We aren't ready.

We need a deeper, stickier, stronger church.

Back when I was a student, I worked in an on-campus bookstore at SMU. One of my co-workers, a quirky guy named Joe, learned I was in seminary and started asking me questions about the Christian faith. In the course of that conversation, I learned that Joe didn’t know what Easter was. This must have been around 1997. I knew and worked with people who weren’t Christians. For him not even to know what Christians celebrate on Easter, however, surprised me. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Joe was indicative of a larger cultural shift that was taking place. Cultural Christianity was on its last legs, even in Dallas, Texas. The times they were a-changin’.

Today that same conversation wouldn’t surprise me at all. It’s hard to overstate how deep the collapse of Christendom goes. For those of us raised in the church, who grew up in the twilight of Christendom, it’s easy to miss the extent to which the intellectual and spiritual scaffolding of the Christian worldview has collapsed.

According to Pew Research, around 62% of U.S. adults identify as Christian these days. That’s a 16-point drop since 2007. 29% are religiously unaffiliated, and within that group 19% identify as “nothing in particular.”

While the decline in Christian faith in the U.S. has leveled off for the moment, we may not have seen the bottom yet. According to the same Pew report,

• Young adults are far less religious than older adults.

• No recent birth cohort has become more religious as it has aged.

• The “stickiness” of a religious upbringing seems to be declining: Compared with older people, fewer young adults who had a highly religious upbringing are still highly religious as adults.

• The “stickiness” of a nonreligious upbringing seems to be rising.

Part of what’s noteworthy here is that people who have been brought up as non-religious are more likely to stick with their beliefs than people who have been brought up in the faith. Why is that? Why is non-religious belief “stickier” than the Christian faith in our current moment?

There could be all kinds of reasons. We Christians aren’t exactly setting the world on fire (at least, not in a good way). The Roman Catholic sex-abuse scandals, the seemingly endless list of large church pastors involved in some form of sexual and/or financial misconduct, constant infighting, the politicization of evangelicalism… and have you seen how Christians behave on social media? It kind of makes me wonder why anyone would find Christianity appealing in our current context.

Of course, non-religious people are involved in scandals and controversy all the time, too, but they aren’t doing so while simultaneously claiming to have been born again and have new life in Christ. They aren’t claiming to live according to the teachings of Scripture. They aren’t calling sinners to repentance. We are doing these things, so when we’re caught doing the very things we’re decrying, we lose credibility.

Additionally, of those people who identify as Christian, it isn’t clear how much heavy lifting their faith does. A recent Gallup survey indicates that only about 44% of Protestants and 33% of Roman Catholics attend church weekly or almost weekly. That number drops to 26% with Orthodox Christians.

So here’s a problem: In the United States, we tend not to take our faith very seriously. Thus we can’t expect anyone else to take it seriously, either.

For a long time, we’ve tried in many and various ways to make ourselves palatable to the ambient culture. This is the essence of liberal Protestantism. It was an attempt to rethink Christianity in terms of the worldview of post-Enlightenment European intellectuals. As elements of that worldview—radical skepticism, a mechanistic universe, a rejection of traditional systems of authority, an inflated sense of the value of personal experience—seeped out into the broader culture of Western Europe and North America, churches and church-related organizations increasingly conformed to these perspectives. The results have been disastrous. The more fully denominations have embraced revisionist notions of Christian doctrine, the faster they have declined.

At the same time, following World War II we saw a generation of institution builders reach maturity, the so-called “Greatest Generation.” Church attendance became part of a cultural expectation. This generation gave birth to the Baby Boomers. Churches were full and vibrant. Many of the Baby Boomers, however, rejected the institutionalism of their parents, and that included the church. As the Greatest Generation began to age out, church attendance declined.

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

Of the Boomers who continued in the church, there was still a common (though not universal) impulse to shed the traditions of their parents. From the Jesus People movement to the Church Growth and contemporary worship movement that peaked in the 80s and 90s, many Christians divested themselves of rituals and practices that earlier generations had taken for granted. “Worship” became songs and a sermon. The traditional hymnody, the songs of our forebears in the faith, were exchanged for music intended to sound more like what was played on the radio. In the process, we lost a great deal: the formative practice of reciting creeds and the Lord’s Prayer, the eucharistic liturgy, the theological depth of so many traditional hymns, the communal prayers of the people, and more. By contrast, some traditions kept the form of religion—the elements of liturgy—while rejecting the orthodox theology to which liturgy has always been connected.

