The One Who Left the Gate Ajar

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I’m a bit late to the commentary on iMonk’s post “Another One Gets Off the Evangelical Bus: Thoughts on A De-Conversion,” which is a response to a post by the blogger known as theBEattitude, “Losing my religion. Why I recently walked away from Christianity.” But I have to comment because this issue of people walking away from the faith is something we Christians must address—even more as the days grow darker.

In reading iMonk’s commentary and theBEattitude’s post and its follow-up comments, the one thing that strikes me more than any other is the travesty that is the loss of even one sheep from the fold.

Jesus says this:

What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. So it is not the will of my Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish.
—Matthew 18:12-14

I believe one of the most hollow vows American Evangelicals take occurs during infant baptisms and dedications. In nearly every church I have been a part of, the congregation pledges to join the parents in the spiritual development of the child. God takes such vows seriously, yet I would guess that fewer than ten adults in any given church will have any meaningful spiritual impact on that child’s life, even through adulthood. (And I believe that number to be generous.) When you consider the size of some churches, that’s an abysmal number.

The fact is, the average person in the pew has very little spiritual impact on the lives of fellow believers. The compartmentalized island that we call My Life™ here in America doesn’t make a whole lot of room for other people, and one of the areas we make the least amount of time for is discipling the less mature in the faith.

When I read the pile-on that functions as comments to theBEattitude’s post, it’s a stunning indictment of the spiritual wasteland that passes for modern Evangelicalism. I read through at least a hundred comments and most consisted of individuals stating (a) it sure is freeing to cast off the chains of religion, or (b) now you’re going to burn in hell, and it’s your own damned fault.

Apart from atheists rejoicing in their folly (Psalm 14:1), what got me more than anything was that the Christians who responded placed all the responsibility on theBEattitude for wandering out of the fold. To that I ask one hard question, “Oh, yeah?Well, which one of us left the sheep pen gate ajar?”

In a Christian culture that has de-evolved into the same “every man for himself” mentality that afflicts the worldly, placing the entirety of the blame on theBEattitude for apostasizing should come as no surprise. gate_sheep.jpgWhile it is true that each of us must give an account before God, it is just as true that too many of us who claim to be Christians don’t give a hoot about our culpability when the  gate goes unlocked.

When I read theBEattitude’s tale of apostasizing after 33 years of being in the faith and the junior-high-school-level questions posted that form the backbone of his wandering through the open gate, I have to wonder, What mature Christians invested in theBEattitude’s discipleship? How blind were they to his building on sand?

Yet on reading the comments to his post, I did not see any that said, “We fellow Christians failed you.” Instead, we want to blame theBEattitude for his failure. Rather than wonder how his end might have been different if all those adults at his baptism had actually followed through on their pledge to raise him up firm in the faith, we want to blame him exclusively for wandering out the open gate when there never should have been an open gate to begin with.

How easy it is to point the finger of blame at the person who was wronged.

And theBEattitude was wronged. I wronged him and so did you. We didn’t keep up our end of the discipleship bargain. No, we hoped that someone else would. And all that hope led to nothing but apostasy.

In every church around this country, there are people like theBEattitude. He is representative of an enormous problem facing the Church in America, a massive failure that increases each year with little effort on our part to lay aside our own little kingdoms and do something to stop the flight from the unsecured sheep pen.

It is a failure of individuals to take time for others in genuine community.

It is a failure to see the necessity of solid, biblical teaching.

It is a failure to build a comprehensive Christian worldview in impressionable people.

It is a failure to address the issues of the day from an intellectually rigorous viewp0int.

It is a failure to understand the eternal life-and-death nature of raising up the next generation of believers.

It is a failure to take seriously the vows we make concerning our young people.

It is a failure to read the times and prepare for the future.

It is a failure to understand what is most important in life.

It is a failure on our parts to humbly accept part of the blame when those in our care wander away from the faith.

It is a failure to love our brothers and sisters and, most of all, to love Jesus.

What tears me up every day is that this most precious charge doesn’t have to end in failure. That it does is mostly a reflection of our smothering love for our own lives. The first casualty is people like theBEattitude. We are the second casualty (Mark 8:35).

