Christian writer Michael Spencer has an interesting piece in the Christian Science Monitor today that I think presents a largely accurate picture of the future of American evangelicalism. I don’t agree with everything he says, but it’s all worth pondering and discussing. Here are a few excerpts:
We are on the verge – within 10 years – of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.
Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the “Protestant” 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century.
This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good.
Millions of Evangelicals will quit. Thousands of ministries will end. Christian media will be reduced, if not eliminated. Many Christian schools will go into rapid decline. I’m convinced the grace and mission of God will reach to the ends of the earth. But the end of evangelicalism as we know it is close.
Anyone with half an eye can see that there is a growing anti-Christian sentiment in the West, partially as a result of the rising tide of atheism and agnosticism, partially as a result of spreading hedonism. Evangelicalism, along with Catholicism and Orthodoxy, stand athwart such trends, and as they become more and more the norm, Christians will look more and more like relics who deserve to be run over be the rushing train of culture. It is also the case that evangelical churches are seriously unprepared to deal with this future, as Spencer points out in asking why this is going to happen:
2. We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we’ve spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.
This is sadly true, and is explained at least in part by the fact that immersion in a culture that is hostile to our faith (not just our moral values) makes the relatively small amount of time that is spent in Christian endeavors all too often futile. Our children and youth must be taught how to live the faith in every choice and at every moment, not just when they happen to be occupied in “Christian activity.” But to do this, they must also be convinced that what they are doing is right and true, despite the constant messages to the contrary that they receive every day.
5. The confrontation between cultural secularism and the faith at the core of evangelical efforts to “do good” is rapidly approaching. We will soon see that the good Evangelicals want to do will be viewed as bad by so many, and much of that work will not be done. Look for ministries to take on a less and less distinctively Christian face in order to survive.
This is already the case in some areas of ministry (ex-gay work, crisis pregnancy centers) that touch on controversial moral or lifestyle issues. Christian efforts to penetrate sectors of the culture that are considered secular “property” (schools and colleges, media, politics, science) are also viewed with suspicion and hostility, even outright opposition in some quarters. Such responses are not only bad for Christians, they are bad for society as a whole, as they eat away at some of the most vital liberties of a free society. But those engaged in the effort to eradicate Christian influence in the mind and conscience forming sectors of the culture are growing less and less concerned with that, thinking that they are saving society from a medievalist scourge. I hope that Spencer over-estimates the degree to which ministries will downplay their Christian identity in order to survive institutionally, but I can’t say for sure that he does.
He then goes on to ask, “what will be left?”:
•Expect evangelicalism to look more like the pragmatic, therapeutic, church-growth oriented megachurches that have defined success. Emphasis will shift from doctrine to relevance, motivation, and personal success – resulting in churches further compromised and weakened in their ability to pass on the faith.
God help us all if he’s right here. Personally, I don’t think that such churches have any reason to survive, so I won’t mourn their passing, but the resources that will be wasted in propping them up will be unfortunate.
•A small band will work hard to rescue the movement from its demise through theological renewal. This is an attractive, innovative, and tireless community with outstanding media, publishing, and leadership development. Nonetheless, I believe the coming evangelical collapse will not result in a second reformation, though it may result in benefits for many churches and the beginnings of new churches.
Folks like this are already at work. My friend Mike Pasquarello, a preaching professor at Asbury Seminary, and I have talked about the need for this for years, and he’s doing his part with his students there and books that he’s written seeking to recover the theological heritage and practical experience of the Church that we have forgotten as we’ve fallen prey to the heresies of the new and therapeutic. (You can find his books, Sacred Rhetoric: Preaching as a Theological and Pastoral Practice of the Church; Christian Preaching: A Trinitarian Theology of Proclamation; and Narrative Reading, Narrative Preaching: Reuniting New Testament Interpretation and Proclamation at Amazon.) I will post on others as I think of them. The point is that this has already begun. The extent to which it is penetrating the evangelical conscienceness, however, remains to be seen.
•The emerging church will largely vanish from the evangelical landscape, becoming part of the small segment of progressive mainline Protestants that remain true to the liberal vision.
•Aggressively evangelistic fundamentalist churches will begin to disappear.
The first of these is already starting, as people like Brian McLaren become more comfortable with the National Council of Churches crowd than the evangelicals from which they sprang. As for the second, I think they will become less common and smaller, but they will never disappear. Fundamentalism isn’t just a theological stance, it’s also a mind-set, and people of fundamentalist mind-set will always be with us–some as conservative Christians, some as liberal college professors.
•Evangelicalism needs a “rescue mission” from the world Christian community. It is time for missionaries to come to America from Asia and Africa. Will they come? Will they be able to bring to our culture a more vital form of Christianity?
This is also happening now. There are more missionaries from South Korea in the United States than there are American missionaries in South Korea, for instance. The question is whether these workers–from places as diverse as Nigeria, Honduras, and mainland China–will be able and willing to go beyond ministering to their own ethnic group and become universal missionaries. I mean, WASPs need the gospel too, right?
Spencer’s final section asks, “Is all this a bad thing?” I’ll leave that to you to read and answer on your own. But by all means read the whole piece.
