The Reason for Church: A Review
October 8, 2026
October 8, 2026
Abstract: Paul Alexander reviews Brad Edwards’s book The Reason for Church, highlighting strengths of the book’s cultural diagnosis while also identifying weaknesses in its prescription for how our current problems should be addressed by the church and the gospel. Edwards emphasizes how sin has affected the way we relate to one another, but he does not adequately address the way our sin affects our relationship with God. Readers will benefit from many of Edwards’s insights, but those who believe that the church’s primary mission is to make disciples through the proclamation of the gospel will find substantive areas of disagreement with his view of the church and its mission.
Brad Edwards, The Reason for Church: Why the Body of Christ Still Matters in an Age of Anxiety, Division, and Radical Individualism. Zondervan, 2025. 240 pp.
When many of us first read David Wells’s No Place for Truth back in the day, we felt like we did when we saw our first Trans Am. You know who you are—don’t deny it. I know, Christian cultural analysis is more than just “cool” or “awesome.” It’s public theology for evangelism. But shouldn’t it be at least a little thrilling to apply Christian logic to public trends?
The world never tires of rephrasing the Serpent’s question, “Did God really say . . .?” Our age now rallies around a therapeutic spirituality, justified by victimhood as a new virtue, expressed through social media, aflame with anti-institutionalism. That leaves the local church looking so . . . 1900s, which implies we need not just a reason for God but a reason for church.
The title of Brad Edwards’s book, The Reason for Church, tips us off that Edwards hews more to the apologetics of Tim Keller than to the systematics of David Wells. Edwards is an intellectually sophisticated critic of the meta-modern malaise. Thankfully, he loves Christ and the church more than anything in this world. He pastors The Table, a PCA congregation in Colorado that subscribes to the Westminster Confession of Faith.
This book earned Christianity Today’s 2025 Book of the Year for its well-informed cultural analysis, penetrating insights, shrewd applications, and flecks of gospel gold. After reading it, I was not surprised to learn The Reason for Church also earned Edwards The Gospel Coalition First-Time Author Award. Edwards turns phrases like pancakes, but he’s not a show-off. He’s heartfelt, and he’s got personal stories from ministry in his own local church that verify and illustrate his analysis and applications. He writes like he’s done this before.
Edwards articulates his social critique of late modernity as Burkean conservatism, focused through the political lens of Yuval Levin and Jonah Goldberg, filtered through the sociological insight of Charles Murray, and lit by the psychological findings of Jonathan Haidt. The “little platoons” of local mediating institutions that put us shoulder to shoulder with people across the political aisle are disappearing (79, 93; think Putnam’s Bowling Alone). We are fracturing the republic into politically homogeneous ghettos by ZIP code. With no buffer between the individual and the political, everything becomes political, impersonal, ultimate . . . and contentious.
Today, individualism hijacks individuality such that self becomes sacrosanct. Boomers built churches on Peter Drucker’s pragmatism, which ended up offering Sunday consumers “a Coldplay concert with a TED talk” (14, 16). The church’s customer-is-king technique only manipulates our Main Character Syndrome, making church a provider of goods and services, and excusing us for treating each other as non-player participants in a reality where self is still the star of the show (47–48).
Therapy teaches us to prize intuitional over institutional spiritualities (28–35, channeling Philip Rieff and Carl Trueman), so people retreat from churches that call them to repent, choosing instead safe spaces that affirm them in sin. Social media disintegrates real community and counterfeits true liturgy with its digital newsfeeds, memes, retweets, and long-form posts (49). Identity politics and strict binary partisanship back us into a civic discourse of negation—the anti-vision, “a motivating ‘why’ defined by what you are against” (75). Fighting the anti-vision, in turn, justifies a virtuous victimhood that weaponizes compassion to coerce change (93).
As Edwards narrates the modern “Pilgrim’s Regress,” he peppers it with culturally seasoned articulations of the gospel. “Jesus’ love spurned safety and absorbed catastrophic harm to save those consumed with saving themselves” (45). “It is a church’s identity in Christ and shared affinity in the gospel that makes political diversity possible and non-polarizing” (74). “Rather than making meaning by making enemies, Jesus chose instead to die for them—for us—in love” (84). “Jesus will always be the greater victim, and it was the sin of the oppressed and oppressor alike that put him there” (106). As the kids say, spittin’ bars.
Gospel and church, then, are uniquely positioned to cure the ills of late or meta-modernity. End Part 1. Enter the local church, which redeems individuality from the jaws of individualism, displaces us from the main character role, and integrates us into the community where Christ is the Main Character. We go from being irrelevant extras to playing important yet subsidiary roles in God’s plan of redemption.
As Part 2 begins, we anticipate less cultural critique, more constructive ecclesiology. The pattern, though, continues to be heavy cultural analysis with the end of each chapter positioning gospel and church as the sociocultural solution. As a doctor, Edwards’s handwriting is clear as day on the diagnosis; it’s less legible when he’s writing the prescription.
Edwards clearly believes Jesus lived the life we should have lived and died the death we should have died (158). But why did Jesus do that? To what end? The most sustained theology of the gospel appears in an Augustinian metanarrative filtered through Cornelius Plantinga (157–58).
Sounds orthodox enough . . . until you listen for what’s not said. Only then do you notice a screaming silence. Nowhere do we hear of God’s wrath. We read “shalom was shattered.” We read of death. We read “we have inherited their enmity, and in our attitudes and actions toward God and each other, we perpetuate the physical and spiritual death they welcomed into the world” (157). Our greatest problem, apparently, is our own attitude toward God and others.
