I began to be troubled a few years ago when I was leading a study on evangelism, and we naturally delved off into a discussion on the cosmological argument as a potential response to certain objections raised about the Christian faith. What was most troubling to me was to sit facing a room full of people who claimed to love Jesus and claimed to love these unbelieving friends of theirs, but grew quickly bored when presented with evidence and sound logical argumentation that could actually persuade their friends to become Christians.

"It's too much to think about."

"It's kind of complicated."

"Let's talk about something else..."

William Lane Craig has an apt comment to make about the future of evangelicalism when Christians are more interested in the pictures inside the books then the actual arguments themselves. I found this comment to be quite insightful:

"Our churches are unfortunately overly populated with people whose minds, as Christians, are going to waste... Despite their Christian commitment, they remain largely empty selves. What is an empty self? An empty self is a person who is passive, sensate, busy and hurried, incapable of developing an interior life. Such a person is inordinately individualistic, infantile and narcissistic. 

Imagine now a church filled with such people. What will be the theological understanding, the evangelistic courage, the cultural penetration of such a church? If the interior life does not really matter all that much, why should one spend time trying to develop an intellectual, spiritually mature life? If someone is basically passive, he will just not make the effort to read, preferring instead to be entertained. Such individuals will find themselves consuming more television and other forms of entertainment. If a person is sensate in orientation, then music, magazines filled with pictures, and visual media in general will be more important than mere words on a page or abstract thought. If one is hurried and distracted by the business of life, one will have little patience for theoretical knowledge and too short an attention span to stay with an idea while it is being carefully developed. And if someone is overly individualistic, infantile, and narcissistic, what will that person read, if he reads at all? Books about christian celebrities, Christian romance novels imitating the worst that the world has to offer, Christian self-help books filled with slogans, simplistic moralizing, lots of stories with pictures, and inadequate diagnoses of the problems facing the reader. What will not be read are books that equip people to develop a well-reasoned, theological understanding of the Christian faith and to assume their role in the broader work of the Kingdom of God."

From Page 5, Introduction, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview by William Lane Craig