The Cycle of New and Exciting Ideas

Sometimes I feel it’s no use writing anything new, because everything good has already been said and just has to be read again. Take this quote from Preaching & Preachers

by Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones:

One of the advantages of being old is that you have experience, so when something new comes up, and you see people getting very excited about it, you happen to be in the position of remembering a similar excitement perhaps forty years ago. And so one has seen fashions and vogues and stunts coming one after another in the Church. Each one creates great excitement and enthusiasm and is loudly advertised as the thing that’s going to fill the churches, the thing that is going to solve the problem. They have said that about every single one of them. But in a few years they have forgotten all about it, and another stunt comes along, or another new idea; somebody has hit upon the one thing needful…Here is the thing, and everyone rushes after it; but soon it wanes and disappears and something else takes its place.

This is, surely, a very sad and regrettable state for the Christian Church to be in, that like the world she should exhibit these constant changes of fashion. In that state she lacks the stability and the continuing message that has ever been the glory of the Christian Church.

I’m not quite old enough to see this forty-year cycle, but maybe the cycle is shorter these days. Otherwise, I think he has us nailed.