Being Prepared

A few weeks ago, I had an interesting dream.

A group of people are sitting in the lounge of the house having a deep discussion. They were in comfortable chairs and the conversation was pleasant.

After some time, one got up to go through the door that opened to the other rooms of the house. When the door was opened, we saw that a sheet of plywood had been nailed to the door. When we removed the plywood, we saw that the rest of the house had been stripped of everything in it, including furniture and fittings.

I wrote down the following interpretation.

Church leaders look at their own situation and assume that everything is fine. If they looked around, they would realise that everything that belongs to God is being stripped out of our culture.

Yesterday, I found an article by Rod Dreher that confirmed the importance of this message.

What Christians who live in parts of the US where the faith hasn’t declined as steeply as it has in New England don’t understand is that the virus is coming for us too. There is no effective quarantine. Of course, it’s frightening to face all this, but the failure to face it and figure out what we in the churches can and must do to deal with the crisis is going to result in the total collapse of the faith within our own families and communities. Waiting for a miracle is not a plan.

I’m not going to rehash here the facts about the state of the church and the Christian faith in the US. You’ve heard them all from me here before, and anyway, they’re in my book. If you go to a church that has a lot of people in it, and everybody is engaged with their faith, well, that’s great! But look beyond the walls of your congregation. Look beyond the bounds of your Christian community. Things are not okay. Things are not remotely okay. There are no relatively minor adjustments we can make that will enable the churches to manage this without radical change.

New Zealand is probably as far down this path as New England or California. It is a totally different world from the one that I grew up in during the 1950s, and God has been squeezed out of everything.

Aaron Renn notes that Christian leaders have been blind to what is happening.

I believe a big part of the reason why is that they simply reject Dreher’s premise that things are getting bad. Instead, if you listen to what they say and look at what they do, it’s pretty obvious that they think things are still going reasonably well. They still have big expansionist visions such converting significant percentages of people in their city, planting large numbers of new churches, etc. that at a minimum suggests that unlike Dreher, they believe Christianity is going to retain significant mainstream appeal. As a video put out by a Manhattan church plant put it, “We’re here because we refuse to believe that this city is hostile to church.”

The Evangelical world, essentially all of the people with powerful platforms to speak are either a) pastors of very successful megachurches b) leaders of important Evangelical institutions c) their acolytes or others who hope to curry favor with them.

This isn’t the result of a nefarious conspiracy but rather common sense. Who are you going to listen to, someone who is successful or someone who is a failure? Who is going to have a bigger audience, the pastor of a 50 person church or the pastor of a 5,000 person church?

Now ask, if you’ve built a 5,000 person megachurch in a major city, are you likely to think that Christianity is losing its appeal or that trends for the faith are poor in America? Probably not. If I were in the shoes of one of those pastors, I think I myself would probably say that things may be different today but they are still ok if we adjust our ministry strategy a bit – say to look more like mine.

Alan Jacobs summarises the problem.

The dominant media of our technological society are powerful forces for socializing people into modes of thought and action that are often inconsistent with, if not absolutely hostile to, Christian faith and practice.

In America today, churches and other Christian institutions (schools at all levels, parachurch organizations with various missions) are comparatively very weak at socializing people, if for no other reason than that they have access to comparatively little mindspace.

An example of how far things have gone “down under" occurred this weekend. The best Rugby player in Australia will be kicked out of rugby in a world cup year because he posted comments on Instagram about the eternal consequences of life choices. I don’t agree with his statement, but his claims have been standard doctrine in conservative and catholic churches for at least the last 500 years. Rugby has never had particularly high moral standards, with the main values being winning and money, but the response to his words has been vicious. People who suggested that he is allowed to say what he thinks, have been quickly silenced. I amazed that Australian Rugby will put its world cup chances at risk over a religious statement by one of its players.

At the same time, the main on-line news site in New Zealand has highlighted an article about a homeless person who has just converted to Islam and found a welcoming community. The same edition had a satire article mocking the Christian God. I don’t recall an article about a person whose life was changed around by the gospel of Jesus, for many years, although I presume that there have been plenty.

I am not worried about the rugby player, because he has already earned millions during a long career, and he has peace with Jesus, but I am concerned about the lack of preparedness in the church for what lies ahead.