"....
when they are, the Spirit can come rushing in and make huge changes in people's lives."
Materialism also quenches openness to the Spirit, he continued, something that plagues much of the Church in the West.
People in the West, American and Europeans alike, live in what author Charles Kraft called a "closed universe," McKnight explained.
"We live in a world that is empirical, materialistic, that if it's not scientific or demonstrable — we can't touch it, see it, feel it, eat it — then it's not real."
In the minds of many Westerners, then, especially within certain strains of secularism, the "real" is largely confined to the material, but those mindsets are present in the...."