The Problem of Church Health

I haven’t written for quite some time. I’ve been doing a lot of research in the area of church health and how we can help churches become healthy, stay healthy, and get healthier. I don’t believe the American church is agonizing in its death throes. I also don’t believe any church leader worth his salt would say that either. The American church, however, is declining. The US Census Bureau reports a 50% increase in the number of churches from 1900-2000. The problem is that our country’s population more than quadrupled. In the last decade, the US population has increased by 9% while the US church population has decreased by 9.5%. More than 85% of American churches are non-growing and only 6% are growing faster than their population rates. Currently, only 17.5% of Americans actually attend church on any given weekend. I don’t believe we’re dying, but I do believe we’re suffering from a spiritual myopathy that has infected nearly every quarter of church life and praxis, regardless of church size, denominational affiliation, geography, or particular cultural milieu and is contributing to our decline.

Identifying the Problem

We live in a pre-Christian/post-modern society. By that, I mean that the American culture has become largely pre-Christian with respect to biblical literacy and reverence of biblical authority. An article by Al Mohler at Christianity.com laid out just how biblically illiterate our American society has become. I’ll summarize it here. Research by Gallup reveals that while most Americans who claim to be Christian revere the Bible, they just don’t read it, so their biblical literacy is at an all time low. This truth has been borne out by multiple research lines. For example, Barna Research Group found that 60% of Americans can’t name even 5 out of 10 Commandments. 82% of Americans claim that “God helps those who help themselves” is found in the Bible – those claiming to be born again Christians did better by 1%. Nearly 12% of American adults thought Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife, over 50% of graduating high school seniors believed Sodom and Gomorrah were husband and wife, and a large number of respondents to another poll believe the Sermon on the Mount was preached by Billy Graham. The saddest part of these examples is that those who claim to be Christian (including Evangelicals) fared no better than those who claimed to be secular. Mohler put it well when he said, “Secularized Americans should not be expected to be knowledgeable about the Bible. As the nation's civic conversation is stripped of all biblical references and content, Americans increasingly live in a Scripture-free public space. Confusion and ignorance of the Bible's content should be assumed in post-Christian America.” While Mohler referred to American Society as “post-Christian,” I like to see us as pre-Christian for another reason. American society has grown beyond tolerance of things such as Wicca practices, native spiritualism, Shamanism, paganism, etc. to open acceptance as part of the mainstream norm; a thought that would have been abhorrent to our Founding Fathers who established this country on the bedrock of the freedom to practice a distinctly Christian belief system. We have adopted a globalized pluralism in favor of biblical absolutism. When our general biblical illiteracy and acceptance of pluralistic pre-Christian religious ideologies is combined, it must be admitted that we have returned to a pre-Christian society in America.

Our culture is also post-modern. Much has been written and said about postmodernism in America, but pinning it down is like nailing Jell-O to the wall. There is, however, one unifying theme of Postmodernism as it relates to how our culture approaches God, the Bible, the Church, and spiritual matters in general – relativistic skepticism. Post modernism can be defined as, “a relativistic system of observation and thought that denies absolutes and objectivity.” This denial of absolutes and objectivity extends to every facet of philosophy and life, but particularly as it relates to spiritual and religious matters. Influences from Marx, Freud, Heidegger, Nietzsche, et. al. combined with strong New Age influences have produced an American philosophical system that rejects absolute truths and authority. Barry Burke, in his work on Postmodernism and Post-Modernity said, “Postmodernism…denies the existence of any ultimate principles, and lacks the optimism of there being a scientific, philosophical, or religious truth which will explain everything for everybody.” Postmodernity highlights experience, subjective knowledge, community, and preference. This way of approaching life, truth, culture, society, authority, religion, etc. can be found not just in secular America, but in our Christian homes, churches, seminaries, denominations, and pulpits.

The problem for the American church, then, is great. By and large, the Christian church in America myopically ignores the truth that the overwhelming majority of the people in our churches are biblically illiterate and have an unhealthy relativistic skepticism of our basic belief codex – the Bible. A recent Gallup poll found that 28% of Americans believe the Bible is the word of God and should be taken literally. Nearly 50% of Americans said they believe the Bible is the inspired word of God, but that it cannot be taken literally as it merely contains “metaphors and allegories that allow for a wide interpretation.” 58% of those claiming to be Christian agree that the Bible cannot be taken literally. Generally speaking, this means that on any given Sunday we can expect over half of those in attendance not to believe that the Bible ought to be taken literally and that it is authoritative for their lives. This, of course, assumes the pastor believes in the authority, inerrancy, and inspiration of the Bible – a topic for another day. Our problem is an unhealthy spiritual myopathy as it relates to our American society and culture.

Finding the Answer

I wish I could wave a magic wand and return the American church to the state of health and well-being it should have, but I can’t. I wish I could enumerate a list of action items universal for every church to fix our problems, but I can’t. What I can do is prescribe a couple of general principles to get us started in the right direction. We must focus on the supra-cultural rather than allowing ourselves to continue to be driven by the vapidity of our constantly shifting culture and the ministry fads that accompany it. Churches and church leaders must learn to make decisions outside of their cultural myopathy; focusing on supra-cultural absolutes rather than cultural shifts. How do we do this?

It begins with a commitment not to become modern or postmodern in our thinking, but to become biblical in our worldview. We must understand our culture, not become it. Our ministry praxis should be neither syncretistic nor sectarian. We cannot absorb too much of our culture, but neither can we reject everything. It’s a fine balance that must be constantly evaluated and adjusted. In order to reach our pre-Christian/post-modern community, we can no longer hold too firmly to our forms of ministry. Things that produce stress and friction in our churches (e.g. worship wars, bible versions, hyper-seperationalism, etc.) can’t become immovable fixtures in our churches. We have to be willing to change the way we do ministry for the sake of the mission and be willing to sacrifice our sacred cows if they impede our ability to reach our culture with the gospel of Christ.

Secondly, we must become missional. By that I mean focused on the mission given to us by Jesus Christ in the Great Commission – making disciples by evangelizing the lost and helping them grow into fully mature followers of Christ. The Church exists for no other reason. We are not a social club, even though fellowship is important. We are not society’s fixers, even though we need to be doing more to tangibly help the poor and downtrodden in our communities. We are not a Christian dating service, even though the premier episode of Natalie Grant’s It Takes a Church was really funny. The sad truth is that the American church has lost its zeal for evangelism. A study by Tom Rainer found that in the fastest growing churches the senior pastor spends no less than 5 hours per week in personal evangelism. Sadly, the majority of pastors admit to spending 0 hours per week in personal evangelism (yes, your read that number correctly…zero). This is a leadership problem, not a time management issue, that needs to be addressed. 13 different current studies support the evidence that 95-98% of active, committed, participating church members have not shared the gospel with someone they know since becoming a Christian, and most will never share their faith. It’s no wonder why the American church is so uninfluential today. Furthermore, too few churches have a systematic, measurable process for making disciples and increasing the evangelizing-disciple making labor force.

If we don’t act soon, I believe the American church will become secularized and marginalized to the point of obscurity. Fixing the problem begins with prayer and strong leadership. We need to be on our knees begging the Almighty God we serve to forgive us for our malaise and revive in our hearts a driving passion for His mission. Then, we need to get off our knees and go to work fixing the problem by focusing on our supra-cultural absolutes – the authority of Scripture, the effectiveness of the gospel, and the power of prayer – while simultaneously rethinking and experimenting with how we do ministry to relevantly reach our ever-changing pre-Christian/post-modern culture without getting sucked into it. May God help us.