In the fifties there wasn’t much to do for entertainment in the rural community where I grew up. The little country church my family attended held a couple of revivals each year. A firebrand preacher was usually invited to bring the “messages” and folks would come from all around to hear him. For that week it was the best “entertainment” in the community. Even the unchurched attended. That’s why revivals worked as an evangelistic outreach. People came to know the Lord through these revivals.
For much the same reason, through the 1950s churches thrived by simply being there. There was not much competition on Sunday, even in our towns and cities. Cinemas, shopping, and sports events weren’t open for business on Sundays. Nothing else to do, might as well go to church! The church was the place to be.
But now it’s the 21st century. The church has plenty of competition. Cinema, shopping, television, the Internet, and a multitude of other activities are competing with the church on Sundays and every other day of the week. We can no longer just erect a building, put a sign out front that says church, and expect people to come.
But that should never have been our strategy for making disciples of Jesus. Those methods made church members, but did not always make obedient disciples of Christ. Jesus never called the church to be a social club where friends gather for a short while and then go home. This kind of church was described several years ago by Chad Walsh in his book Early Christianity in the 21st Century. “Millions of Christians live in a sentimental haze of vague piety, with soft organ music trembling in the lovely light from stained glass windows. Their religion is a pleasant thing of emotional quivers, divorced from the will, divorced from the intellect and demanding little except lip service to a few harmless platitudes.”
This kind of church was described even earlier by the great theologian Elton Trueblood. He suggested that many Christians have been inoculated by just enough “Christianity” to keep them from catching the real thing. My sixty plus years of experience in the church has convinced me that Walsh and Trueblood were right on the money. Very few people in America are atheist or even agnostic. They just believe God doesn’t have much to do with their life. Church members see themselves as “believers.” The problem is they believe in a Jesus that saves, but not the one who calls those he saves to radical discipleship.
The institutional, social club church of the 1950s will not survive the 21st century. But a church that takes seriously God’s call on our lives will thrive. When we feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, welcome the stranger (rich and poor), give clothes to the needy, care for the sick, we will attract others who want to be a part of something that makes a difference. When we address life issues such as unemployment, divorce, addiction, and family conflicts, we will attract those who are hurting. When we provide a nurturing place for children and youth and help parents with the awesome responsibility of raising kids in a hostile world, we will attract new families.
When we take the gospel seriously, serving as faithful disciples, God will bless our work of service and our churches will grow in quantity and quality.
Do you agree the methods that might have been somewhat successful in the fifties are not making disciples in the 21st century. What do you think we should change?
Reposted from The Transformative Church website. Read the original article at: http://www.transformativechurch.org/2013/01/25/the-fifties-church-vs-the-21st-century/
About the author:
Dr. Gary Thompson is a retired United Methodist pastor. He writes adult curriculum for the United Methodist Church. His passion is helping the Christian Church more effectively fulfill its mission of making disciples of Jesus Christ and helping individuals identify and fulfill their God-given personal mission.
[A] church that takes seriously God’s call on our lives will thrive. When we feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, welcome the stranger (rich and poor), give clothes to the needy, care for the sick, we will attract others who want to be a part of something that makes a difference. When we address life issues such as unemployment, divorce, addiction, and family conflicts, we will attract those who are hurting. When we provide a nurturing place for children and youth and help parents with the awesome responsibility of raising kids in a hostile world, we will attract new families.
ReplyDeleteMy wife and I were formerly members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), so I will use it as an example. The ELCA has all of the aspects that Dr. Gary Thompson described. And the result has been an unqualified disaster.
Dr. Thompson's first sentence is the key to the ELCA's present difficulties. Because of the single-minded devotion to "social justice" the ELCA has substituted its own will for God's will. Instead of calling on Christians to roll up their sleeves and actually feeding the hungry themselves, the message is to outsource the job to government and other large organizations. Instead of reminding Christians that marriage is a sacred institution ordained by God and not to be entered into lightly, the popular idea is that divorce is no real biggie, and the kids probably won't feel too much pain. Instead of contending for the faith, the popular belief is that the apostles did not possess modern scientific knowledge and therefore are not to be taken very seriously. In the ELCA’s view there are many paths to God (or the gods, or whatever), and there is probably not a hell or a heaven anyway, so why not make heaven on earth ourselves? Why not become gods?
It is therefore not surprising that the ELCA, despite having undertaken many of the actions Dr. Thompson listed, remains a dying denomination with a dwindling membership. This slow death, along with the exodus of Christians who have become fed up with the increasingly frivolous and un-Biblical nature of the ELCA, has created a vicious negative feedback loop. The destructive habits and impulses that have led to the ELCA’s current predicament are magnified (since there are fewer Christians left who are raise questions and challenge the trajectory), while true repentance becomes not only more unpopular but increasingly unthinkable. And for all of its talk about diversity, many pastors and leaders in the ELCA tend to see the world in stark, even simplistic terms. If (for example) you believe that the homosexual lifestyle is sinful, you are derided as a homophobic bigot obsessed with sex. If you feel that the ELCA should not place such a heavy emphasis on secular political activism, you are accused of being blind to the world’s suffering. And so on.
Ironically, the ELCA’s emphasis on salvation through secular political activism is causing many of its worthwhile activities to suffer as membership slowly hemorrhages. A faith that holds “social justice” to always be more important that fidelity to the Scriptures will eventually lose both.
So I would say follow Dr. Thompson’s prescription, but be aware of the fact that if you do not seek God in what you do, and if you forget that it is not your job to usher in God’s kingdom all by yourself, you run the risk of creating something much more diabolical than a 1950s social club.