Jesus says:

Everyone to whom much was given, of him much will be required, and from him to whom they entrusted much, they will demand the more. “I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled!
—Luke 12:48b-49

We have been entrusted with so much here in America. Yet how is it that we care so little for that trust that we so easily blame the weak for their own destruction!

The following is a well-known verse most often used in a completely different context, but it applies most fully here:

Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter. If you say, “Behold, we did not know this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay man according to his work?
—Proverbs 24:11-12

Instead, how easy it is to blame those who are wandering off to destruction and absolve ourselves of any responsibility for them. The sheep have left the pen. Oh well, guess they’ll get eaten by the wolves. That’ll teach ’em!

But our God neither sleeps nor slumbers, and He knows who left the gate ajar.

Musings for a Monday Morning

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Many thoughts today…

Yesterday was  about the most beautiful day I can remember, one of those “It’s great to be alive” days. Wonderful morning in church,  a nice nap afterwards, some basic housecleaning, and then a fabulous afternoon and evening outside in absolutely perfect weather. Even spotted an Orchard Oriole on our property, a bird that in checking was not on my life list. How about that? Then my wife and I settled in to watch the second DVD of the Haibane Renmei anime series as part of a project for a friend. Even got to bed by 11:15. Just a superb day.

Which makes it all the more difficult to segue into current events…

While it may not have been the infamous History Eraser Button, Lee Grady of Charisma magazine claims “God Has Pushed a Great Big Reset Button.” In part, he says the charismatic movement is kaput.

You know it’s pretty bad when the Russians are claiming they’re now less Marxist than the United States. (For ultra-irony, the linked article was also featured in Pravda.) For further proof of the claim, perhaps we need look no further than this amazing bit of proposed legislation.

If you want to be really depressed, while also seeing how bad the economic situation is in our country (or your county), check out this animated, interactive map of spreading job losses.

Oxymoron of the week: A doctor who specialized in late-term abortions was gunned down in his Lutheran church yesterday as he handed out bulletins.  (So much for loving the sinner and hating the sin.)

Meanwhile, holding a Bible study in your home may now run afoul of local laws.

Risking brickbats and charges of heresy, the iMonk wonders if something is lost by being too God-centered. He also weighs in on the above San Diego Bible study issue.

CCM recording artist Shaun Groves postulates what the world would be like without the CCM business.

If you want to know how to write a compelling story, this serves as a perfect example of the craft.

Meanwhile, I watched 20 months of work on a novel I was writing, The Dying Day, go down the tubes thanks to J. J. Abrams.  Though I promised not to get dragged into an ongoing TV series again, having been a devoted follower of The X-Files for far too long, I got snared by the similar Fringe this year. To my horror, the final two episodes for the season mirrored the events in my novel’s plotline and the lives of my characters so thoroughly that the novel may be a complete loss. This is the second time this has happened, and this one is even worse than the first. A fellow writer tried to console me by saying that it shows that my ideas are marketable (online scuttlebutt was calling the Fringe finale “genius”), but that’s little comfort right now. Argh.

Did I mention that yesterday was just a stunningly perfect day?

Is American Evangelicalism on the Verge of Collapse? – A Response

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In my previous post “Is American Evangelicalism on the Verge of Collapse?,” I included a series of links that responded to a study showing a decline in American Evangelicalism. Michael Spencer of internetmonk.com riffed on the study, and Leith Anderson, the leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, rebutted Spencer’s article. (I would encourage readers to check the previous post for details.)

I want to thank those readers who responded to my post. Today, I want to add my thoughts.

Back in the dim, distant past (the mid-’80s), when the show was actually still funny, I enjoyed watching Saturday Night Live. One of my favorite characters was Martin Short’s tobacco industry lawyer, Nathan Thurm. 'That's a lie! I never said that! Show me the papers....'A sweaty, nervous man with a pronounced twitch, Thurm would be interviewed by 60 Minutes-type investigative reporters and would dodge any question that made Big Tobacco complicit in the deaths of smokers. To Thurm, everything that came out of the interviewer’s mouth was a lie, no matter how true it might be. He would spin every statistic, turn damning statements into PR copy, and keep glancing nervously at the camera to see if the audience was buying his confabulations. Watching Thurm squirm and twist the facts egregiously made for the comedy.

