Where Should the Church Go From Here?

The past 2,000 years of Church history have been a long and winding road.  The early Church tried to do its best to live out the radically countercultural reality of Jesus’s Kingdom in the midst of a hostile culture.  But beginning in the fourth century, there was a dramatic transition to Christendom, in which Christianity was established and imposed on all of society by the coercive, violent power of the government.  Then, in the modern period, there has been a transition to post-Christendom, as the political establishment of Christianity has ended and the Church has ceased to hold a dominant place in government and society.  

At this point, Europe, once the center of Christianity, has become largely post-Christian.  We can now see the same process occurring in American society, as the percentage of Americans identifying as Christian continues to decline at a steady pace (from 2011 to 2021, there has been a decline from Christians being 75% of the population to 63% of the population).^[1]https://www.pewforum.org/2021/12/14/about-three-in-ten-u-s-adults-are-now-religiously-unaffiliated/  And many Christian values once taken for granted in society, such as the Christian understanding of sexual ethics and the importance and value of the Church, are now widely dismissed in American culture.  

Understandably, many American Christians are alarmed at these developments, and are asking where the Church should go from here.  Many have a sense that the old ways of doing Church inherited from the time of Christendom will not work anymore in our new, post-Christian situation.  But the American Church is floundering as it attempts to answer the question of what a faithful and effective way forward might be.  

On the one hand, the remnants of the Religious Right attempt to wage a political battle to keep the American government, and therefore American society, at least somewhat Christianized.  By fighting this “culture war,” they hope to stem the rising tide of unChristian culture that is pulling young people away from the Church, and compromising the faithfulness of young Christians within it.  While the Religious Right’s intentions are good, and some of its political actions are valuable, it has received a good deal of legitimate criticism.  For the sake of political expediency, the Religious Right often gives unqualified endorsement of candidates whose platforms align with some of its goals, while muting its criticism of aspects of that platform that are clearly contrary to the Gospel.  All too often, there are blind spots in the Religious Right’s conception of what “Christian” political goals should be.  For example, the Religious Right is often associated with supporting a strong military, in spite of supposedly being a movement in service to the Prince of Peace who taught us to love our enemies.  

The more fundamental problem with the Religious Right’s strategy, though, is that it is essentially a futile attempt to turn back the clock to the time of Christendom, when Christianity had a place of undisputed dominance in government and society.  But we cannot go back.  Nor, given the deep problems with the Christendom model of the relationship between Church, government, and society, should we want to.  Genuine Christian faith and morality cannot be imposed by force on anyone.  They can only be established by methods that are consistent with the methods of Jesus’s Kingdom: persuasion, and the life and ministry of the Church.  The attempt to preserve the health and faithfulness of the Church by using the government to impose Christian values on all of society is misguided, since, at best, the end result of this strategy is to make people both inside and outside the Church somewhat “Christian,” with little clear difference between them.  This does not line up with the mission that Jesus and His apostles gave the Church of being a radically countercultural community of disciples that can visibly show the world what God’s Kingdom looks like.

On the other hand, theological liberals and so-called “progressive” Christians seek to keep the Church relevant by simply taking the ideas, morals, and values that are popular in our post-Christian American culture, and then covering them with a thin veneer of Christian language.  This may sound like an overly harsh assessment, but it is quite accurate.  They speak of, for example, Christianity being about “love” and “justice,” but they define these terms using concepts that are prevalent in contemporary American culture, even though these concepts directly contradict what Jesus and His apostles actually have to say about what genuine love and justice are.  Meanwhile, when they find that some very clear teachings of Jesus and His apostles, such as their teachings about sexual ethics, are difficult for contemporary Americans to swallow, they simply discard them.  Without genuine submission to the Authority of God’s Word, liberal and “progressive” Christianity becomes whatever people want it to be, which, predictably, ends up being what contemporary American culture is already saying, with some Christian language thrown in.

