A new survey of U.S. adults who don’t go to church, even on holidays, finds 72% say “God, a higher or supreme being, actually exists.” But just as many (72%) also say the church is “full of hypocrites.”
Indeed, 44% agree with the statement “Christians get on my nerves.”
LifeWay Research, the research arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, based in Nashville, conducted the survey of 1,402 “unchurched” adults last spring and summer. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.
The survey defines “unchurched” as people who had not attended a religious service in a church, synagogue or mosque at any time in the past six months.
Y’know.. as a Christian who attends Church, I can agree that “The Church is full of hypocrites” and “Christians get on my nerves”. I can also say the exact same thing for people outside of Church and non-Christians. I don’t see the point.
Yes, “the church is full of hypocrites.” Actually, the truth is much worse than that! The Church is full of sinners!
YBIC,
Phil Snyder
Phil is absolutely correct. One of the issues lies in the way we present the Christian faith to nonbelievers. We are all sinners in need of a redeemer. When we receive the gift of faith through God’s grace, we still sin. Sure, we are forgiven and counted as righteous. But we are still sinners and ought to be confessing this fact, begging God for forgiveness. We go to worship to receive God’s gifts of His Word and Sacrament. Church is God’s doing, not ours. This is how I think we should present our faith to the unreached, and to folks who profess faith but do not wish to formally affiliate with a church.
I think there are a number of reasons to account for the rapid decline in the past decade or so of church-going adults. One factor is, I think, the waves of battle in the culture wars which turn off so many young people; the fights going on in Anglicanism probably contribute to this. Another is that post Gen.-Xers do not understand nor are attracted to doctrinal matters generally. And frankly, while we may agree that we are all sinners in need of amendment of life, sin is not a topic that draws a large crowd. Even in some of the mega-churches where you can hear a primarily self-help, therapeutic message (e.g., Joel Olsteen), the audiences (that’s what they are) are largely composed of people over forty-five. The culture wars (including the one over homosexuality) simply have turned off a large number of younger adults.
However, there is a growing number of younger adults attracted to the emerging church movement. Christianity will survive, but probably in a much different form than the denominational structures we are committed to. It currently is growing in smaller house church type groups not identified with a denominatiion but who are seeking to recover what they believe is an authentic Christianity they don’t find in the established churches. Some are “Angloemergent,” discovering in our liturgy a structure for worship that sits well with their truth-seeking.
Sociologist Phyllis Tickle has become a widely regarded scholar of what she and others (e.g., Brian McClaren) are calling the Reformation of the 21st Century, at the center of which is the “Emerging Church.” Tickle will be leading a workshop on the topic at my parish this month and I look forward to hearing her most recent thoughts on this growing movement.
A further thought. What the emerging church movement thrives on is networking. We have entered a new cyber-life of faith
“do not forsake the assembling of yourselves together, as some are in the habit of doing”.
It’s risky, spiritually, to go it alone and yet still call yourself a ‘Chrisitan’. “I can be a Christian and not attend church!”. Part of the ‘Rugged Individualism’ of Americanism that has affected our mindset when it comes to Christian Identity.
That said, we dropped out of church for about three years due to a move, and circumstances, and troubles within the denomination, and are now struggling to get back into the habit! I gotta tell you, people, it’s HARD! One gets used to sleeping in on Sundays, or have to remind oneself that you have to stop whatever you are doing at 3:00 to get ready for the 5:00 Sunday service! I wish I could say we are getting there, but we still skip more than we attend. 🙁
I think that in Western Society we are simply facing the fact that Christendom is over. Without in any way pooh-poohing the need for creative evangelism, I think we need to understand that the Church will not ever reach all the people in a given society. A few thoughts:
1. Several of the comments in the article read to me like people who are intellectually lazy and are taking the easy way out:
In other words, they want to believe in God, but only in a god that blesses and affirms whatever they want, lets them do whatever they want, lets them ignore Him whenever they want, will always be there for them, and doesn’t require anything from them.
2. With the fall of Christendom, we should expect that less people will go to Church.
Bingo! Christendom is no more. Social standing is no longer tied to whether you go to church or not. Since about 400 AD, if you wanted to move ahead in Western society, you had to go to Church whether you believed the Gospel or not. In today’s society (and especially in Canada and Europe), we are moving towards the situation in which if you go to Church, you run the risk of seriously compromising your ability to move up the societal ladder.
