thoughtsofagyrovague.com

October 2nd, 2007

The current state of the Christian Church is one of major confusion and a tearing away from our heritage as Christians in the name of “multiculturalism” “acceptance” or any host of other words you can come up with. With this progress that has been made in technology which has allowed the Internet, 200 cable channels and 30 different radio stations into the average household, all with different agendas to promote. Do not get me wrong, technology is a wonderful thing, but by farming out our minds to technology we are becoming increasingly disconnected from the moorings that our parents and their parents before them laid for the growth of the family.

One of the best ways to gauge the health of a church is to look at the youth of the church and see what is happening. Today the church you attend might be strong, but the church of tomorrow is the youth that you have coming to church with their parents. Are they engaged in the process of learning, are they engaged in winning their generation to Christ, are they able to articulate their faith to those around them and lead them to a meaningful relationship with Jesus Christ? These are very valid and important questions to ask regularly of your church.

The Heritage Foundation recently completed an eye opening survey of thousands of teenagers and correlated several statistics in households that regularly attend church versus households that rarely or never attend church. Hands down it shows the importance of religious instruction in the life of a teenager. The following statistics are from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health which can be accessed in its entirety at http://www.heritage.org/research/family/Map_of_Religion.pdf.

1) 6.4% of teenagers in a household that attends religious services weekly admitted to ever running away from home versus 11.5% in a family that never attends a religious service. (pg. 19)

2) 19.1% of teenagers in a household that attends religious services weekly admitted to being drunk in the previous year versus 35.2% in a family that never attends a religious service. (pg. 22)

3) 20.9% of teenagers in a household that attends religious services weekly were expelled or suspended from school in the previous year versus 38.9% in a family that never attends a religious service. (pg 23)

It is easy to use this study to say that Christianity is the only key to lowering risk factors for child hood, but this study did not discriminate between a Christian household, and say a Buddhist household. However, the point is clear that children who have a Church family have another place to exhort them to better living, to give them a place to get counsel from people outside of their family, and a place to learn communally what is a normal life within the society that they are in. The Proverb “in a multitude of counselors there is victory” comes to mind.

Today it is crucial for the church to engage the hearts and minds of its children in a meaningful and appropriate way. More and more people and agendas are conspiring to take our children from the ways of God and into the ways of Secular Humanism and other things with terrifying names.

A “New” View of the Church

One area that is causing much concern in the church today is the rise of postmodernism. Postmodernism is a hard concept to define in the scope of this paper, but it basically is a reinterpretation of how we as a society treat and view church. Instead of “doing” church we are exploring how to “live” church.

In the short term questioning how we live out our faith as a church is a valid and important question. Allowing it to last for years and years opens up post moderns to very liberal interpretations of how Church works and exists. Postmodernism has more youth of today exited, confused, concerned, and lost. When they reach the age of defining what church is for themselves they know that their parents’ way of “doing” church is not satisfactory for the deep spiritual longings that they have, but they do not quite know what it means for them. Without strong guidance in this area this whole generation (of which I am one) will find themselves lost in the morass of religious pluralism and “consumer friendly” religion.

The solution is as multi faceted as the definition, but I have a few thoughts: (borrowed in part from The Great Giveaway by David Fitch)

1) Learn to value the relational aspect of the gospel over the ability of the gospel to bring in the numbers. By this I mean as a church repent from trying to get bigger and bigger, and instead focus on becoming more and more effective in the lives of those in your church.

2) Work as a Church in a capitalist society, without becoming a Capitalistic church in approach to everything we do. By this I mean do not forget the oppressed, depressed and repressed in our own churches. Take time to build them up in character and help them become better Christians and citizens.

3) Spend time cultivating liturgical worship. By this I mean spend time in worship that invites God into our midst on His terms, not ours. Singing consumer friendly, contemporary worship is fine, but spending good amounts of time singing some of the older hymns and reflecting on the creeds. I believe doing these in worship will help to re center and refocus our worship on Christ.

In all this news about the state of the American or “western” church there is good news. The good news comes in the fact that while the church is stagnating or loosing ground in the west, it is exploding in places like China, Rwanda, and Ghana. The entire African Continent will be considered a “Christian Continent” in the next 15 years if the current rate of revival and growth continues. Add to this mix the growth of the church in China and in India and Christianity is not loosing ground world wide, it is just being redistributed in where the “power” lies, power being Christians who are newly converted and have a massive population that has not heard the gospel.

The church that is growing is the church that is persecuted. Sometimes severely, other times not so severely. History has shown that the Gospel spreads quickly when persecuted. The Church of the first century was fed to the lions, was burned as candles in the emperors gardens, and suffered horrible deaths. This is not much different then the church of today that exists in parts of India, in China and other places that typically are not friendly to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I have seen first hand what happens to believers in India if they do not recant and pledge their support of Hinduism. The picture is not pretty. In spite of all of this it is estimated by one member of YWAM (Youth With A Mission) that 15 new Christian churches were started per day in India. This was in 2005. I can only imagine that the growth has been exponential since then.

Evangelicals in today’s church in the west have been able to help exponentially in the ability to help the church thrive in these dark regions. If it was not for western missionaries faithfully carrying the gospel into lost regions of Sub Saharan Africa, if it was not for the wheels of commerce pressing into new places I believe that the Gospel would still be lacking in some places that it is now thriving. So on the one hand, the picture of the church in the West is bleak, but the picture of the church in other areas is one of vibrant and missional mosaic that is taking the world by storm in it’s commitment to one thing, and that is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

What is the Western Church to do?

I believe the church in the west should do nothing substantially different. Let me qualify that by saying yes to the fact that we need to look for new ways to reach our generation and yes we need to still seek to fulfill the great commission and reach out to our culture. We must continue to preach the word, preach the word and preach the word. Then we need to model it to the next generation of Americans and inculcate it into their belief systems to the point that they do not even know, nor could seriously consider a different way.

I believe the church in the west should continue to provide material support for those in the persecuted nations. We should continue to provide the basics in order to show ourselves as workmen in the fields of the fatherless, the widow, and the downtrodden. The western church has been woefully negligent in the tasks of ministering to the widow and the orphan (James 1:27) and has been way to capitalistic in its view of the church. Yes it takes money to run a church, but churches with 17 million dollar buildings are an atrocity against God. God is using the small churches meeting in rural areas of the world to minister to those in greatest need. I pray that the biggest and best growth in the church will continue in these areas, these areas are where God’s heart is expressed the greatest.

With Globalization comes the greatest push on modern Christians, it is a knowledge of what is going on in different cultures and not being able to say “I did not know”. With technology bringing the world closer and closer together, with the World Wide Web and 24 hour news channels, we can not just sit down and say “I did not act because I did not know”. We know now, we see the deplorable circumstances of so many millions, we must now get away from sitting on our hands and empower these new churches and these new converts to teach each other how to live a holy life, how to teach others, how to affect public policy and how to bring about change in society.

The greatest challenge for the countries where the church is growing is going to be to not follow the church of the west. By that I mean we worked and pushed and got our independence. We became a nation of Christians, formed on Christian principles, and lost our Christian world view in the process of a few short generations. What is going to have to happen is the church grows in these areas, but the church work to inculcate its history, its worldview and its unique abilities to answer the tough questions of life into the generation that comes after them. If they do not they will find themselves in the same boat we are now, lost and without a rudder or wind in our sails.

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