The theological vacuum created by the one-two punch of Protestant liberalism and the church growth movement set the stage for the “young, restless, and Reformed” crowd. On a rainy day in Memphis in 2000 John Piper preached his famous “Don’t Waste Your Life” sermon and did the very opposite of what the church growth movement was trying to accomplish. He stood in front of a large group of young people and told them that many of them didn’t give a rip about the eternal significance of their lives. He called them to something higher and better. He called them to give themselves to lives of significance in service to Christ. And they responded in droves.

That was a pivotal movement for the Reformed tradition in the U.S.

I’m Wesleyan, not Reformed (Calvinist). I’ve found myself in disagreement with Piper and other Reformed theologians about significant matters over the years. But we do agree on this: the church must call people out of sin and into lives given over entirely to God. If we’re not doing that, we’re just spinning our wheels.

It’s a different day now than it was in the early 2000s. Piper was preaching in what Aaron Renn has called the “neutral world,” one that was by and large neither positively nor negatively disposed toward Christianity. Today we live in the “negative world.” A big chunk of the Western world has a negative view of Christianity. People see us as anti-scientific, oppressive, patriarchal, homophobic, and hypocritical. Those who don’t associate with one of the major world religions in the U.S. are not, by and large, atheists. The human religious instinct is too strong. We are made for God, but, as the Bible teaches us again and again, we will seek after other gods rather than submit in obedience to the true God. The Western world isn’t becoming secular, but pagan, and pagans have never liked Christians. We’re not just trying to reach people for Christ. We’re trying to reach people for Christ who are hostile to both Christ and his church. That’s no joke. (By the way, check out my friend Andrew Forrest’s book, Love Goes First.)

We won’t do it with songs, a smoke machine, and a sermon. We won’t be able to make minor adjustments and accomplish the work to which we’re called. We can’t be attractional or passionate or passional enough to make the church palatable to denizens of the negative world. It’s hard to grasp how radical the change is going to have to be in how we think about the Christian life and the work of the church. If the church is an adjunct to the rest of our lives, we will continue along the same trajectory until the U.S. looks like the most re-paganized areas of Western Europe.

I was struck earlier this week by a Substack note by Sheila Dougal, someone I wasn’t familiar with before. I encourage you to click on the image below and read the whole thing.

Depth.

We need depth.

We need depth at every level of the Christian life. We need pastors, not influencers. We need theologians, not culture warriors. We need converts, not consumers. We need preachers, not platform jockeys. We need writers, not simply content creators (h/t Anne Kennedy). We need disciples who are immersed in the life of God through the means of grace handed on to us by fathers and mothers in the faith. The church must again become a community of deep formation touching every aspect of life, from our eating habits to our money to our bedrooms to the education of our children.

I’m not really a Benedict Option kind of guy. I find Rod Dreher brilliant when he hits. He can be incisive in his analysis and a moment later fall into an abyss of pessimism and catastrophizing. So while I’m not ready to adopt the neo-monastic lifestyle of his Benedictine prescriptions, he is on to something in terms of the kind of thick Christian culture we are going to have to develop in the days ahead. In truth we are already years behind.

In our current moment, we are losing ground. What will happen in the coming decades as AI revolutionizes entire industries (and more), the sexual revolution reaches some new iteration, Islam continues to spread through Europe, and Medical Aid in Dying (killing sick and old people) becomes more common? Are we prepared for this? I don’t think we are. We need a much stronger Christian culture for the present moment, not to mention what may lie ahead.

I’ll offer here a few suggestions regarding what a deeper, “sticker” version of church might look like:

1. Theological preparation. The people who proclaim the Gospel to the gathered faithful, who counsel those in spiritual need, who marry and bury us, who preside at the Lord’s table, must receive adequate preparation. If we fail to insist on this, we are guilty of theological and ecclesiastical malpractice.