3. There is a good deal here of Western individualism.
I think that this might factor back to the lazyness aspect. Accountability typically produces results. If you don’t want results, you don’t want accountability.
4. How honest are some of the perceptions?
Yet, I recall a recent study that proved that the midwestern religious folks were indeed more generous and giving then the secular city folks. I am thinking that this is the perception that lazy people want to have about churchgoers because it rationalizes why they don’t go.
5. Now here is something we should pay attention to!
Some churches do come across as highly annoying. What has always annoyed me about churches is not deeply held doctrinal positions (though I may disagree with them), but rather 1) strong judgmentalism for positions deemed essential to that church but not widely held in the Christian Church; and 2) the smarmy dressed-up feel of many churches that makes you think you are at a used-car salesperson convention.
6. Society is “Me”-focused, while the Church is “Other”-focused.
The only problem the Church can solve for people is to tell them about Jesus Christ who has taken away their sins. If we try to attract people to church by trying to be a therapeutic warehouse for American society by making people “feel good about themselves” we might as well shut our doors right now.
[i]The only problem the Church can solve for people is to tell them about Jesus Christ who has taken away their sins. If we try to attract people to church by trying to be a therapeutic warehouse for American society by making people “feel good about themselves†we might as well shut our doors right now. [/i]
[b]Amen![/b] I’ve been in a congregation where it seems like every year the rector was introducing yet another ‘pop psychological fad’ to the congregation: the Road Less Travelled; The Enneagram; TA; Myers-Briggs; Spiritual aptitude survey; etc. And then moving along to the next new thing before we could find out WHAT it meant to us as a congregation. As a result, we had a lot of infighting over this nonsense. It turned us off (see my post #6), and caused us to start our road of stopping attendance on a regular basis.
P.S., I went back for a visit to a friend still in that congregation, and they are now doing a parish wide study of Matthew Fox’s “Original Blessing” where he says we must re-interpret Genesis 1-3 as the original blessing and not original sin. 🙁
#4 Bob from Broome, what stop people going to the Protestant Mainstream is the LIBERAL NEW THING RELIGION, Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbiterians liberal congregation are so Christians as the LDS, UNiversalists and Witnesses
While I am sure that part of what keeps people away from church is that there are hypocritical, self-righteous people there, or people that are simply awkward to be around, and so on — but there is one factor that we have not mentioned. The thought of attracting people to church by being pleasant, open-hearted, appealing to the felt needs of those in the surrounding area/culture is a helpful one. We do need to proclaim a biblical message and to interact with people in the most gracious way possible.
That being said — we are not dealing with someone neutral when we deal with an unbeliever. We are dealing with a sinner who is in rebellion against God, and who will seek to find as many reasons not to believe, or even to be in the company of believers, as possible. Paul reminds us in Romans 1 that even though God’s power and goodness are discernible in creation, men and women still suppress the truth and hang onto their rebellion as tightly as possible.
Fifty or sixty years ago, Satan could protect his fiefdom by filling the church with sociable non-believers who would insulate one another from the gospel. Satan still keeps people from the Gospel by encouraging the ordained to believe strange and ungodly things — but he seems to have added a the attitude that churches that are not “up to date” are mean and selfish places. Some times that may be real — but how often is it just an excuse not to have to deal with one’s sins before the living God?
The “Emergent Church” is just a new tag for the same, old, worn-out, social liberalism dressed up in robes and liturgy – only this time it is dressed up in casual clothes with a post-modern, Internet flavor. It gives some hope to the 60’s generation of aging hipsters that what they want to be true will somehow turn out to be true.
As one of the “unchurched” I’d like to address a few things the commentators have said that need some addressing:
BfB #4: “Another is that post Gen.-Xers do not understand nor are attracted to doctrinal matters generally.”
We do understand and debate these matters, sometimes to great length. Key Christian dogma, such as the divinity of Christ and the existence/need for hell, are brought up and defended regularly. Now, other doctrine, such as Transubstantiation and the Perpetual Virginity are seen as being unimportant stumbling blocks. Does it really matter if Christ is physically or symbolically present in the wafer so long as we all take the same communion in the name of the same God? This will bring me to my next point.
