The Church

What’s wrong with our church? What’s wrong with each of us that the disintegration of our church is possible?

Hebrews 13:8 LEB

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

Don’t Change

UPHEAVAL is all around us. A messy dark age of misinformation, distraction,

and willfulness dominates us. Civilization trembles, besieged by gusts and

surges. Impregnable institutions are collapsing while, by wit, will, and luck,

power brokers ride the waves at a mad pace. In the midst of all this, for

anything still trying to call itself a “church,” it is a terrifying time to be in

business, much less to actively sail against the tide.

But is any of it truly new? Or do we merely believe it to be so? To be sure,

compared with memories of those greener pastures of only a few decades

ago, pews are emptier, congregation budgets are dwindled, and church doors

are closing. There’s no question about that. It all looks authentically bleak.

Yet what we must consider is what precisely the bleakness means

Have the times really changed? Is the Church actually dying? Are we

truly in danger of being subsumed beneath a new, ominous culture of evil?

Or is the only real difference a matter of our perspective? Is the only real

change the fact that we have convinced ourselves that times have changed?

Change is often spoken of as if it is its own kind of religion. Some fear it

and avoid it at all costs. Others trust it implicitly, regardless of the results.

Whichever side of the coin you are on, both parties are too quick to grant

“change” near godlike powers. If Christianity is a holy spirituality founded

to outlast even the end of the world, aren’t we overreacting a bit? Twitter

gets invented, and boom! The almighty dominion of the Lord of lords is

suddenly in question?

WHAT?

It’s kind of like watching sailors on a boat far from shore. They notice

signs of a storm approaching. But rather than batten down the hatches, they

decide that now would be a good time to renovate the whole boat from the

hull up. “Anchors? Who needs anchors? Hey you! Get over here and slice up

that sail. It’s a bit medieval, don’t you think?”

“And ropes? Ropes are sexist. Toss those overboard, quick, before

someone sees them. Hop to it, ye scurvy dogs! We need to get moving now!

We need to change what we’re doing . . . or die!”

But does the approaching storm warrant this? Will any change help, or

would some changes be useful while others only make the situation worse?

Are these questions even being asked?

In American Christianity, this “change or die” refrain has become

its own form of creed. Within little more than a generation or two, it has

accompanied the erosion of Christianity’s presence in society. In a brief time,

nearly two millennia of conviction that historic

Christianity is the last bastion of humanity’s hope

have been replaced. Instead, there sits the new

assumption that we are about to face such a perfect

storm of change that unless the Church finds a way

to join its maddening pace, Christianity is fully and

rightly doomed.

Down to a skeleton crew, with no rudder or

mast to be seen, and the few remaining officers

frantically drilling holes in the hull while cackling, “The answer! At last! The

answer!” one has to wonder how long until they set to work bailing water

into the boat. The shoals loom deadly close. Leviathan waits in the depths

with open maw.

IT LOOKS BLEAK

There is something

terribly diabolical at work.

But allow me to suggest that even such impending doom is not nearly so

bad as it might seem, especially when you’ve got Christianity on your side.

And all the lukewarm spiritual attention, all the shrinking congregations, all

the collapsing moralities and apostatizing children are not unique.

Allow me to insist that our times are nothing new.

For the vast bulk of history, times like our own have been the tragic

consistency. There is only one new wind that is blowing among us, and that

is the wind of believing that we’re so very different from everything that

came before.

Empires collapsing? What of it?

The love of many is growing cold? You are surprised by this?

People who grew up in church aren’t going anymore? Welcome to

Sadland. Welcome to Normalsville.

The churches of our age have forgotten that they are not here to build akingdom in the present but to herald the impending better one?

Been there,

done that too. Tickets to the Reformation, anyone?

The only truly new idea of our age is the suggestion that our age is new.

And even this isn’t really that new of an idea.

But it does remain the one idea that everyone

believes, the granted “truth” that none of us

are willing to question.

I don’t care. I think the idea that times

have changed is a stupid idea.

Take a deep breath and dwell on that. Let it be the faintest hint of a

possibility. Pause and consider that maybe the only real problem we face is

believing we face something new.

Maybe relevance, technology, and strategy are human realities that make

precisely zero spiritual impact in Jesus’ Church.

Maybe reactionary fearmongering and growth-minded fad peddling

might not be the solution. Maybe they’re the problem.

Certainly only a fool would board a ship whose crew throws all the food

overboard at the first sign of a storm.

Only the same kind of fool would join a religion filled with adherents

willing to jettison their most cherished beliefs at the first sign of people not

believing them.

Only a narcissist would join a movement more concerned with getting

him to join them than with moving him in their direction.

Only mania explains self-proclaimed followers of Jesus believing that

they can convert people to His Spirit by hiding Jesus, by minimizing both

His words and His most public works from all polite conversations.

Are today’s Christians really so arrogant as to believe that the way to save

Christianity is to cease clinging to it? Are today’s Christians truly so blind as

to willfully forget that the only real purpose of Christianity is to preach the

radical message of trust in the body of a single man, and Him dead, hanging

nailed to a cross? Do today’s Christians actually think that our churches will

long survive by willfully forgetting that the one thing universally guaranteed

by Him to never pass away is His Word?

Jesus sends Christians into the world with the insistence that they are sheep among wolves

He did not give us a product to market or an ideology

to debate. He gave a truth to be believed. He also told us that the world

would hate that truth. Whether we are in the midst of the most bountiful

new-Pentecost harvest the world has ever seen, or in the midst of a drought

so bone-deep and out of season that even the tares are asking where the

water might be, what is needed is not the doubt-riddled lunacy that we must

“change or die.” What is needed is the old-fashioned faithful grit that believes

that no matter what we see, Christianity will never die.

Because Christianity cannot die.

Because Jesus is not dead.

Take courage.

Have some moxie.

Grab a glass of tenacity with me.

Stop and listen.

Stop and remember.

Patience, grasshopper.

Zeal without knowledge is fire without light.

There is a gut-deep, mind-transfiguring, change-invincible faith given in Jesus Christ “so that you may believe” (John 20:31)

that no matter how bad it

looks, the Church of Jesus Christ is not going anywhere.

Except forever.

Because Jesus is alive.

Jesus is not only a man of our past but the Lord of our present and our

future. He submitted to death, not to get bound by it but in order to rip out

its sting by the root. He rose again, not to abandon us but to bind Himself

to us eternally. He ascended to the Father, not to leave us as orphans but

to compel the first twelve men He left behind to “more than [conquer]”

(Romans 8:37) the world.

Not by any means necessary.

Not as man saw fit.

But with an extreme, specific vision.

With an invested, marvelous, particular mission.

Authorized to wield a single, scandalous, peculiar, highly unbelievable,

certifiably impossible, yet everlastingly eternal promise.

Not a guess.

Not a gimmick.

Not a gamble.

A plan.

“Do this,” He said.