The more things change...

"To put it bluntly: the call to evangelism is often little else than a call to restore "Christendom," the Corpus Christianum, as a solid, well-integrated cultural complex, directed and dominated by the church. And the sense of urgency is often nothing but a nervous feeling of insecurity, with the established church endangered; a flurried activity to save the remnants of a time now irrevocably past... In fact, the word "evangelize" often means a Biblical camouflage of what should be rightly called the reconquest of ecclesiastical influence. Hence this undue respect for statistics and this insatiable ecclesiastical hunger for ever more areas of life." -- J.C. Hoekendijk, The Church Inside Out, Chapter 1 (1966)