Also in #4: “However, there is a growing number of younger adults attracted to the emerging church movement. Christianity will survive, but probably in a much different form than the denominational structures we are committed to. It currently is growing in smaller house church type groups not identified with a denominatiion but who are seeking to recover what they believe is an authentic Christianity they don’t find in the established churches. Some are “Angloemergent,†discovering in our liturgy a structure for worship that sits well with their truth-seeking.”
Why, yes, house-churches are coming back into style and denominations are breaking down. I hope that this will bring us, not into a new form of Christianity, but back to a “Catholic” Christianity, in the original sense. Too long have divisions inflicted suffering on the Body of Christ and hampered our mission to spread the Gospel. Too long have we let cathedrals and buildings define our spiritual lives when it was the gathering of the community of believers which mattered all the more. And, on a snide(intended) note: If we don’t have a cathedral to begin with then we never have to worry about a Presiding Bishop trying to repossess it.
Now, if we are attracted to an “Anglican” liturgy it is for a very good reason: The Anglican liturgy from the 1662 BCP is extremely close to the traditional liturgies preserved by the RCC and GOC.
But hopefully what does finally “emerge” will truly be Christianity and not just a new fad in spirituality. We have far too many of those already.
Now to address Phil’s offended feelings in #2: “Yes, “the church is full of hypocrites.†Actually, the truth is much worse than that! The Church is full of sinners!”
Yes, and praise God for each and everyone of those sinners. But let’s try and cut down on the hypocrisy, please? Hypocrites, no matter their lefward or rightward leanings, have a tendency to nail genuine people to crosses. Remember, it took both reappraising High Priests (Saducees) and reasserting rabbis (Pharisees) to attempt deicide.
There is a big stinking pile of hypocrisy dividing the Anglican Communion right now: homosexuality. Both sides are equally guilty, the tEC for ignoring pretty much any moral claims on God’s part and the reasserters for either not allowing gays to slide or not taking the entire community to task.
This means: No more divorced priests, no more “forgiving” priests caught in adulterous affairs, etc. If the role of the priests and bishops is one of Church leadership then the following must be realized: within the Church we are led by example, the person doing the leading must be the one not with the most knowledge and degrees in theology, but with the most loving, graceful, and (above all) holy life.
And, please, before we even begin trying to pluck out that speck of sexual ethics out of the eyes of my generation could we remove that huge 2X4 of slander, gossip, and back-biting from the ocular cavities of the previous?
The Church is indeed full of sinners. The main problem is only a very few of us are actually trying to get better, while the rest only wish to argue with the doctor about his treatments.
No. 13 – Sounds like you know just what the “real” church should be like. And, just to mention one thing – Wouldn’t be important that Christ really be “there” in the eucharist, rather than be there just symbolically?. Thx.
As to the house-church thing: A year and a half ago, because we had a pastor who developed an obsessive power hunger, a number of us left and held our Anglican services in the home of one the “exiles.” it was very pleasant. We used the morning service because we could not have a mass, but this suited me perfectly well because I love the morning service. I used a simple Yamaha keyboard so we could have music for our hymns. Then everyone had breakfast and talked and talked and talked. No gorgeous robes, no pomp and circumstance, but the 1928 BCP, the hymns, the morning service. I found I didn’t need more. I would go back to that practice at the drop of a hat. The gospel message made a lot more sense in that context. I could HEAR it better.
About the eucharist, scripture makes it clear that it was meant to be symbolic. Read the event again. The audience is made of of good Jews, and they weren’t stupid. They could see that the bread was bread, not flesh. And if they were supposed to believe that it really was flesh, what would a people with strict dietary laws say about eating raw human flesh and drinking raw blood? They would have fled in horror. Christ was present because two or three were gathered together. The bread and wine gave focus to this gathering. This is not mystical, it is spiritual, a rather different matter. This is all one needs. Larry
RUSSERT: We’re talking today with Mr. C. Potato, author of the best-selling book “Why I Never Go to Church.” Mr. Potato, do you EVER go to church?
POTATO: No, Tim. That’s why I’ve entitled my best-selling book, “Why I Never Go to Church.
RUSSERT: So in your case “never” really does mean “not ever.”
POTATO: Right.
