The American Dream – an Appropriate Model for the Church?
ISBN: 978-0-9556435-9-0
£7.95 (+ £1.50 P&P, 1st Class in UK)
Tony Mann
About the Book
At its heart the book challenges the fact that the world and, by implication, the Church is being influenced and indeed dominated by everything American. This might not be an issue if everything American were benign. However, American culture and American values now permeate everything and the Church is no exception. As the body of Christ has moved more and more to accommodate and live as part of the world so it has imbibed American values and American ways. This book will examine this and ask
whether this is healthy or perilous for the
church.
This book seeks to challenge the Church about the way it functions, the way it lives out its calling, the way it is church. It seeks to explore where the threat comes from and why we are in such a predicament. It may be blatantly anti-American but this is because America has such a dominant role in the world and exports her values and beliefs without questioning their validity, appropriateness or their foundation in biblical terms. For a nation that prides itself on being ‘Christian’ and ‘God fearing’ what it exports has to be examined because Americans believe wholeheartedly in what they are doing and see no fault in their values and approach.
As I have been writing I have come across more and more information which supports it and re-inforces the message at the heart of this book. It is in part prophetic - designed to warn us about the future and to prepare us. The Apostle Paul warns the church that ‘in the last days even the very elect will be deceived’. This means that Christians, believers, people who worship God will be led astray and will follow false trails and find their faith shipwrecked.
This is serious. We live in perilous times. Post-modern society has no time for God and yet indulges in all kinds of spiritualism and at the same time the Church itself is being deceived. When it should be on its guard and wide-awake to heresy it is in fact asleep. The night watchmen have left their posts and the enemy has entered the city.
The Church is being led astray; it is trying to be like the world, trying to imitate secular society in order to appeal to people. Yet God warned the Israelites to be separate and to follow God’s ways. In the New Testament the message is the same, we are to be in the world but not part of it. We are to live our lives as if our home was in heaven.
About the Author
Tony Mann became a Christian in his early 20s. His conversion followed several years of being agnostic and then searching for this person called ‘God’. His early church life was spent in the Pentecostal church and then he was posted to Germany with the RAF. He joined the Officers Christian Union and met many fine Christians. He also had his first exposure to a fundamentalist ‘gospel’ which was rigid and unforgiving.
His first experience of the charismatic renewal which had a deep impact on his view of church was through the Dales Bible Week conventions. When he saw the conflict between this new ‘movement’ and his basic Bible teaching Tony and his wife began to challenge the post-modern concepts of church. This led him to question much of what he saw and heard and to challenge the underpinning philosophy of the house church movement. For a short time he later became an elder in a Pentecostal Church but essentially is he is now one of the many who are ‘unchurched’. He has many Christian friends and he keeps abreast of the post-modern activities in the mega churches which have influenced his views on the way the church has sought the American Dream.
