No man can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one, and love the other: or he will sustain the one, and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon. – Matthew 6:24 

The words of Christ say it plainly enough. We cannot serve two masters. We have to choose between God and mammon. We must be moved by the Heilige Geist or the Zeitgeist; the Holy Spirit or the Spirit of the Age. We must build our faith on the Rock of Ages or follow the fads and fashions of our own time. In the language of the theologians we must remain orthodox or succumb to modernism. What is clear, as Christ says clearly, is that we cannot serve both masters. 

This timeless truth can be seen in the implosion of those Christian denominations who have sought to follow the fads and fashions of the world, in the vain belief that this would make their faith “relevant”. In fact, as these shrivelling denominations prove, the best way of ensuring that a denomination becomes irrelevant tomorrow is to try to be “relevant” today.

The Anglican church abandoned any pretense of orthodoxy in order to move with the times, and has become, in consequence, a shrivelled shadow of its former self. Now, as new figures show, the Presbyterian Church of the USA, having embraced all the fads and fashions of our own deplorable epoch is collapsing in dramatic fashion. As this report shows, the PCUSA has shrunk by almost 7 per cent in only twelve months: http://www.christianpost.com/news/pcusa-decline-in-churches-members-continued-in-2013-120725/ 

Having embraced the “relevance” of feminism and homosexualism, the Presbyterians have made themselves utterly irrelevant and have doomed themselves to oblivion.

Make no mistake about it, the same fate awaits any church that surrenders to the Zeitgeist. We cannot serve two masters. We cannot serve God and mammon, nor can we serve God and Sodom. 

The way of the world leads to the gates of hell, which will prevail against any of the false churches who choose the world’s ways over God’s. By contrast, the gates of hell will never prevail against the True Church that Christ Himself founded because Christ Himself said so. 

As Chesterton reminds us, we do not want a Church that will move with the world but a Church that will move the world.