RUSSERT: Why don’t you ever go to church?
POTATO: Because churches are all full of hypocrites.
RUSSERT: How do you know that?
POTATO: Everybody knows that.
RUSSERT: How can you know if you never go?
POTATO: It’s common knowledge.
The purpose of going to church is to hear the law and gospel preached and to receive Christ in the Sacraments. Luther said that everyone is a Saint and a Sinner at the same time.
[blockquote]they weren’t stupid. They could see that the bread was bread, not flesh.[/blockquote]
Awesome. It’s good to know not only am I stupid, but a cannibal to boot. Me and all the rest of the stupid Catholics and Orthodox. Not to mention high church Anglicans and Lutherans. Oh, and the Church Fathers. Those morons. How could they not see how clear scripture was about this? They just didn’t understand Judaic dietary laws! Good thing the memorialists showed up 1500 years later to fix things. /sarcasm
Chris,
You beat me to it! 2000 years of teaching on the ‘real presence’ in the Eucharist is wrong, because modern scholars say they were wrong — that it couldn’t have been that way!
“This IS my Body”, “this IS the blood of the new covenant”; “unless you eat of the flesh of the son of man and drink of his blood you do not have life within you” have been misinterpreted all this time. by those who knew Jesus and by those taught by those who knew Jesus. Imagine!
The post-modern definition of historic theology: the study of how everyone in history got it wrong until we came along.
/sarcasm, too.
Hey, Ireneaus,
Shoudn’t that be RUSSETT not Russert? Goes with Potato better.
🙂
18 and 19, count me in as a real presence believer as well. Scripture is clear on this. And I count myself as an evangelical, not an Anglo Catholic. But this is getting off topic…
#14
Regardless of a “real” physical presence in the eucharist, Christ is truly present in a gathering of believers. “Wherever two or more are gathered in my name….” Christ is indeed in the room, I need not try and nail this presence to any wafer or goblet.
Further, I have always felt that with God the real and symbolic might not be quite as distinct as it is with us.
Go back and read the tale of the supper again and treat it as real people meeting in a real world. The sarcasm above is purposeless and only demonstrates that you have achieved orthodoxy. Now try reading the tale of the supper as if you were there, one of the disciples. What do you see? What did you hear? Did Christ offer you a piece of bread or a piece of flesh? Did he actually offer wine or blood? And when you drank the wine, did it taste like wine? Or blood?
You crank, and it was wine, no other thing. Given your Jewish background, would you eat a piece of bread that somehow has been turned into flesh? Would you? He offered you a piece of bread. You ate it and it was bread indeed. Would you suppose that you were able to tell a piece of bread when you ate it? Well, most of us can tell, even now.
Does it make a whit of difference what a thousand years of practice has declared? Of course not. Tradition can be, and often is, wrongedy wrong wrong wrong. Should you continue doing what tradition tells you to do even though there is no root for such practice? Hum, well. And will you also believe that Mary was a virgin, in spite of the Greek, all her life and that she was drafted into Heaven without intermediate steps? The RC is full of such pious nonsense. Are you fine with this?
The establishment of communion is neither obscure nor difficult. You can know pretty much what the disciples knew, and, knowing that, know pretty much what Christ was up to. See #22. Is he not right? That when two or three are gathered together, Christ is there.
The bread and the wine – the staff of life itself – seal the bond and give the ACT its significance.
What could make you think that Chridt would EVER suggest to his followers that they should actually eat human flesh? This is truly bizarre, a return to the old barbarism of eating your enemy’s heart so that you can acquire his courage.
You and LibJim have treated this issue with ridicule because you are unable and unwilling to treat it as you should: Real people doing real things in a real world. Your responses are those of who wish to dodge what they dare not face. You sarcasm rebounds on itself as mere sarcasm so often does. For sarcasm is a kind of rethorical question whose answer the speaker incorrectly assumes is foregone – which is the reason rhetorical questions so often damage the speaker on the rebound. Larry
No.22 – OK, then the Eucharist is nothing special. Sorry. no. 23 – It might be helpful for you to read what St. Thos. Aquinas wrote about the Blessed Sacrament, Presence and Sacrifice. It might disabuse you of the mistaken notion that the Presence was carnal. Think of it more as the Presence of Christ’s glorified body. Hope this helps.