Evangelical Reformation

The greatest problem for America turns out also to be the greatest problem for the American church.

That problem is numbness to the desperateness of our situation.

If you attended a good church this morning, you no doubt had a positive worship experience and heard a good sermon. But chances are slim that you encountered a sense of urgency about our situation.

Remember the prayer meetings that followed 9/11? None of that anymore. We’re back to life as usual.

Last week’s post listed a number of factors that demonstrate the decline of the evangelical church in the United States. A similar list could be generated regarding our secular society.

If I were making a medical analogy, I would not use the sniffles to depict our problems. For example, precipitous decline in the number of evangelicals and a large segment of our young people buying into relativism would be analogous to terminal cancer.

All the disease needs to kill us is time. Our lack of desperation provides the disease with the time needed.

The Tea Party Movement constitutes one segment of our society that understands the urgency of the situation. On February 19, 2009, Rick Santelli grasped the economic disaster that would result from the Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan announced the previous day, and called people to join him in a tea party to protest this government initiative. Some mark this as the beginning of the movement. Note Santelli’s sense of urgency in the YouTube video of this event. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp-Jw-5Kx8k

Why isn’t the church manifesting the desperateness of our situation? Let me suggest several reasons:

• We are so consumed by the issues of daily life that we tend not to think too much about the disaster that surrounds us.
• Here in America, things have turned out okay for a couple of centuries, so we assume that current problems will pass also.
• We can shelter ourselves from many aspects of the current crisis. For example, as Christians we can choose not to view the utterly despicable television programming and movies currently on the market. We should do this, but it blocks our awareness of how bad things really are.
• The news media tends not to reveal the desperateness of our situation, especially during a Democratic administration.
• Liberal authorities use their influence to prevent people from seeing realities that conflict with their positions. Imagine what might happen if abortions were televised!!! What if this atrocity were aired not just once but frequently enough that people could not escape the reality? If people realized the brutality being inflicted on unborn and being born children, (pulling off their limbs, scalding them to death, etc.) abortion would quickly become illegal.
• The government shields us from coming economic disaster by borrowing and printing money, creating the reality that everything is okay at the expense of our children.

Many other factors could be added to this list, but perhaps the major perspective promoting evangelical complacency resides in the assumption that since God is in control we will be protected from disaster.

In describing the disaster all around us my Christian friends often respond, “Well, it is good to know that God is in control,” by which they mean, “If you had faith, you wouldn’t be concerned about these things.”

To this I respond that God was in control when the Babylonians burned down Jerusalem, murdered men, raped women, and carried children into slavery. No doubt some of those were godly people.

How could God allow such things to happen to godly people? I don’t know all the answers to that, but perhaps part of the answer is that though these people were godly in general terms, they were complacent regarding the growing evil of the day, as evangelicals are today, so that in some way they deserved the catastrophe when it came.

Solutions can only begin with a sense of urgency over impending disaster—when the church starts to act like Rick Santelli.

By church, I refer to the evangelical church, which currently is the cutting edge of the American church. Ultimately I speak of the individuals that comprise that church and the leadership that formulates the culture of those individuals. How are we doing?

I named this blog Evangelical Reformation because of my conviction that the church is not doing okay—that just as the church during the time of Martin Luther needed reformation, so with the evangelical church in America.

The facts supporting this position are compelling:

• We are losing market share. George Barna provides statistics demonstrating that we are precipitously shrinking. Mega-churches, best-selling books, and other factors camouflage this decline.
• We are losing our identity. George Barna provides statistics demonstrating that we act more like the secular world all the time, in some cases outstripping the world in our worldliness.
• We are losing our marriages. George Barna provides the statistics demonstrating that the rate of marriage breakup among evangelicals is the same as or greater than that of secular society.
• We are losing our children. George Barna provides statistics demonstrating that our children are buying into secular relativism and that once they leave high school they tend not to return to church. Why should they return if they do not believe that the church is the guardian of the truth but only one perspective among many.
• We are losing our effectiveness as salt and light. George Barna provides statistics demonstrating that we are losing the culture war. We don’t need George Barna to tell us that. The designation “post-Christian era” means that we are losing. Listening to the news on any given day should remove any doubt.
• We are losing our compassion. Our indifference to the plight of persecuted brothers and sisters around the world displays our self-absorption.
• Worst of all, we tend to be blind to the devastating symptoms above, believing that we are okay. Just as the AIDS virus disarms the immune system, so our spiritual immune system is failing to activate our defenses.