But Leith Anderson’s update on Nathan Thurm should make none of us laugh. If anything, we should be crying at how blatantly he spins reality as he dodges painful truths. And I say that with a pronounced heavy heart. None of what follows gives me any joy.

In what ways does Anderson pull a Thurm?

1. Spencer’s article is aimed at the decline of Evangelicalism in the West, with the U.S. being a key focal point, as reflected in the ARIS study. This is Anderson’s response:

Evangelical Christianity is rapidly growing in Asia, Latin America and Africa. Traditionally Catholic South America is fast turning into an evangelical Pentecostal continent. Christians are multiplying by the millions in Communist China. And in the USA? The growing edge of almost every evangelical denomination is Hispanics. Many of the largest and fastest growing evangelical megachurches in this country are Hispanic, African American and Asian. While white megachurches have been around for a while many of these new ethnic megachurches are just getting started.

Excuse me, but since when is Anderson’s title president of the International Association of Evangelicals? It is true that Evangelicalism is growing in places once deemed “The Third World,” but that is not the West. And the East is not the area over which Anderson presides. In other words, he fails to speak directly to the Spencer article’s area of focus.

2. Anderson notes a positive trend in U.S. Evangelicalism: the rise of Hispanic Evangelicals.

My question: If polled, how many Evangelicals would say that we have too many Mexican immigrants in this country, especially of the illegal variety? I see that hand, and that one, and you over there, and you, and…boy, that’s a lot of hands going up.

I don’t think there has been a group screaming for tighter border control than Evangelicals. Seriously. In fact, immigration issues are on the forefront of the culture wars, right up there with  abortion.

Does Anderson truly believe the collection of people he oversees is supportive of the growth of Hispanic churches, many of them populated by people of suspect citizenry? Sadly, I suspect that many of the constituency would love nothing more than if the attendees of those churches went back to where they came from.

Also, the rapid growth of Hispanic Evangelical churches is no counter to the precipitous decline in all other Evangelical groups, as the ARIS survey shows. In other words, this is a dodge by Anderson.

3. Anderson notes the rise of Pentecostalism around the world as a positive sign for Evangelicalism.

Imagine you’re a kid again, and you form a club for kids your age. It will be the best club ever. No uncool kids, just your friends. Then your Mom catches a whiff of your plan and asks if your kid brother will be included. When you say no, because he’s a whiny little kid and your club is only for older kids who have it going on, Mom tells you right away that he’s either in or there will be no club. Shattered, you relent, though not without a kick at the kitchen table leg and a lot of mumbling.

As someone who has been associated with a number of Evangelical churches and ministries over the years, I can say with no hesitation that Pentecostals are considered the snotty-nosed kid brother in the Evangelical clubhouse. They may be in, but they are merely tolerated.

Too mean? Then ask how the largest Evangelical denomination in the U.S., the Southern Baptist Convention, feels about their missionaries speaking in tongues. The fact that the mission board of the SBC tried to eliminate “Pentecostal-ish” members from serving is telling.

In fact, I suspect that the group of Evangelicals most ardent in their Evangelicalism would be aghast if people in their congregation spoke in tongues or claimed to have a word of knowledge, a gift of healing, or a prophecy to share. Evangelical churches split over such things.

So I find it disingenuous on Anderson’s part to hold up Pentecostalism as the bright, shiny hope of Evangelicalism worldwide, when a lot of Evangelicals wish that Pentecostals would stop crashing their club.

4. Anderson says its wrong to define Evangelicals by their political affiliations because the leadership isn’t political:

I have talked to thousands of evangelical pastors in almost every state and rarely have I heard any of them talk about politics. They talk about God, the Bible, faith, Jesus, salvation, evangelism, discipleship and a lot of other spiritual themes. The political label has been added mostly by the press, politicians and religious leaders not connected to or accountable to churches. If those who wrote the label now want to peel it off, most evangelical church leaders either won’t notice or won’t care because they are focused on what they’ve always been focused on–God, the Bible, faith, Jesus, salvation, evangelism, discipleship and a lot of other spiritual themes.

