Worldliness in the Church

Charles Spurgeon, 150 years ago, puts his finger on one of the church's besetting problems - the lack of clarity between the Church and the world:

I believe that one reason why the church of God at this present moment has so little influence over the world is because the world has so much influence over the church.

Frustrated by what he witnessed as "worldliness ... growing over the church; she is mossed with it", he had often argued from history that the church was at her strongest when she stood out distinctively from her culture:

Put your finger on any prosperous page in the Church's history, and I will find a little marginal note reading thus: 'In this age men could readily see where the Church began and where the world ended.' Never were there good times when the Church and the world were joined in marriage with one another. The more the Church is distinct from the world in her acts and in her maxims, the more true is her testimony for Christ, and the more potent is her witness against sin.

Charles Spurgeon, sermons from the Metropolitan Tabernacle, cited in CJ Mahaney, Worldlines: Resisting the Seduction of a Fallen World, p.23