Anxiety about the state of the church is everywhere you look. Church professionals, lay and ordained, are constantly bombarded by books, articles, blog posts, Facebook updates, and on and on, all about how the church is dying, and why, and what we should do in response: save it! let it die! Often these recommendations come with a handy bulleted list.
I don’t think the church is dying, but it is changing. Or at least, the culture around us has changed, and we are–slowly, painfully–changing too. The question is, are these changes a cause for despair? Or hope?
We no longer enjoy the cultural hegemony that Christendom afforded–those many centuries when culture, political power, and the church were tightly intertwined. But I think this is actually a blessing.
The author’s closing statement indicates the problem, in my opinion: “With God’s help, the church that we are becoming will be more faithful, more like the topsy-turvy Kingdom of God and less like the hierarchical, power-and-money driven ways of the world. A church better able to preach peace and pursue it, to stand up for the prisoner and the captive, the poor and the oppressed. Not a bad trade-off, really.” Perhaps I am reading the author wrongly, but he seems to be saying, “I’m ok with less people coming to faith and being saved from the fires of hell, as long as we’re preaching peace.” Huh? He seems to miss the point that the pre-establishment Church grew by leaps and bounds, not by preaching “peace” but by preaching the Gospel. He also fails to note that TEC’s become a mirror of the world, hierarchal, power and money driven, culturally surrendered. Am I wrong?
As long as Christ lives, the Church will not die. Some branches may die and be cast into the fire however.
I don’t know about the church as a whole, but Cox’s parish St. Columba’s is in a difficult period of time. Since 2006, the parish has shed about a third of its attendance and plate-and-pledge has dropped from 2.8 million to about 1.8 million. That’s a significant decline outpacing both the Diocese of Washington and the national church.
This article is a self-comforting exercise excusing decline based on lukewarm unbelief and cultural conformity, and confusing it with cultural disestablishment.
I think we can take seriously cheers for the demise of Christendom when the cheerleaders voluntarily renounce the tax exemptions of their churches and the privileges of clergy tax exclusions and all the other vestigial trappings of semi-establishment. And that will indeed be a good thing, because then–and only then–can they genuinely enter the fray of convincing their fellow citizens that Christian faith is seriously about changing their world.
The churches will be the State’s neutered lapdog so long as they accept their chow at the State’s trough. But when the churches are genuinely free, their mission will still and always be the war of the Lamb, to make Christ the King in every heart and nation, a real Christendom.