'The Church is an alternate polity that is fundamentally different from the world around us, especially in our world of late modernity. Our worship should reflect that difference. Conformity to this world will make the Church just another part of the world and not a very interesting part'

Your final para is where many would part company with the rest of your article (if not before). The Church is not different to the world around us, it is part of the world whether you like it or not. The beauty of Christ (if one takes the religious view) is not separate from the beauty of nature or the beauty of people when they are at their best. If the Church sees the rest of the world as not very interesting it cannot have a meaningful role. For my two pennies worth, the Church needs to embrace the real world for if it does not how can it serve the needs of the people who attend.

It is saddening to see many people finding a lack of joy in the real world in favour of the supernatural. Perhaps this is why religion will survive if it brings solace and comfort to so many. I just hope the comfort and solace it brings is also reflected in behaviours that work for a better world rather than just a worship of a higher figure in and of itself.

COMPETITION BETWEEN CHURCHES

The contradictory statements in this article of dense prose makes it unclear whether the author wants to bring back the traditional Hymns that might bring back congregations. I'm talking "There is a green hill far away" and of course "All things bright and beautiful"

Doesn't matter if their lyrics fail an intellectual test. Songs work and attract on a different level.

On sectarian competition I recall Toowoomba in 2003. While the Anglican Church was shrinking Church of Christ and more so Assembly of God (AoG) where booming. AoG had some Cathedral size Churches seating 2,000 at a time, 3 sessions a day.

This was partly because AoG has speaking in tongues, the drumkits and pop groups.

AoG targetted younger interests (toddlers to 50yo) and significantly preached how-to paths to material success and money. The Minister's (facilitator? whatever) low tax car plan was part of his sermon and he exhorted families to give $100 each in order to buy the block of land next door.

Meanwhile Anglican Churches had small congregations dying off - average age around 71. A comfortable peer group or an attempt to pack in more Church time in one's last years to avoid Hell in the presumed Afterlife.

I don't pretend to understand Mr Sellick's argumentation on this subject, as it is obscured beneath a mass of relentlessly in-house logic. Which, as far as I am concerned, renders it impenetrable to the non-Christian.

But I do understand methodologies, just a little, and this line stood out for me.

>>The way forward consists not so much in doing a new thing but in doing an old thing more rigorously.<<

In business, this is the fastest route to self-destruction that you could select. It has even spawned its own label...

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

If Mr Sellick were to emerge for a moment from his protective carapace and face reality, he would know this. The reason people desert one particular path and choose another is because they are dissatisfied with the path they are on.

Doing the same thing, only more so, is not going to alter the fundamentals. If your car mechanic does a poor job when fixing your car, the solution is not to take it to him more often. More relevantly, if you are in fact that car mechanic, you are not going to improve your product by doing more of the same thing.

I suspect that Mr Sellick has missed one key point, which is that the product itself has changed, and requires a different form of marketing these days. He finds himself holding a heavy black bakelite instrument with a twisted brown cord that plugs into the wall, when everyone else is queuing up for the next iPhone.

One wonders if any of the 20th century ever happened, or if we are living in the 21st when reading this naive, nostalgic, sentimental back-to-the-past mommy-daddy religiosity.

Humankind at the end of the 20th century killed its Deity, in every form that the Deity has been conceived. The Deity was killed off by both the anti-"culture" of scientism AND reductionist anti-Spiritual exoteric religion/religiosity.

Humanity needs to be reassociated with Reality Itself, Truth Itself, and The Beautiful Itself. Even in order to support ordinary human life, humanity needs access to the ESOTERIC Truth of existence and thereby the real experience of that Truth.
There must be a ressurection of Consciousness in the 21st century - just as there was a "death" of Consciousness in the 20th century. For the sake of humanity, there needs to be a commitment to do this - now, and forever hereafter. Otherwise people are left with the dismal exoteric point of view, a point of view that is thoroughly reductionist, and even aggressively anti-Spiritual.

