About

Churches Without Chests is the personal blog of David de Bruyn. If it matters to you who that is, then here’s a little more.

The title borrows from C.S. Lewis’ book The Abolition of Man, in which he has a chapter called “Men Without Chests”. He describes men who have lost all sense of moral and aesthetic judgement as men without chests, men without ordinate affections to mediate between their belly (their appetites) and their head (their reason). People without rightly trained loves are slaves to sentimental passions or driven by the tyrannical dictates of an unyielding form of reason.

I think that’s very much the state of modern Christianity. Churches seem to be missing the element of moral and aesthetic judgement, and it’s evident in the chaos of what goes for worship, ministry and evangelism. This blog is where I point to the problem, offering, where I can, possible ways to repair the damage or perhaps – more accurately – to stop the bleeding.