Back Pain Again!
There is an apocryphal story told about the time in 2006 when I was laid up for weeks with back pain. The story goes that some sanctimonious person said to me, "God must be teaching you a lot through all of this." To which I am said to have replied, "Yes, how bloody painful a back can be!"
None of this is true, but it is what I would have said!

The Shard from Bedale Street by Borough Market.

The Shard from Great Maze Pond.

Richard Niebuhr (1894-1962).

Niebuhr's comment about modern theology sadly seems to be increasingly true of evangelical preaching too...

"A God without wrath, brings men without sin, into a kingdom without judgement, through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross."

It seems to me that unless we have the courage of our convictions and teach key ideas like Sin, Wrath, Judgement and the Cross, the Evangelical Church will have nothing of worth to say to the on-looking world. We will be compelled to reflect back to the world what it finds congenial. There is a coherent philospohical message in the Gospel, but when we compromise on any of these teachings a sceptical world will point out that our message has ceased to have any coherence.
Unless we understand sin and God's anger towards it we will not have a realistic understanding of the world we live in nor an understanding of the conflicted nature of humanity, nor will we be able to adequately describe who Jesus is, or what his ministry meant, we will be supremely unable to explain the purpose of the Cross.