Soren Kierkegaard

Why Christianity Is Failing in America – Further Thoughts

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I almost always post on Monday. I didn’t yesterday because I was thinking more about my post from Friday, “Why Christianity Is Failing in America.” A couple readers asked the question I knew would come—””So how do we fix the problem?”—which led me into all sorts of introspective thought.

I don’t like raising problems without at least some stab at a solution. There are a million Christian blogs out there moaning about this problem and that, and I don’t want Cerulean Sanctum to simply add to the collective complaint. I’m looking for answers.

The question of how to overcome the kind of half-baked, slacker mentality that permeates American Christendom needs better brains and souls than mine to find lasting answers. I struggle with this morass we find ourselves in as much as anyone. I’m not sure how to extricate myself, much less provide life-changing answers to anyone else.

Still, a few core concepts might lead to resolution:

1. We Christians must stop worrying about what others think. For all our talk in America of being individuals, for all our love of the iconoclast who does it his way, for all our national pride at stepping up to the plate when no other country will, we Americans are stunningly conformist. And we are that way largely because we are scared to death of suffering eternal damnation because someone in the fast lane might think we’re not good enough.

For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.
—Galatians 1:10

The Church of Jesus Christ in these here United States will keep on preserving the status quo as long as we fear men. And truly, we are shaking in our boots at what others think of us. Such a group will never be martyred. But it’s going to take some level of personal sacrifice to break the self-conscious chains that tie us to conformity to the world.

2. We have got to take time apart from the world and reconnect with the brains God gave us. We Christians in America are some of the least introspective people in the universe. Talk of the “examined life” goes right over our heads.

If I could wish one thing for American Christians right now it would be to jettison whatever it is that keeps us distracted 24/7/365 (even church-related stuff), and get before God in silence to pray.

But more than prayer, I think that modern Christians must take back time from wordly living to do something even more necessary in light of the times we live in: We must think and meditate.

I am continuously startled by how pragmatism is rapidly undermining the base that Christianity was built upon. We’ve become people who fail to consider the consequences of each “new thing” we promote, even when those things seem on the surface to be great for the Church. Fact is, most aren’t. “Because we can, we should” is practically the mantra of contemporary Christianity in the West. And it is that way because we live unexamined lives. We bought the world’s marketing and we’re remaking the Church in a pragmatist image.

The way we are headed, perhaps we should just jettison the pretense and go for it. I hear about the lack of men in churches today. So why toss another chunk of change at yet another doomed-to-fail men’s program purchasable from whatever the hottest new church is? Just put up the stripper poles and hire a few hot things in skimpy outfits to dance before the service. It would work. You could probably find a Bible verse taken way out of context to support it, too.

Too extreme? Well, that’s what happens when Christians don’t take time to think about the consequences of everything we do. We’ve trapped ourselves in this race to the bottom because we turned off our brains during our rush to consume and be  stylin’, with-it individuals like everyone else.

3. We have got to question the way we do EVERYTHING. We can go on and on about how Jesus turned the world on its head when He walked the earth, yet we go out from our Sunday meetings to live conformist lives that never question the status quo.

In concert with the call to sit in silence before God while asking Him to respark our burned-out minds, we Christians must begin anew to ask the question WHY. This is not an exercise with re-evaluating our doctrine. Too many churches fry their theology in the crucible of why. Instead, we need to place every aspect of our praxis as believers in America under the white hot stage lights of why.

Why do we sink enormous amounts of money into church buildings? Why do we slave in jobs outside the home? Why do we put our kids in private Christian schools? Why do we read only Christian novels? Why do we follow a church service order of worship, announcements, offering, sermon, go home? Why do we have a youth ministry? Why are there so few Christian leaders on the national stage who are making a difference? Why do we buy items made in the country of China that actively persecutes our fellow Christians? Why do we depend on others to feed us? Why are we letting Muslims outreproduce us? Why are there still orphanages? Why are we not making disciples? Why do so many of us wonder if we’re truly saved?

Why?

People looking to replace their “old” iPod they’ve had for two whole years don’t ask the question why. They don’t question anything except why they didn’t get their new gizmo in the mail the next day despite paying for overnight shipping.

People in the Church in America, on the whole, are not asking why. And worse, we’re not following up the why with the answer that the Gospel will give us. And that’s largely the reason why we keep doing things the world’s way and not the Lord’s.