2. Liturgy. Lex orandi, lex credendi—the law of prayer is the law of belief. Worship matters. It shapes us as people of faith. It is an ongoing part of our catechesis. I learned the Apostles’ Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and an abundance of theologically rich hymns because my parents took me to church every week. There are many churches, however, in which I would have learned none of these.

3. Preaching: Good preaching has one goal: the proclamation of the gospel. It isn’t about five fantastic tips to have a better marriage or how to achieve Christian financial health. It’s about the Gospel: Christ died for us while we were yet sinners. We can have new life in Jesus Christ. That’s it. Eventually, some version of that should find its way into every sermon, whether we’re preaching from the Old Testament or the New. The Bible is one book with a singular referent: Christ. Scripture should always lead us to him. A revival of faithful preaching in this country would draw our parishioners deeper into the life of God.

4. Catechesis. Preaching is crucial, but in many Protestant churches the only catechesis people receive is from the pulpit. This is insufficient. New Christians, both adults and children, need to be taught the faith with intention and rigor. They must learn who God is, what he has done for us in Jesus Christ, and how to live in light of his saving work.

5. Schooling. I am a big advocate for the classical Christian school. Think about it: kids are in school for 6-8 hours a day, five days a week. They are being formed during that time. Education always involves the communication of values. What values are they adopting? In many schools, the values of the sexual revolution are not just tolerated, but celebrated by the teachers themselves. Kids form their primary peer groups at school. They make friends, and their friends will have a tremendous impact on their thoughts and behavior. Additionally, I simply think the intellectual rigor required in a classical Christian school is much higher than that of most public schools. I sent my older son to a classical Christian school and have never regretted it for a moment. (As as side note, I ran this by a Gen Z student at Asbury, and she challenged my advocacy for classical Christian schools. I’d like to write another post on just this issue.)

6. Higher education. Christian colleges and universities that actually take their Christian commitments seriously are a gift to the church and the world. There are many nominally Christian schools. Some, however, are committed to the faith development of their students. If your son or daughter is going to go college, I would recommend a hard look not only at the academic standards of the schools they are considering, but the spiritual environment.

7. Fellowship. Jesus gave us a new commandment, that we love one another (John 13:34-35). In fact, he said, people will know we are his disciples by our love for one another. This is different than the command to love our neighbors. This is about the love between Christian brothers and sisters. Love means to will the good of the other (Aquinas). We can will one another’s good in a variety of ways: by sharing table, sharing our food, and sharing financial resources. We can become spiritual sons and daughters or spiritual fathers and mothers. Methodist class meetings are a powerful conduit for this level of fellowship. We can invest in one another’s lives in ways that our atomistic society would find strange, even unsettling. The church is a new family rooted in Christ. When we love one another as Christ loved us, we demonstrate that familial ethos. This may be the most important of the recommendations in this list.

8. Love of neighbor. We can teach new Christians to be generous, kind, and loving people. We can teach them to care for people whom they do not know, to whom they owe no specific loyalty, with whom they may differ in race, creed, and ideology. Crucially, we can introduce people to the means of grace through which God pours out his sanctifying Spirit. The Christian life is one of self-giving, which is entirely different than the focus on self-actualization that predominates in the Western world. It is not about finding some true self that has always been within us, but about dying to self, living for God and other people. The more we fixate on ourselves, the more we are incurvatus en se—curved in on ourselves—the more miserable we will be. The more we pour out the abundant life that is ours by the power of the Holy Spirit, the more we will find true satisfaction and meaning.

What have I left out? I don’t propose this as a definitive or exhaustive summary of what will be required to stanch the bleeding in the Western church. I’m sure I’m off base in some ways, but perhaps this will help to propel a vital conversation.

Maybe I sound like a loon, but several of these practices echo those of the early church. They created tight communities in the midst of a hostile culture. They were different, and they leaned into that difference in a way that attracted outsiders. What we’ve been doing has resulted in a long period of decline. Perhaps God is waiting for us to prepare ourselves for the next great outpouring of his Holy Spirit. Whether or not we see that outpouring in our lifetime, we know what our calling is: to make disciples, teaching them to obey all that Jesus commanded and baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We’ve been losing more than we’ve been gaining. It might be worth trying a different approach.