We tend to see ourselves as we do our congressman. While Congress has been destroying this nation across the past several decades, congressmen and women have continued to get reelected.

How has that happened? The answer resides in the rationale that while Congress is bad, my congressman is okay. Likewise, though the church in America may be failing, we tend to think that we are doing okay.

Economically our nation has reached such crisis that the Tea Party movement is in the process of replacing congressmen who have created this disaster with candidates who promise more responsible fiscal decisions. I hope they do.

Wouldn’t it be a blessing if we had an evangelical Tea Party that was as sensitive to our spiritual plight as the Tea Party is to our impending economic doom—and if that spiritual Tea Party would promote changes needed to precipitate an evangelical reformation? It is that hope that keeps me posting to this blog.

Franklin Graham found himself disinvited to speak at a Pentagon prayer service because he had made what were considered to be inappropriate comments about Islam.

Agreed, one may speak truth in a reprehensible manner and for reprehensible reasons. For example, comments made about the morality of someone’s mother without due cause, e.g. a court case in which this might be relevant, is inappropriate and would provide sufficient reason to disinvite someone from speaking at some event.

However, Franklin Graham, both because of his personal character and his media experience, is not one to unleash inappropriate tirades.

We ask then, did he tell the truth about Islam?

Our culture asserts that we must differentiate between radical Islam and the mainstream Muslim religion. Almost all agree that radical Islam is evil, but we are told that this should not influence our conclusion regarding Islam in general.

To begin with, we should ask, “Why not.” If a religion produces a movement this substantial and this perverse, does it not reflect on it? Sure, there are bad Christians and bad new agers and bad people from any group. But the issues of how many and how bad are relevant.

A favorite ploy of liberalism consists of finding one bad Christian and shouting moral equivalence. This is sheer sophistry. Quantitative and qualitative issues do matter. That being the case, Islam must bear responsibility for unleashing a horrendous force on the world.

But what about the “typical” Muslim? Overwhelming evidence supports Graham’s pronouncements about Islam in this regard also.

Was it just those associated with radical Islam that danced in the Palestinian streets following 9/11? The left tries to dissociate radical and mainstream Islam, but evidence reveals a kindred spirit. Maybe they don’t commit suicide bombings, but many applaud those who do.

Today Compass Direct reported the shooting of a Coptic Christian couple in Egypt. http://www.compassdirect.org/english/country/egypt/21405/ His sin was seeking to provide help to his fellow Coptic Christians, and hers was being his wife. Maybe we might associate those doing the shooting with radical Islam, though it is hardly legitimate to automatically dissociate those behaving badly from mainstream Islam.

However, the article also reports a celebration in the village when they heard (incorrectly) that the Christian couple was dead.

This is not an isolated incident but the daily experience for Christian living in Muslim countries. Permission to build or even repair churches is often rejected, and those that are built are often burned down. Such burnings are common in Nigeria and Indonesia. Christians are often beaten and raped. (http://www.compassdirect.org/english/country/pakistan/21482/)  Police are reluctant to make arrests in many of these cases. The list of atrocities and injustices inflicted on Christians on a daily basis by Muslims could do on and on.

Franklin Graham’s concern and mine is how it must dishearten these Christians living under such oppression to hear Americans call Islam a religion of peace. President Bush had a habit of doing this while the Iraqi church was literally decimated by killings and kidnappings under his watch.

But no, there must be some mistake. We know that all religions are good—except for Christianity. That is the platform of Michael Weinstein, president of Military Religious Freedom Foundation, under whose influence Graham was disinvited.

Graham had truth on his side. Weinstein had the support of culture. In our society, culture trumps truth every time.