Anyone who has been paying attention knows that Christianity is in decline in the western world by all accounts. For many leaders within organized Christian circles, this is all a call to arms, a warning shot across the proverbial bow to wake us up from our slumber and engage the impinging culture war with renewed commitment.
It’s actually good news. Granted, it may not slow the decline and closure of churches anytime soon, and we Christians will likely continue to lose some degree of political clout, but I argue that this isn’t the point. It never was. And in fact, our numerical, political and even financial success in recent generations has taken us far off track.
There are several ways in which this current shake-up is the best thing for us, and actually promises to liberate the Gospel and its adherents from some of the false idols we've often come to worship, mistaking them for God.
Humility is necessary. We've become too comfortable with an imperialist attitude toward our faith. But Jesus consistently challenged such top-down power plays, and in as much as we’re to imitate the Christ-illuminated path to realizing God’s kingdom vision for the world, we’re well advised to do the same.
Friction is good. We've come to lean on a ‘The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it’ way of approaching scripture, suggesting that there even is such a thing as literal interpretation of scripture. But such absolute approaches to the Bible and our daily living out of our faith actually stifles the spirit’s movement within and among us, rather than forcing all into some uniform mold dictated by God for us to fall into.
We’re worshiping religion, not God. We've fallen victim to mistaken assumption that we have to resurrect dying religious infrastructures in order to reveal God to ourselves and others.
We need to know who we are independent of Church. We have to re-imagine who we are without being propped up by the religious systems into which we've invested so much of ourselves, our resources, and therefore, much of our egos and identities.
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