The Decline and Fall of Evangelicalism?

I was sent this article by my Dad. It's worth the read. Don't choke on the CSMonitor source, Spencer is certainly no C-Scientist, and the article is a summary of a series he had on his own blog. I have run into Spencer's articles in various place in the past year or two. He's definatley thought provoking. I'm not sure I agree with every point in this article of course, or the causality of said implosion. ...but that's nitpicking. The bulk/substance is some pretty solid criticism and reminds me of some books I read by Os Guinness, and others years ago. It has come true. Evangelicalism is in a downward spiral.

Evangelicals are notorious for chicken little political and cultural analysis, but I think what is different here is that Spencer's analysis is less prophet of doom and more state of the union.

 

I came across this video on a friend's website a while back,
Piper puts it pretty clear...



...I think I have the same fear.

For the church today, doctrine is optional, knowledge is personal experience, wisdom is often personal intuition, community is conditional, and felt need and "what can this passage do for me?" shape most preaching. "Relevance" rules, and today's churches are probably more culturally shaped than Gospel formed.

I grew up a church kid, and I used to wonder how there could be a great falling away? How could people leave the Church? Desert the Gospel? I thought, 'that must be in a future whose preconditions are a long way off' .... but now I think they might be uncomfortably close to home in our age. Like Piper I fear that many people in evangelical churches don't know the Gospel. They have come to Jesus for dubious self improvement reasons, not because they are sinners, wholly lost in sin and bound for hell apart from the Grace of God in Christ. 

I have had some discussions over the past two years with my students and various others regarding "The Way of the Master" evangelism series by Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron. It's an approach to evangelism that emphasizes a need to show a person their sin and utter separation from God first. Only when a person knows their hopelessness can the hope of the Gospel be clearly seen without distraction. 

It is interesting what a discussion of this approach has revealed about the understanding of the Gospel among Christians from Bible teaching churches. Putting the Holy standard of the Law up front so that sin is revealed is a shocking approach to many in evangelical culture today. (Those of us who hung out with Martin in His small catechism immediately sense the binary Biblical pattern of Law and Gospel.) The fact that the message of the Law is shocking to many makes me wonder what they are used to hearing, and what they personally understand they were saved from and saved to.

Evangelical culture has tended to put the personal benefits of salvation front and center, both in evangelism as well as church life. I once heard a pastor say that what you use to draw people, you will also use to keep people. If we have drawn people with the promise of Jesus as the key to a better life, what will we keep them with? We invite people to come to Jesus so they can get their life straightened out, then continue with preaching that presents Jesus as the key to the maximized life. It's not about what the text says, but what it can do for you.

What Joel Olsteen shamelessly places in the center of his sinless-self-improvement christianity, is probably the subtle mantra woven into much preaching and church culture: Evangelical culture is all about our Best Life Now. It's what I sarcastically refer to as the church of Pimp my Ride. No Sinners in the hands of an Angry God in church today.

So...who's in church? What do they believe? What are they here for?

The question my discussions with these students and others has brought up is the question of what is it that is preached in most churches today? What "Gospel" are people getting "saved" into? As Ray Comfort rightly questions, does the self improvement Gospel really save? Maybe I've read too much Luther and Bonhoeffer and Paul (...is that possible?) but I have the same question; can you preach the Gospel without first preaching the Law?

...Or is that Cheap Grace? ...and therefore not Saving Grace?

When things get tough, when Gospel fidelity becomes costly, and the church no longer appears "self improving" to the masses, we will experience 2 Timothy 3. I think that is what Spencer is getting at.

The hope is, as always, abiding in The Vine. The Source of true life is there, not Church. But we cling to that vine in clusters because that is how we are made to grow. Contrary to our hyper-individualistic self-determining culture we need each other. We need to be where the Gospel is faithfully proclaimed in a way that holds us accountable to it. Teaches truth and doctrine that form us, not principles we extract from it. We need to be among Gospel formed people forming a Gospel formed accountable Christian community ...not just "families of association" or community of convenience (Bonhoeffer's Life Together springs to mind as a definition) and then faithfully living, witnessing, and proclaiming the Gospel.

...There are still some of these around, precious few, but there are some new clusters forming on the vine with this awareness and intention in mind. But is going to take a counter-cultural... maybe even counter-evangelical-culture commitment to create, maintain, and defend such a creed and community.

The real Church existed before there was Evangelical, Relevant, Emerging, Emergent, or Contemporary and it will exist after all that is dust. We should make sure we don't mistake one for the other.