The Church Must Change or Die

It’s almost cliché at this point (at least among apologists) to throw out the statistics about how many young people are leaving the church. But just in case you haven’t heard yet the figures are something like 65-75% of churched students are leaving the church after high school, many whom are never to return. This is indeed an epidemic and, even for people like me who are really terrible at mathematics, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that the church cannot endure forever with these kinds of losses. We must find a way to either stop these losses or make up for them or Christianity in America will be nothing more than something you study unfavorably in a secular history class about 100 years from now.

The church must either find a way to stop the hemorrhaging of our young people or we must make up for those losses through the means of evangelism and new converts. But, ideally, shouldn’t we be doing both? Shouldn’t we be giving our kids good reason to stay in church and follow the Lord Jesus? Shouldn’t we be winning people’s hearts and minds to the Lord Jesus all the time? What is wrong with the church today that we cannot keep our kids and we cannot replace the loss of them fast enough to keep up through evangelism?

When students who were raised in church make their exit, the two most common answers we hear from them as to why they left are “intellectual doubt” and “hypocrisy in the church.”

These young people don’t feel they can maintain their Christian beliefs in light of what they learn from the media (social or formal) which informs them that science is sufficient to explain everything in the universe, the Bible is full of errors and no different from other archaic religions in the world, that Christians are homophobic hate mongers, that human beings all really just highly evolved animals and that truth is just a social construction and there are no objective moral values that are binding for all people. God has been edged out and everything they learn in college and on YouTube points to the fact that their parents and pastors either lied to them or they are just back-wooded ignorant people that don’t know any better.

And talk about hypocrisy? The church is full of people who say one thing and do another. These kids are taken to church every Sunday and Wednesday and told that all of this stuff is very important but then the Bible is never opened in the home, the family doesn’t pray together and in many sad cases mom and dad divorce each other. Why should we expect that any young person should keep on believing in what we say is important but which we deny daily with the way we live our lives?

Allow me to add one more reason they are leaving the church, and I think it’s one of the biggest reasons that not enough people are talking about. They are leaving the church because they were never a part of it. I mean this in two ways.

First and foremost these kids never learned the gospel or, at least, they never accepted it. They have been taught moralism from the Bible and what God demands of them (or on the flip side that God loves everyone the same and expects nothing at all from them, they are fine just the way they are) and they are leaving after high school because they are lost! Why go to a building and play church if you are not part of God’s church (you know, in the biblical sense of church that means followers of Christ and not just a building)? The gospel has to be taught, constantly. Never assume the gospel, always preach it like it was the first time they were hearing it. If people have a relationship with Jesus that is real, that is, they understand their sin, need for a Savior and have repented and trusted in Jesus for new life then they won’t go anywhere. As Peter said to Jesus when Jesus asked the apostles if they would leave him also just like the crowd had, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, 69 and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.” If you really get the gospel, you won’t leave Jesus behind.

But let me toss to you the other nuance of my point that they are leaving the church because they were never part of it. We have done something really hurtful to ourselves as the church in America. We have separated our students from the life of the church. From the moment of birth we have nursery, then children’s church, then youth group, and then….oops….then they’re gone. We have put our kids into various corners of the church so that what? So that “we can get fed.” I hear it all the time. You can’t have little ones making noise in the service or at a Bible study because that distracts from people getting fed.

May I just say that church is more than just about you “getting fed” (that’s churchanies for listening to a sermon or Bible study)? Because it is. Church is about coming together as a family in Christ and worshipping God corporately, singing songs of praise, the word being preached, interacting with other believers in fellowship, all of which kids can do too. We need to not be so quick to shuffle our kids off to some corner of the church to be with just kids and we should be quick to model for them how to be a part of the church. Kids need to sit with their parents and other adults. They need to see mom and dad singing, putting money in the offering plate/box, turning pages in their Bible and following along with the pastor. Kids need to see that “this is what we do as a family.”

I’m not advocating that we rid ourselves of all peer group interaction. I’m not against having a student ministry, or even children’s Sunday school, but we need to make sure we are intentional about integrating kids into the life of the church. Intergenerational Bible studies and small groups and, for the love of all that is good and holy, stop children’s church! Don’t send the kids out of the service! Will it be noisier at times? Yes. Will you as a parent have to work harder and maybe miss some things the pastor says? Yes. But the dividend is called discipleship and it starts at home with the parents and the church as a whole has a responsibility to encourage young people to be engaged in worship and service in the church.

We have to, have to, have to answer these problems if the church is going to turn things around. We have to put a regiment of robust apologetic teaching that can combat the secularism our kids are facing. We really do have good reasons to believe Christianity is true. Better ones than our opponents have!

