Musing 26

One of the things that has baffled me in recent years is the surprise that Christian leaders at large have had at the acceleration of Americans leaving the church.

Growing up in the Bible belt, I can only say that even before I became a Christian at 13, it was blatant how superficial the religion of everyone was. The same kids who would be the first to go up at a revival would also be the first to actively encourage other kids to shut down any type of serious conversation in Sunday School or Youth Group the next day or week.

While I have been encouraged by seeing some of those same troublemakers became faithful brothers and sisters in Christ, they are also clearly in the minority.

There are many learned men and women studying the decline of the visible church in America who have given their assessments on the matter. Many of them I agree with, some I don’t.

But on reflecting on my childhood, there are so many small things that added up to a much stronger force than I’ve frequently seen talked about.

First is the idolatry of school sports. Growing up, I saw so many people deprioritize church over so many other things, especially school sports. Childhood is when we teach our kids what things should be valued, and so many of my friends and others grew up with the implied message of “sure, we say church is important, but we’ll take you away from it the first time something conflicts”. While sure, there are times when, as a one-off, life takes us awy from the fellowship of believers.

But as Scotty said in Star Trek Generations “If something’s important to you, you make the time for it”. And because there are only so many hours in the day, sometimes something has to make way. It is easy to let the copium of a million excuses take us away for 1 week here, 1 week there, and before we know it, we’ve missed more than half of the Sundays in the year.

Second is that we lost the community of the church, and so people have looked for that community elsewhere. One of my friends who was a big fan of the house church movement made a really good point that we cannot easily be in community with people who live 30+ minutes from us. Even with the modern miracles of technology giving us unparalleled reach, we still can’t beat the fellowship of people near us. And the breakdown of centralized community within the church has unquestionably impacted us. We now often find ourselves in more communities with people who have the same niche interests at the cost of deeper community where we can help bear life’s burdens together.

The third is probably the most important. On both the left and the right, there has been an abandonment (to some degree) of the gospel. While the left’s abandonment of the gospel is obvious through any number of vectors (such as the ever weakening condemnation of sin, or unbelief at Jesus’ own claims about Himself), the right’s abandonment was, at least in the 90’s and 00’s (and even continuing to the present), much more of a substituting the blessings of the gospel for the gospel. I can’t count the number of guys who have expressed discontent with the church because they felt like they were promised “if you just go to church, you’ll find a wife” and that reality did not easily materialize if at all. And so many feel betrayed by the church, and so naturally don’t feel any particular loyalty to the church.

As my heart ponders these, numerous other reasons come to mind, whether it be the generally bad youth education I saw across the churches I attended or grew up in, the conflation of gospel and politics, the exposure of the “good ole boys” network protecting men in the pulpit from properly being removed and allowing wolves to remain in the pulpit. So many different ways sin has attacked the church, and we rightly deserve criticism for allowing sin to remain in our midst.

But all this being said - though the visible church may have had many setbacks in recent years, the reality is that our victory is won. Christ reigns now, and as we go forth proclaiming His rule, sin will strike at us every chance it gets. May Jesus come quickly, and may we fight the fight to see righteousness in the world till the day we come to see our Lord directly through death or His return.