Guest Preacher: Simon Guillebaud

Bible Study

Sermon Outline

Sermon Application

“I was living in classic suburbia, and not liking it very much. The people who gathered to worship God under my leadership were rootless and cultureless. They were marginally Christian. They didn’t read books. They didn’t discuss ideas. All spirit seemed to have leaked out of their lives and been replaced by a garage-sale clutter of clichés and stereotypes, securities and fashions. Dostoevsky’s sentence hit the target: the ‘people seem to be watered down… darting and rushing about before us every day, but in a sort of diluted state’. No hard ideas to push against. No fiery spirit to excite. Soggy suburbia... I had no idea that an entire society could be shaped by the images of advertising. I had lived, it seems, a sheltered life. The experiments of Pavlov accounted for the condition of these people far better than anything in the four Gospels. They were conditioned to respond to the stimulus of a sale price, quite apart from need, as effectively as Pavlov’s dogs were trained to salivate at the bells’ signal, quite apart from hunger. These were the people for whom I was praying and for whom I was writing, these spirits who had taken early retirement, whose minds had been checked at the door. Suburbia-lobotomised spirituality.”