weekly dose or fix of religio-entertainment return afterwards to their secular prayerless, biblically illiterate and evangelizingless lives to exist, by in large, as spiritual “couch potatoes.”