We have to take our faith seriously and live it out daily. No more going to church, time to be the church. Parents, read your Bibles in front of your kids and with your kids and pray for them and with them and not just on Sunday and Wednesday…is this real to you or isn’t it? Do what the Bible says, apply it to your life.

Finally we have to teach kids the gospel and not just moralize them to death with Bible stories and commands and, in turn, we need to disciple them as parents and as the church as a whole. We have to stop segregating the kids out of the life of the church. Show them that they matter, they belong, they can learn with us, they can serve with us and they can do Christian life with us. Heck, we might just learning something from them!

Discerning Doctrinal Priorities

I see a lot of people ready and willing to go to war over differences of opinion on various doctrinal issues. Some of the classic examples are, of course, Calvinism versus Arminianism, Young Earth Creationism versus Old Earth Creationism, and of course things like whether you can have a beer once in a while or not. There are plenty of issues that divide churches today and some issues are significantly more important than others to be sure. There are truly some issue which ought to cause division to some degree or another but there are issues which no one ought to divide over. The question is “How do we decide what makes an issue essential versus non-essential?”

I will not be so bold as to claim I have this all figured out and that you who read this should look at this the same way I do but, that said, I thought I would share with you how I see it.

I divide doctrinal issues into three categories. First rank importance would relate to the nature of God and the question of “What is the gospel?” Second rank would relate to issues that would make it difficult ecclesiastically for believers on opposite sides to worship in the same congregation. Third rank doctrinal  issues are things which should not divide fellowship in any significant way.

When it comes to the first rank issues I think the nature of God and the nature of the gospel are the two most primary issues in Christian theology. I think that because in my understanding they both relate to the most important being in the universe and who He has revealed Himself to be and how we can have a right relationship with him (salvation). I believe errant doctrines on the nature of God and the nature of the gospel are often damning and therefore, by definition, separate genuine Christians from false Christians. It is for that reason that these are first rank matters and if we are to spend our time dogmatically defending any doctrinal position then these issues of who is God and what is the gospel should rank as all Christians primary concern.*

Secondary issues, then, are much less important than the first rank. It’s not to say that they are not important (they are) or that they don’t bear the worth of contending for one position over another (they do). But they don’t divide the body of Christ salvifically and so they are of dramatically less importance than the first rank issues. Examples of second rank matters might be believers baptism versus infant baptism (Credo vs. Paedo). The fact that I don’t believe we should baptize infants to usher them into the covenant community of God is enough to keep me from worshipping as a member in a Presbyterian church. It would be difficult for me to worship regularly as a member in such a church because I would feel by conviction that I would have to teach my children that what the pastor taught on the matter of Baptism was errant. So any issue that similarly and significantly would affect my ability to worship in a certain denomination or congregation is a secondary issue.

Tertiary issues, then, are even lower in significance. These are matters which one could have some disagreements about with other believers but not feel the need to worship in a separate congregation. Perhaps this would be something like the frequency of partaking in the Lord’s Suppers as a church or even one orthodox view of eschatology versus another. Any given congregation will have some minor disagreements among themselves about this or that and Romans 14 speaks to such a matter. We ought to have a firm conviction based upon the Scriptures but be willing to respect and agree to disagree with others whose convictions vary from our own.

Now, admittedly, this is just kind of a rough framework for thinking about how to rank the importance of doctrinal issues but I find it a useful one. Clearly some would disagree about what properly belongs in the third rank versus the second and some of that is understandable. Unfortunately some people don’t even think a third rank exists and they are constantly causing church splits or hopping from church to church to church whenever they disagree with someone. That is sad and certainly not in keeping with what Scripture has to say about this.

Even more sad is that some people don’t even recognize a distinction between first and second rank doctrines. Those who would make mode of baptism, or a particular view of the age of the earth or even the doctrine of inerrancy a first rank issue do damage to the body of Christ and they confuse their own theology (whether they be correct or not) with soteriology (salvation). I thank God that he does not require perfect doctrine for salvation but only trust in a perfect Savior!

*There is, however, one other concerning move that people sometimes make in relationship to this discussion. Some people dangerously move the first rank issues down to second rank issues and make it so that there are no clear first rank issues. This is just as dangerous, indeed perhaps more so, than those who collapse all other issues into the first rank.

Most Christians will at least tow the line of saying that faith in Jesus is essential for salvation. Some go the route of Universalism and Inclusivism unfortunately but most conservative Christians hold such views as suspect if not heretical (as I think they should). My greater fear is that many today have adopted the attitude that as long as you say you “believe in Jesus” then you are good to go and it doesn’t matter what you believe about the teaching of justification in Scripture.