What of God’s attitude toward us? Is that a problem? Is that a reason Jesus died? How did our sin, and Jesus’s atonement, change God’s attitude toward us? How does that message figure into the reason for church? We are left asking, Did Jesus die primarily to solve our identity and loneliness epidemics? Or did Jesus die primarily to suffer the eternal wrath of the inflexibly righteous God against us for our sins?
I realize this is a cultural apologetic for the church. Still, what gospel will our unbelieving friends hear when we get them there? The closest we get to a theology of atonement for the meta-modern sinner is that “our loving Creator co-opted all our evil and suffering to rescue us from ourselves” (157). Ourselves? Rescue us from ourselves? No. Jesus died to rescue us from God’s wrath.
Or take this statement: “Jesus Christ gave his life to flip individualism’s script for [nobodies] like you and me” (161). Okay. I can get there. Jesus will have the prize for which he died, an inheritance of nations. Fair enough. But with no context of propitiation either behind us or on the horizon, we might be forgiven for thinking that “Jesus Christ gave his life to flip individualism’s script” sounds sociological, not theological; more temporal, less eternal.
Anyone who can analyze and articulate radical individualism this well can do the same for penal substitution if he wants to. So . . . does he want to? Without that, The Reason for Church feels like a sociologically derived ecclesiology coated with a thin varnish of atonement. It’s as robust an ecclesiology as you can have, minus propitiation—which is concerning.
He similarly defines the dynamic of gospel obedience—even the Greek words for “grace” and “faith”—in sociological terms of Roman patronage and reciprocity (173–78). Christ is our divine patron, favoring us with his charis. We are the helpless clients, reliant on him through pistis. Perhaps that’s fine as an illustration. But to build a dynamic of gospel obedience from a sociologically constructed meaning of charis is, for me at least, a bridge too far. “When an ancient Greek person heard the word charis, they would naturally think of the flow of patronage all around them” (175). He makes the corresponding move with pistis as a reciprocal response to charis. But that’s more analogical than exegetical.
To conclude, then, that we are actually in a patron-client relationship with Jesus (175, 177, 182, based on Eph. 2:8–9) is probably misguided, or at least premature. It also sidelines the sanctifying dynamic of union with Christ and abiding in him as the inwardly transformative dynamic of gospel obedience (John 15:4–5). “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20). The theology of obedience taught by both Jesus and Paul far outstrips the patron-client arrangement. Is there some explanatory power in that analogy? Maybe. Is it the central biblical model or motive for obedience? That’s highly doubtful.
When it comes to horizontal reciprocity between church members, Edwards is all in, again, in order to combat radical individualism and our modern allergy to incurring obligation by asking for help. Yet there’s no anchoring acknowledgment of the apostle Paul’s own trenchant critique of congregational patronage (see 2 Thes. 3:6–12), or of his carefulness to avoid the entanglements of missiological reciprocity (see Phil. 4:10–20).
As critical as Edwards is of pragmatism, he still fronts the social-problem-solving aspects of the gospel while leaving the church’s proclamation of propitiation unaddressed. Again, I realize this is a cultural apologetic for the church. But again, I ask, what gospel will the culture hear when we bring them to church?
Similar to the treatment of charis and pistis, gospel mystery is defined backward from the Latin sacramentum to mean that Gentiles “have access to full covenantal relationship with God through the sacraments of baptism and Communion” (165–66). But Paul’s meaning for mystērion is more likely determined by the Hidden but Now Revealed dynamic so clearly elucidated by Beale and Gladd.11 .See G.K. Beale and Benjamin L. Gladd, Hidden but Now Revealed: A Biblical Theology of Mystery (IVP Academic, 2014). “With water and in the name of the Trinity, all God’s promises are made available to MacGuffins” (165). That’s too sacramental for my taste. Faith is the saving response to the promise; baptism is how faith goes public.
The mission of the church also gets a bit blurred with the emphasis on and even promotion of “the economic halo effect” around, for example, United Methodist churches in North Carolina (203). That begins to sound like mission creep. The church is the only redemptive institution, and its mission is to proclaim the gospel of forgiveness through faith alone, a faith that repents. It’s the common grace institutions that preserve the created order. The marks of the true church are the right preaching of the Word and the right administration of the ordinances. Love to the non-Christian neighbor is the function of the church scattered, the Christian in his this-worldly vocation, as Edwards recognizes.
Consider the following paragraph:
This relational and creational goodness is the entire reason common grace institutions exist in the first place, and why our abandonment of institutions is leaving us without a way to generate social capital anywhere near as quickly as we’re burning through it. As the only redemptive institution ordained for the life of the world, the body of Christ is uniquely equipped to steward blessing, strengthen bonds, and mediate tangible goodness that everyone everywhere needs. (205)
That seems like a confusion of categories. Is the church a common grace or special grace institution? Is it preservative or redemptive? Is the point here that the church should take up the mantle of a common grace institution in mediating tangible goodness? It’s a bit unclear. What’s also unclear is the place of preaching in the mission of the church. The sacraments get airtime, and mediating tangible blessings gets treatment; but preaching, at least within the confines of these pages, sounds muffled, if not muzzled. Is preaching indeed central to the mission of the church? If it’s central to Edwards’s model—and I assume it is—it’s not central in this account of it.
Edwards demonstrates an impressive grasp of late modernity and its discontents. He places the local church in its proper social and spiritual perspective as the primary context for individual discipleship to Christ. For that, we should thank and agree with him.
This is an award-winning cultural apologetic for the church. Read it for that reason alone. But if you’re an Old Calvinist, just be aware: this is New Calvinism, Cool Calvinism—more cultural exegesis, less biblical exegesis, in service of cultural transformationalism. With it come all the strengths, weaknesses, and ambiguities one has grown to expect. Sadly, the ambiguities appear in the places where clarity matters most.