4. Genuine community has never before been so needed. When Christians start sitting in silence before God, begin holding up their practices to God to be examined under the question of why and the Gospel’s reply, the next step is for the Christian community to join together to take what has been gained and change the world.

What Christian community?

Oh. Yeah. Hmm.

I no longer support the long-cherished belief that it takes one person to change the world. Fact is, with 6.5 billion people on this planet, nothing happens outside of groups. I can radically change my behavior and little around me will change. By its sheer enormity our culture tamps out whatever fires I may start as an individual.

Any godly change that will make a difference in the world today will not come through a scattered set of individuals but a like-minded group of hundreds—such as your typical church. That so few churches are able to spark that kind of change in their localities…well, you get the point.

The problems we face as a Church in America cannot be addressed by individual martyrs. And it’s going to take martyrs to buck the massive systems we’ve erected that blind us to the Lord’s way. You can crush an individual. It’s more complicated to crush several hundred people. The pressure is more equalized among all involved, with fewer individuals likely to crack entirely. (That’s the Body of Christ working as a genuine body, with each organ supporting the others.)

If I jump off the bridge, I make a small splash. But if several hundred jump with me, look out for the wave…

5. “Seek first the Kingdom” cannot be relegated to a platitude. Every Christian in the United States will raise his or her hand to the question of “How many here are seeking first the Kingdom?” But the biggest lie we Christians tell on a day to to day basis concerns how much we’re truly committed to that truth.

If you are a Christian, seeking the Kingdom first must necessarily change the entire way you live. It has to. That it’s not for so many of us only proves our failure to seek. We instead seek personal glory and comfort at the cost of discipleship. It’s as if we don’t believe in a life to come, only the vaporous reality of this physical world.

In America, pastors have the reins for leading people to Kingdom-mindedness, whether we (or they)  like it or not. In truth, every one of us is charged to spur on our brothers and sisters to growth in Christ for His Kingdom. But sadly, until the Church here gets some momentum, pastors are it.

And so I ask pastors, why (there’s that question) do so few of your charges get what it means to seek the Kingdom first? Why is it that your people seek houses, promotions, vacations, and comfort above the Kingdom? Worse, why is it that you preach sermons that only fuel people’s desire to fill their lives with that which sets itself up against the Kingdom of God?

A simple example: I’ve heard a bazillion messages on how we Christians can prosper in our own lives, but I can’t ever remember hearing a sermon explaining why Christians should seek economic justice for the poor, even if it means they must become poor themselves to do so.

Genuine Christian education is in a freefall in this country. Our curriculum is a shambles of wordliness. Our sermons only prop up fallen kingdoms. Our people never see genuine Christian practice.

And it’s all because we’ve made the Kingdom of God a concept rather than a reality.

The Church in America will reverse its tragic trajectory when fearless groups of Christians who have meditated on the tough issues of our day, who ask the question why, band together and put the Kingdom first again.

That’s highly conceptual. I know that. But it’s going to be slightly different depending on where one lives and the strength (or weakness) of the local churches in that area. (Maybe I’ll provide some general practical advice in days to come.)

This is a genuine tar pit we’re in, folks, and we’re up to our necks in the world’s black goo. I will even go so far as to say that revival alone is not the cure-all. The Lord can light the fire, but we have got to be more serious about what we do when He does. And that will take many of us thinking while we challenge the status quo. Perhaps it will even take us rising up before the best of the fire falls.

I think that talk is not cheap in this case. I think talk can stir up the dissatisfaction that many of us feel. Perhaps that will build the momentum for a new American Church Revolution.

We can hang together or we can hang separately. God is giving us the choice.

Why Christianity Is Failing in America

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Over at First Things, Jared Wilson posts a passionate call by Ray Ortlund Jr. for a recovery of the Gospel in modern America. It’s a needful call I utterly support.

Yet despite the clarion nature of Ortlund’s words, a fundamental problem exists that we Christians in America have been entirely unable to overcome.

I don’t believe that American Evangelicals don’t know what the Gospel is. I admit that no one person seems to grasp the entirety of the Gospel and its implications, but most people who self-label as Christians get the Gospel to some point.

But the messes we’ve made of living out the Gospel in a redemptive way, those many tangents that Ortlund describes so well that distract us from the real Gospel, are what they are because of a fundamental problem with America and American Christians.

The following quote from Kierkegaard captures the problem in a nutshell:

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world?

