The church is being left behind by a culture that is "re-calibrating," Steve Chalke said today.
Speaking at an event on leadership held by Oasis Church, of which he is the founder, Chalke urged church leaders to shift with a fast-moving society.
Phyllis Tickle, an American academic, thought that the Church went through a transition every 500 years and replaced old forms of teaching and spirituality with new ones to adapt as culture moved. 2015, said Chalke, is such a time.
"We have different songs, different people with a few new tattoos but its basically the same message," he told an audience of church leaders this morning.
"We are preaching a message for a different culture and it doesn't work."
Chalke's great passion is church involvement in community. Oasis Trust, the umbrella group of which he is also the founder, runs over 40 academy schools, a higher education college, several youth and children's programmes and supports over 1,000 homeless people.
"The first controversial thing I said was 'churches should do community'" he previously told Christian Today, and today he reserved his harshest comments for the Church's obsession with trivial things.
Christians, he said, are often like a group of geese in a safe farmyard with all the security they need, so never learn to fly. The geese learn about flying, Chalke said in his parable. They write poetry and songs and hold conferences about flying. They even do PhDs on the subject, but not one of them ever actually takes off. Instead, they remain in the safety of the farmyard.
"We are always onto the next thing," Chalke continued. "When huge employment laws were going through in this country which would trap thousands of people in poverty, the whole of the evangelical church was flying to Toronto to be blessed," he said, referring to the Toronto blessing in the mid-1990s.
"Its tragic," he added. "If God blesses people then he blesses the poor. You don't need to get on an aeroplane to blessed by God. You don't need to be able to afford a plane ticket to be healed."
Chalke, who has been a church leader for over 30 years, spoke of how his personal theology has changed while he led a small baptist church in London.
"I realised my faith wasn't fit for purpose," he said.
"Over the years the church I was running grew and people started coming who were gay. They joined in and formed a community. They were cheerful and Christ-centred and some of the most generous people I have ever met.
"So as you engage with people your theology begins to be impacted and develop. Not that you abandon the Bible, but you look at it more closely."
Over the day's conference, Chalke fielded questions on vision, leadership, theology and personal growth. Never afraid to offer a controversial sound-bite, he happily answered difficult questions and spoke of the need to have an honest and open conversation.
"We need to come to a developed understanding of the Bible and stop pretending there aren't any contradictions," he said.
"You only need to read chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis to know it is full of contradictions. Genesis 2 has a completely different order of creation to Genesis 1 because Genesis 1 is poetry and Genesis 2 is parable."