The well-intentioned attempt to keep the Church relevant by changing Christianity to fit with contemporary American culture actually ends up having the opposite effect: it makes the Church irrelevant.  If the Church is just a “religious” version of the rest of society, or a “spiritual” cheerleader for what society already considers to be “good,” then there is no reason for society to pay attention to what the Church has to say.  It is only if the Church embodies a radically different way of life and proclaims to the world a radically different concept of goodness that the world can truly hear the Church’s Gospel proclamation and benefit from it.  

As the Religious Right tries to turn back the clock to Christendom and liberal Christians seek to conform the Church to the world, evangelical Christians seek to counteract the decline of Christianity through evangelistic Church-growth strategies.  There is much in this that is good and admirable.  The Church certainly has a moral responsibility to evangelize the world, and we certainly should seek to reach the growing number of spiritually lost, unchurched people in our society with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  

The problem, though, is that, most of the time, the evangelistic message put forth by evangelical churches is merely a message about how one can have a personal relationship with God.  Rather than being a message about how one must deny oneself in order to become a participant in the story of the Gospel, it is a message about what God can do in an individual person’s life.  Rather than being a political message about the Lordship of Christ, who has established God’s Kingdom, it is a depoliticized message about how one can have a religious relationship with God.  Rather than being an invitation to be saved by becoming part of God’s Holy covenant people, the political community of the Church, it is an invitation to be saved by establishing an individual, interior relationship with God.  

The result of this type of evangelism is that among converts there is frequently a lack of understanding of the demands of Christian discipleship,^[2]See Unchristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity–And Why It Matters by David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2007). a lack of understanding that the Gospel provides any kind of challenge to the violent, selfish political structures of this world, and a lack of understanding of the central importance of the visible Church community to Christian salvation and identity.  We can have church growth strategies that “work” in terms of numbers, but we must ask to what extent they are really consistent with the advancement of God’s Kingdom.  As theologian Stanley Hauerwas puts it, “The strategies to attract “the unchurched” through the manipulative practices associated with church-growth advocates I take to be a desperate attempt to “save” Christianity.  From my perspective, church-growth strategies are but the gurgles of a dying Christendom.  The church-growth strategy to simplify the gospel. . . ironically, is a version of the liberal Protestant theological presumption that the basic language of the faith is a description of our experience rather than being about God.  The only difference between Protestant liberals and church-growth strategists is that the latter tend to make a fetish of the Bible.”^[3]Stanley Hauerwas, The Work of Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2015).

The Church should be concerned about evangelism.  But the Church’s success is truly measured not by the numbers of people we can claim as converts, but by our faithfulness to the Gospel and to being the holy nation which God has called us to be, a nation that can visibly show the world what God’s Kingdom looks like.  If we want to do this, we must return to the model of the relationship between Church, government, and society embodied by the early Church.  We must engage in intensive catechesis of young Christians and Christian converts, rather than assuming that Christianity is simple or can be taken for granted.  We must form the Church into a disciplined community of genuine disciples of Jesus by practicing strict church discipline, rather than assuming that Christianity is an individual affair and that the Church does not need clear boundaries.  And we must be willing to embrace suffering, genuinely loving our enemies (including the enemies of our nation) and accepting the fact that persecution will be inevitable in a post-Christian society.

Yet, few churches are committed to this biblical way of being Church.  Most are busy either trying to push back against the inevitable transition to post-Christendom, or compromising and assimilating into post-Christian culture.  Of course, God can still to some extent work through the modern Church in spite of its unfaithfulness, just as He worked through the Medieval Church, in spite of its unfaithfulness.  But this does not excuse our unfaithfulness.  

As the Church grows and thrives in other parts of the world, it will likely continue to decline in America, where a question mark looms over its future.  God alone knows what that future will be.  Those of us committed to following Jesus and building up His Church must simply do what we can to bring about reform and revival in the American Church, trusting that God is at work through us.

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