The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century

Published by InterVarsity Press in 1970 (153 pages). Schaeffer looks at the forces he saw pressing on the church and on Western society at the turn of the 1970s: the New Left and the Establishment, both of which he regarded as threats to freedom, along with the ecological crisis, what he called the biological bomb, the population explosion and the loss of the concept of truth. He expected a revolution from one side or the other and argued that the church's answer was a recovery of orthodox Christianity lived out. A large part of the book concerns the institutional church itself, discussed under the heading of form and freedom: which forms of church life the New Testament fixes and where the church is free. Later Crossway editions printed it together with The Church Before the Watching World, and it opens the fourth volume of The Complete Works of Francis A. Schaeffer (1982), A Christian View of the Church.