Even if one can say that pastors in Evangelical churches aren’t politics-minded (and that’s a stretch if one looks at the history of the Religious Right), there is no doubt that the people in the pews are. To be an Evangelical is to be a Republican. To be an Evangelical is to fight on the forefront of the culture wars, a battle that is waged politically.

The problem is that this battle has largely failed, as it was destined to do. Jesus alone changes hearts, government laws do not. If the people are ungodly, the laws will not turn their hearts to righteousness. When even James Dobson admits the battle is lost, it’s lost. And that admission is creating havoc in Evangelical ranks, because for too many people, the culture war (as fought through political means) defines their entire Christian faith. That political manueverings have largely failed may, in fact, be one of the reasons that those discouraged people are abandoning Evangelicalism. They want a vital relationship with God, not their elected officials.

Lastly, Anderson’s comments tell us nothing of the bigger picture.  George Barna has  published numerous polls that show that Evangelical pastors do not adequately reflect their congregations. The pastors ARE more spiritually minded than the people they serve. In addition, they are curiously unaware of this at times, rating themselves highly on their ability to transmit the Gospel to their charges in a life-changing way that forms those people into little copies of themselves. But Barna’s numbers show that the people in the seats are two-thirds less likely to actually espouse what the pastor believes, no matter how much the pastor believes it. That’s a pretty serious  disconnect in belief between the leadership and the average Joe or Jane Evangelical. Anderson should know this.

5. Anderson says that the best exhibition of Evangelicalism comes when bad times strike:

There is a very practical way to observe the depth of evangelical Christian faith across America. The next time there is a tragedy–tornado in a small town, shooting at a school, apartment fire in a major city–listen to what the survivors say on television. You will be impressed by frequently declared depth of Christian faith in Jesus when facing the harshest traumas of their lives. This is the evangelical faith that has spread across our land and will continue into the next generation.

To me, what you are at all times better reflects a changed life than what you are when the heat is on. If people only trot out their faith in disasters, can they truly be counted among the faithful? Remember the old line: There are no atheists in foxholes.

It’s a sad state of affairs when the leader of the National Association of Evangelicals has to stoop this low to find anything positive to say about the movement he leads.

6. Anderson points to new blood as a positive sign:

In the coming decade many older local congregations will go out of business. Of course they will, just as many older Christians will die and many older businesses will close. But, have you seen what is happening in your local elementary school on Sunday mornings? Across America there is a rapid spread of new churches meeting in schools, community centers, restaurants, theaters and any other rentable gathering place. Almost all of them are evangelical congregations with young pastors and young parishioners.

Folks, all we’re doing in the above is splitting existing congregations into tinier and tinier factions. We’re recycling people. We’re passing around the same people and calling that church growth. For every new church plant that starts with ten families, those ten families were most likely cannibalized from an existing congregation elsewhere. Evangelicalism is not growing in the United States, even when younger congregations led by younger people are factored in. This is the whole point of the ARIS report.

Frankly, I am stunned at the Thurm-job Anderson did in his rebuttal of Spencer.

We don’t need leaders like that heading anything. He said nothing that dealt with the reality of declining numbers. Nothing. With a wave of his hand and a few words, he dismissed it all.

Look, we need serious people who talk bluntly and truthfully. The best thing Anderson could have done is to kick some butts and take names, to admit that the culture wars and political wranglings have diluted the Gospel message and driven people away from or out of Evangelicalism. He could have talked about the necessary things Evangelicals can do to stop the hemorrhaging.