The Gospel demands something of us. It also forces us to see with a different set of eyes, God’s.

Red pill, blue pill--which will you take?The person confronted by the truth of the Gospel is like the person in the world of the movie The Matrix who is given the choice to take the red pill and see the world as it is from a different set of eyes or take the blue pill and stay blissfully doped against reality.

And that person, confronted with the truth of the Gospel of Christ, MUST then come to grips with these truths:

The American Dream is a vicious and all-consuming lie.

The way the American economy functions is antithetical to the Gospel.

The way we Americans live socially in our communities denies the Gospel.

The values we American hold dear more often than not war with the Gospel.

The Gospel demands the death of self, while the American ideal demands the exaltation of self.

The American system is cracked to the core and is rapidly failing, yet misguided American Christians spend enormous amounts of time and energy attempting to seal the cracks.

As Kierkegaard so ably said, if we American Christians genuinely lived the Gospel we say we believe, every single aspect of how we live, work, love, commune, and bleed would be radically altered. Almost none of the way we live would resemble the lifestyles we have becomes so enamored of. We wouldn’t recognize our old lives at all. And we would look so profoundly different from the rest of the world that it would have to sit up and take notice.

Ortlund makes the obvious statement:

To a shameful degree, we Christians are morally indistinct from the world. Why? One reason is that we think piecemeal, and our lives show it. We do not perceive reality from God’s perspective. We perceive reality from the perspective of our ungodly culture, and then we try to slap a biblical principle onto the surface of our deep confusion.

We all know this damning final assessment of the rich young ruler:

When Jesus heard this, he said to him, “One thing you still lack. Sell all that you have and distribute to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” But when he heard these things, he became very sad, for he was extremely rich.
—Luke 18:22-23

Our problem as Christians in America 2009 is not simply that we are more wealthy than 95 percent of the world’s population, but that every single aspect of how we live, work, love, commune, and bleed  MUST be “sold” to follow Jesus.

And we are simply unwilling to take that step.

But instead of going away sorrowful, we construct a syncretistic faith that melds the parts of the Gospel we can stomach with the life we cannot leave behind.

What makes this so troubling is that not a single one of us is immune to that syncretism. In fact, we have made it our religious security blanket, the warm, comforting deception that gets us from one day to the next. We marvel at the rich young ruler’s stupidity and yet we ourselves are even more deceived.

More than anyone, I want Ortlund’s call to resonate. But I fear it won’t. If we truly re-examined the Gospel and sought to live it purely, then nothing we experience in America would be free from questioning. In fact, everything that is not the Gospel MUST be questioned.

Yet who today will put up with those people who question the foundational shibboleths of the American Way of Life? We instead remain mute because too few of us are prepared to be martyrs for the cause. Taking the red pill may not only wake one up from the stupor, but it may also mean being attacked—and even from our supposed brothers and sisters in Christ.

If you and I truly stepped out in faith to live the Gospel we say we believe, it may well be that we would have to drop out of the corporate treadmill, suffer a freefall in the company hierarchy, watch our income plummet, and suffer the American indignity of no longer being able to keep up with the Joneses. It may mean we cannot get our children into the fancy private school, the top division sports team, and subsequently fail to send them to Harvard to mint their perfect future. It may mean that we reject consumerism and globalism, returning to a local economy that celebrates community and works to see that no one suffers at the expense of the richer among us, no matter how difficult it will be and what it will cost us. It may mean that we have to let go of long-time friends who suddenly hate our “class descent” and no longer want to be around us. It may mean that we live among the rejected people of the world (as we have become rejected ourselves). It may mean that we rediscover what the Lord meant by “give us this day our daily bread.” It may mean thousands of profound changes to the way we think and live that put us out of the mainstream and make life more chllenging, though in the end we realize the challenge is where Christ Himself dwells.

Believing the Gospel will destroy our American lifestyles. But as long as we are Americans first and Christians second, we have nothing to fear from the Gospel, and we can be thankful we downed the blue pill.

I am not confident that what Ortlund writes will make any difference. When the call for change comes from the very people who are enmeshed in the system and prefer it that way, hope comes hard. I know that every day I struggle to put off the shackles from which Christ has freed me. He unlocked the chains, but their weight upon me has become too comforting, too familiar. I am like a man for whom the entire world is a chain, because that is all I have known—and anything that is not a chain is too difficult and frightening to understand.