Nowadays, there are, at best only sentimental, nostalgic gestures towards the ancient esoteric understanding that Consciousness transcends physical existence.

Notice that, tragically, Sells doesnt even refer to or use the word Consciousness!

Where to from here, for real?

This reference describes the thoroughly conformed to the world power-and-control-seeking worldliness of the Christian ecclesiastical establishment,whether in Rome or anywhere else.
http://global.adidam.org/truth-book/true-spiritual-practice-4.html
This reference describes how the usual dreadfully sane religionist (such as Sells) is trapped in the paradigm of scientism (while pretending otherwise)
http://www.adidam.org/teaching/gnosticon/universal-scientism.aspx

This reference describes what is required for the future of humankind.
http://www.adidam.org/teaching/aletheon/truth-life.aspx

These references provide a radical Spiritual critique of the usual "official" Christian mumbo-jumbo, including the fabricated origins and political purposes of the "New" Testament.
http://www.dabase.org/up-5-1.htm
http://www.aboutadidam.org/articles/secret_identity/beyond_public.html
http://www.aboutadidam.org/readings/birthday_message/index.html

These two references are about Art & Sacred Culture.
http://www.aboutadidam.org/readings/art_is_love/index.html
http://www.adidaupclose.org/Art_and_Photography/rebirth_of_sacred_art.html

This reference provides a unique Understanding of Postmodernism, and the limits of Western philosophy, whether old or "new".

http://www.adidaupclose.org/FAQs/postmodernism2.html

Well, I enjoyed this article. It really resonated with me, and I found myself wanting more.

I live in Sydney and occasionally attend an increasingly evangelical Anglican church. I very much miss the rituals that have been dumped in favour of a stripped-down fundamentalist theology.

Where have the rich layers of meaning gone? Why does every sermon sound exactly the same, regardless of what passage of scripture is supposedly being expounded?

Surely the answer to the question of how one should live one's life is not simply "Go forth and evangelize"?

Religion evolved as a way for frail, fallible humans to connect with the good. A way to keep reminding ourselves of the ideals that are worth striving for. The shallow parody of religion I see around me today just doesn't cut the mustard.

Although Sells likes to pretend otherwise he is an advocate of pop religion.

The usual dreadfully sane religionist functions only in the gross technical sense. He/she is reduced by the influences of the human world to an unconscious robot of personal drives, conventional ideas, and social motives, all of which are kept under control by the locally standard social propaganda and its closed system of stimulus-response techniques. The social influences that are generated to "educate" and control human beings in every part of the world are all basically of the kind that is now popularly declaimed as "brainwashing" whenever the "educational" propaganda of "others" is being criticized or mocked.

People whose minds and bodies are under the control of the basic machinery of the State collective are not generally involved with the free pursuit of Truth in any ultimate sense. Such a pursuit is essentially taboo. Only popular or pop religion is permitted.

Pop religion and "theology" are basically tools of the gross social order. They consist of systems of propagandized belief. The practice associated with such popular belief systems is, at its worst, nothing more than the continuous affirmation of those beliefs and, at its best, the embodiment of those beliefs in the form of socially benign or materially productive behaviors.

"Practice" in such religion is generally associated with essentially suppressive disciplines relative to personal pleasure, taboos against exclusive commitments to any kind of asocial mystical subjective life, and intense demands for productive and enthusiastic social action

In this manner, the dreadfully sane social ego is mechanically reproduced in the form of millions of unconscious robotized clones in each generation, much in the same manner, and for the same basic purpose, as "worker" bees in a hive. Conventional pop religion is thus tailored to serve such social functionaries. The standard "gospel" is that enthusiastic social existence and "salvation" are the same.

The basic purpose of such religion is to guarantee the social order through the development of altruism and the propagandizing of anxiety-reducing messages.
There is of course nothing wrong with such purposes, but only up to a point.