God Heart for His People - The Coming Evangelical Collapse, Part 1

As I shared last week, I'll be quoting from others' writings for a few weeks on the topic of where I believe God is taking His people in these critical days. Today and for the next weeks I'll be sharing an article by Michael Spencer on the coming collapse of evangelicalism as we know it. Because of the length of the article, I'll break it into several sections. While I may not agree with the author on every point, I believe the he is sending an important message for us. The prophetic voice has never been a popular voice in the history of God's people but is very important to prepare us for the shaking that God must do among His own for the sake of His name among the nations, so I encourage you to read with a prayerful heart.

"Part 1 - The Coming Evangelical Collapse: My Prediction
     I believe that we are on the verge- within 10 years- of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity; a collapse that will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and that will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West. I believe this evangelical collapse will happen with astonishing statistical speed; that within two generations of where we are now evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its current occupants, leaving in its wake nothing that can revitalize evangelicals to their former “glory.”
     The party is almost over for evangelicals; a party that’s been going strong since the beginning of the “Protestant” 20th century. We are soon going to be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century in a culture that will be between 25-30% non-religious.
     This collapse, will, I believe, herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian west and will change the way tens of millions of people see the entire realm of religion. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become particularly hostile towards evangelical Christianity, increasingly seeing it as the opponent of the good of individuals and society.
     The response of evangelicals to this new environment will be a revisiting of the same rhetoric and reactions we’ve seen since the beginnings of the current culture war in the 1980s. The difference will be that millions of evangelicals will quit: quit their churches, quit their adherence to evangelical distinctives and quit resisting the rising tide of the culture.
     Many who will leave evangelicalism will leave for no religious affiliation at all. Others will leave for an atheistic or agnostic secularism, with a strong personal rejection of Christian belief and Christian influence. Many of our children and grandchildren are going to abandon ship, and many will do so saying “good riddance.”
     This collapse will cause the end of thousands of ministries. The high profile of Christian media will be reduced, if not eliminated. Hundreds of thousands of students, pastors, religious workers, missionaries and persons employed by ministries and churches will be unemployed or employed elsewhere. [ ]. Visible, active evangelical ministries will be reduced to a small percentage of their current size and effort.
     Nothing will reanimate evangelicalism to its previous levels of size and influence. The end of evangelicalism as we know it is close; far closer than most of us will admit.
     My prediction has nothing to do with a loss of eschatological optimism. Far from it. I’m convinced the grace and mission of God will reach to the ends of the earth. But I am not optimistic about evangelicalism, and I do not believe any of the apparently lively forms of evangelicalism today are going to be the answer. In fact, one dimension of this collapse, as I will deal with in the next post, is the bizarre scenario of what will remain when evangelicals have gone into decline.
     I fully expect that my children, before they are 40, will see evangelicalism at far less than half its current size and rapidly declining. They will see a very, very different culture as far as evangelicalism is concerned.
     I hope someone is going to start preparing for what is going to be an evangelical dark age."

(Next week I'll continue with Spencer's article in which he writes about what has caused this decline. Blessings on you this week!)

God's Heart for His People

I'm increasingly aware and troubled by how much my mindset as an evangelical believer has been shaped by the individualistic bent of the western culture. The 20th century is known for the rise of evangelicalism and while there are certainly some positive elements to evangelicalism, there are some serious deficits in the way we think about God and His Kingdom.

With this is mind, I plan to quote from a couple of sources along the lines of this topic in the next weeks. Some of this material may be controversial, especially for those of us who have spent most our years "swimming" in evangelical waters. We are uneasy and uncomfortable with thinking outside of the evangelical box...but I believe God's heart for His people is for much more than we have experienced, so I share this with the prayer that many hearts will be prepared for the coming of what could be the greatest "upheaval" the Church has experienced in her history. We may not know what this will look like yet, but we can be awake and aware when things are shaking badly and thereby be of help to many believers who will be completely disoriented by the shaking.

This week I'm quoting a portion from Hal Miller:

“Christianity is culturally relevant when it offers a qualitatively different society. Jesus called it “the kingdom of God.” Paul saw its first outlines in the gathered disciples of Jesus, and so he called them ekklesia – we translate it “church”- a Greek word denoting citizens assembled to attend to their common project, their city.

The evangelicals missed this. Evangelicalism sought to transform people and so transform the world. They did not see that something might be missing from this vision, something their assumption of American individualism would hide from them. The true Christian vision is to transform people, transforming them into a people, and so transform the world.

The evangelicals missed that middle term. They could not see the church as a foretaste of the new society; it was a club for the new individuals. The evangelicals simply dressed American individualism in Christian clothing. They ended up with new isolated individuals, but in the old society. Since their expression of Christianity did not take form as a new society, it quickly became culturally irrelevant, even though it was admirably culturally open.

To be culturally relevant, Christianity must offer an alternative. God has indeed chosen to deal with persons as individuals- in this the evangelicals were right. Yet they are not simply individuals; they become members of a social reality called ekklesia, which is the entering wedge of the new society of God’s making.

