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.

William P. Young’s The Shack was destined to be an evangelical best seller. Eugene Peterson’s endorsement on the cover asserts, “This book has the potential to do for our generation what John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress did for his. It’s that good!”

An interesting evangelical trait is to brand books that convey concepts already embraced by the popular evangelical culture as bold and prophetic and groundbreaking. That’s what Peterson does here. I must admit that I am not a sufficiently adequate historian to know what Pilgrim’s Progress did for that generation, and I wonder what Peterson thinks The Shack will do for ours.

It has sold so well because it expresses in fiction form the contemporary evangelical mindset. Its popularity rests not in its presentation of some theological truth that we need to embrace but in conveying so graphically what we already believe.

We find God reduced to a jiving black woman. How more politically correct could he make God out to be? I am not suggesting that God is white. However, neither do I find Scripture characterizing God as being hip and cool.

And no doubt Young wants us to get in touch with God’s feminine side, even though Scripture portrays Him as a male. Yes, He can relate to us as a nursing mother at times, but if this inclination represented the essence of who He is, the Bible would have presented Him as a woman.

I had a professor at NYU that observed that, “God created man in His own image, and man has been returning the favor ever since.” Though this view of God does not reflect the one given in Scripture, it does match the God of today’s evangelical community.

This portrayal of God constitutes just one aspect of The Shack that corresponds to contemporary Christian culture. The whole book might be considered a commentary on the current evangelical mindset. Note, for example, the distain for the church. Even the format, the narrative, reflects the contemporary culture.

Therefore, what the book serves to do for us is further petrify us in our unbiblical view of God and life. The book is not ground-breaking but ground-hardening.

This acceptance of The Shack despite its unbiblical orientation reveals another facet of the evangelical approach to life. Of course, as with the secular world, the hallmark of contemporary evangelical thinking is acceptance. God accepts unconditionally, and so should we. Therefore, even though some aspects of the book might miss the scriptural mark, we are not of the narrow-minded, Pharisaical orientation that makes an issue of such minutia.

Rather, the wizened response of the thoughtful evangelical reader looks past those theological misrepresentations and reflects, “I believe I understand what he is trying to say.” In other words, if his intentions are good, we can overlook some heresy for the sake of making the point.

This approach to sanctioning fiction or nonfiction literature makes for a toxic theological climate. In our commitment not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, we have left the baby to wallow in some very polluted water.

But the worst issue resides in our failure to apply this spirit of understanding and acceptance and tolerance evenly. While we have all he toleration in the world for someone advocating heresies compatible with our culture, secular and evangelical, we extend no such latitude to those who are out of step with the culture.

When is the last time you heard someone say, “I don’t agree with some of the positions they take at Bob Jones University, but I think I know where they are coming from”? Contemporary evangelicals possess the capacity to swallow the heretical camel to their left, but strain at the gnat to the right.

This bias in toleration toward the left relentlessly shifts our thinking in that direction. Just as the frog in the kettle, the baby is not aware of how toxic the bathwater has gotten even though it has inflicted on him a life-threatening disease.