So if he won’t, I will:

1. Get serious about evangelism.

Isn’t the word evangel at the root of Evangelical? If so, why aren’t we evangelizing people? If Anderson wants to know why the world is turning Pentecostal it’s because the Pentecostals are still serious about evangelism when most others couldn’t care less. Go to an Assemblies of God church some Sunday and I’ll bet you they have a wall covered with photos of missionaries they support. Now go to a non-Pentecostal church (especially the vaunted Evangelical megachurch) and attempt to find that same wall. Missing, right? Hmm…

2. Get serious about discipleship.

When poll numbers come back showing that 85 percent of Christian youth who go to college apostasize by the time they graduate, that’s one serious problem. And the fault lies in the pathetic Christian education departments most churches run—if they run one at all. I can tell you that the demise started when churches fired all their paid, trained Christian ed staff and replaced them with volunteers. In the defense of those amateurs,  there’s nothing wrong with volunteers teaching, unless they’re amateurish. And most of them are. They’ll claim they don’t have the time due to career obligations (which is another issue) to devote to doing the job right, so they don’t. Too many do just enough to get by. And it shows.

The lack of a coherent vision for Christian education in our churches manifests in the complete lack of biblical worldview in all too many Evangelicals. Barna has repeatedly shown that pastors rate their flocks’ adherence to a Christian worldview almost three-times higher than the actual response numbers show from those in the pews. We have got to stop lying to ourselves on this issue. The people in the seats don’t know the Scriptures, so they have no coherent framework from which to make godly decisions about life.

We need a decisive, coherent, systematic, cradle-to-grave indoctrination into the Christian faith for every last person who claims the name of Jesus. But we’re simply not doing that in the West.

3. Drop the political rhetoric.

Neither major party in the United States adequately reflects the Gospel. There, I said it.

All the political wrangling in the world will not change the hearts of people. Jesus Christ does that, not Sarah Palin, and not Barack Obama.

If Evangelicals are sick of the direction this country is headed in, then they must stop trying to ramrod morality down the throats of the immoral through one piece of legislation or another. Instead, get out there and lead people to Christ. He’s the only change agent that truly works.

4. Get the focus off of Evangelicalism as a movement/culture.

Evangelicals spend far too much time navel-gazing. Being a Christian is not self-focused, but others-focused. Let me tell you, people today have a high B.S. meter, and they know disingeuousness when they see it. We don’t need to put any more impediments in their way to Jesus. It’s time to take the focus off ourselves and get some real humility. When Leith Anderson pulls a Nathan Thurm, he does a disservice to humility. Better to fess up when seriousness is called for than to cop out in an effort to be positive .

5. Stop the factionalization.

Evangelicalism is dying in the United States because it is splitting into smaller and smaller pieces that end up becoming less and less effective. Evangelicals have become so brand-conscious that we now have a niche church for every possible need, just like we have a coffee flavor for every single person living in America. Our military may be shilling an Army of One, but that’s what the Church here is becoming—to its detriment.  If we don’t find the commonality and quite sniping at each other, we’ll become increasingly irrelevent.

6. Give the lax an ultimatum.

Dead wood is hurting our churches. It’s also inflating the numbers. The Southern Baptists claim more than 40 million people on their rolls, but only 15 million actually attend church on a regular basis.  It’s time for churches to tell people to commit or go elsewhere. The Army of the Lord won’t function as intended if the majority of its soldiers are AWOL. There are no private Christians. You either join the group or suffer the consequences.

7. Stop talking, start doing.

The Western Church cannot endure if we talk and talk yet fail to practice that talk. If the lost are to ever know that we are Christians and what we say is truth, we have to walk the talk. And we need to severely chasten those who make excuses for the lack of walking. We don’t need that kind of talk. With all due respect to Leith Anderson, his talk in his rebuttal to Spencer’s article just plain stinks. Where is the call to repentance and practice? Isn’t that why he’s president of the NAE? Shouldn’t he be doing more than just glossing over the genuine unpleasantries that American Evangelicals must face if we are to turn this thing around?

Evangelicalism in on the decline because it loved itself too much and loved the lost too little. It didn’t take the Great Commission seriously, yawned at the plight of the disadvantaged, and spent too much time preening. When its leaders only promulgate those errors and ignore the hemorrhaging, then it probably needs to be kicked off the national stage until it remembers its lines again and learns how to act right.