Too often, for example, we assume that evangelism involves the simple aggregation of more and more new individuals. If enough people are “born again,” the world’s problems will diminish...

The Christian calling requires being reconciled with God, to be sure. But it also requires being a new, reconciling society characterized by forgiveness, acceptance, and responsibility in a common task- a society qualitatively different from its culture, yet engaged with it. Little gatherings of Christians for worship and mutual help in being disciples become the seeds of God’s coming new society.
Such a new society will be culturally relevant because it springs from God’s movement among God’s people. The persons who make up this new society live their faith in the face of day-to-day problems that they share with the world around them. They face the same questions as unbelievers: finding joy and meaning in work, living at peace both personally and globally, raising responsible and compassionate children. And in facing those questions, Christian faith becomes relevant even for unbelievers.

Imagine a group of people gathering to help each other in the common task of seeing God’s kingdom incarnated in their work, in their families, in their towns, in their world, in their midst, and (rather than only) in their individual lives. This gathering is ekklesia. It will be relevant to its world because it lives the life of the kingdom in the world, not apart from it.”

...Under Construction...Thanks for Your Patience!

Proverbs 4:18 has always been a favorite for me: "The path of the righteous is like the first gleam of dawn, shining ever brighter till the full light of day." The implication to the reality that there is increasing light on my journey in God until the full day is that there are still shadows on the path. Remembering this helps me realize that although the light is growing daily, there is yet more to understand about Him and His ways and thoughts. It also causes me to know that I unwittingly do or say things that reflect the shadows that are still there, and consequently I do and say things that irritate and/or offend others.

So this week I want to pause and say "thank you" to the many spiritual siblings (young and old) God has given me who have exercised and continue to exercise amazing patience with me, some more than others by virtue of having lived with me longer and/or having worked with me. I know there have been many times in my life when I thought I saw things very clearly only to realize later that I had been stumbling in half-light and injuring others in the process.

One of my sisters was reading me a story last week of how Ruth Bell Graham decided what she wanted written on her tombstone. One day she was painstakingly driving through a lot of road repair work, and along the way were signs to the effect that the road was "under construction". When she finally reached the end of the road work, there was a sign that said: "End of construction. Thanks for your patience!" That's what she asked to have on her tombstone, and her family did as she asked. What a great epitaph!

But while I am still living in this present age, I want to say to those of you who have borne patiently with me till now: "I am still under construction... thanks for your patience!!" Your patience with me is a reflection of the long-suffering heart of God, and I am very grateful!

Hotel or Prison?

We American believers have been unconsciously and profoundly affected by what this nation's early leaders put in the Declaration of Independence. It has shaped our mindset to such a point that we assume that what is written there is biblical. There are parts that have some biblical truth to them but not all; and even those parts that may have biblical overtones to them, are mixed with the mind of the world, the flesh and the devil.

One idea in the Declaration of Independence is that all men have the "inalienable right" to pursue happiness. I believe this has set us up to think the opposite of what Scripture tells us about our life in this age. And while we who follow Jesus would say that we agree with Jesus and the apostles, we are not aware that the impact of our national beginnings is deeply embedded in us so that in spite of all the promises in the New Testament of suffering and persecution, we still have a subconscious belief that we have a right to be happy, and therefore, when things are difficult, we are confused or offended.

This doesn't mean that we are meant to like suffering or that we intentionally go out looking to suffer; but our mindset related to what we expect in this age will greatly impact our response to suffering when it does come (and it will). God has a future prepared for us of utter joy and peace and satisfaction that will last forever, so He's not ashamed to put us through a thorough preparation now so that we will be fit for the age to come. Because of the fall and the entrance of sin into humanity's story, one of the primary ways of being prepared comes through suffering.

C.S. Lewis puts it like this: "If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it's not so bad. Imagine a set of people all living in the same building. Half of them think it is a hotel, the other half think it is a prison. Those who think it a hotel might regard it as quite intolerable, and those who thought it was a prison might decide that it was really surprisingly comfortable. So that what seems the ugly doctrine is one that comforts and strengthens you in the end. The people who try to hold an optimistic view of this world would become pessimists; the people who hold a pretty stern view of it become optimistic."

Many of us (myself included) need a renewing of our minds concerning how we view this age. The Declaration of Independence tells us we should see this age as a "hotel" while the Scripture indicates that we should view it as a "prison". With the scriptural mindset, the kindnesses and goodness of the Lord shines more brightly in this "prison" and our hearts are empowered to bear the suffering with hope and understanding.

Some Scriptures to meditate on along these lines are: Matt. 5:11,12; 5:43-48; John 15:20; Acts 5:41; Rom. 8:17; II Cor. 1:6; II Cor. 4:17,18; I Thes. 3:4; I Pet. 2:20; 3:14; 3:17; 4:13; 4:19; 4:1; 5:10; Rom. 5:3; II Tim. 1:8; Rom. 8:18; 8:35; Phil. 3:10; Col. 1:24; II Tim. 3:11,12...