The Church Before The Watching World continues to expand on the concepts we explored in our spring class, but in greater depth and a broader subject base. Schaeffer had numerous works on the subject of the church, starting with his third work Death In The City. Yet in 1970-71 he published three significant works on the church: The Church At The End Of The Twentieth Century, The Mark Of A Christian, and The Church Before The Watching World. It is telling that in 1971 he also published his landmark work on spirituality, True Spirituality. There is no doubt that the connection between True Spirituality and Schaeffer's Ecclesiology is significant.
Schaeffer published his final work, The Great Evangelical Disaster, in 1984. What subject did he choose? His last message was to the church. Therein he indicates a dissatisfaction that the Biblical principles he had spent his entire life teaching had still gone largely unheeded by the church. With this study we seek to go back and look at what he was trying to communicate earlier on.
As with all of our classes, the desire is to encourage others to read Schaeffer's works for themselves and provide a means for others to pass the works of Schaeffer on to the next generation. Please keep us in your prayers as we further expand this mission.
