We Americans as a rule are too fat and too happy (or at least complacent). I don’t think that’s a very controversial statement. It can also be argued that American Christians are too, at least when it comes to their religion.
We glut ourselves on airy confections like the latest best seller by someone with big hair and perfect teeth or pop music that if it didn’t mention God once or twice would be at home only on a tween’s radio. We beg for books and movies where all the problems are solved and everyone is “saved” by the third act. We don’t feast on the roughage and solid sustenance offered by the Bible and the great men and women that have come before us.
It seems that the only good news we want to hear is that God will bless us financially if we but ask. We wail and moan that our country and culture need saving and speak not a word about the people themselves, unless it’s to call them names. We don’t like to challenge our own preconceived notions of what it means to be Christians. Notions based not on the Bible, but on hundreds of years of tradition and culture.
What are the consequences of these actions? People are leaving the church in droves. Some speak of airy things like “spirituality” and shun serious thought or discussion and who can blame them given the behavior of those that claim to be serious students of theology. Those that do stay in the church often do so more because of entropy than out of any sense that they should be growing closer to God or because of a desire to bring the Kingdom to the people.
I have heard it from brothers and sisters in countries that don’t have it as “good” as we do that faith in their countries is a living, vibrant thing and that God is working miracles right and left. Christians there are hungry for the truth because it has been denied them by governments or institutions. I would like to see that movement, faith, and hunger here. To hear some evangelicals talk the only way that we’ll see that is when the end times are upon us.
Now recognize that the above is a rant. I know that there are churches and Christians in this country that are seeking truth and doing Kingdom work. I know that some people are leaving the church for their own selfish purposes and not because the institutional church is sick. Life in these others countries, at least the spiritual, isn’t perfect and I can’t personally attest to any miracles.
Still, the current trend, if it continues unabated, would seem to lead to the church in American crumbling under its own weight (or maybe being strangled by a princess in a gold lame bikini). Now this may not be entirely a bad thing. The Christian Science Monitor published an article a while back that indicated that the Evangelical movement would be dead in less than ten years.
Can I get an “amen” to that at least being a good thing?