In a fracturing church, maybe it’s time to focus on a basic remedy

By Mark A. Taylor

Last week, before my October 23 post went live, I shared some thoughts from it with a local ministers meeting I had been invited to visit. I mentioned my “lost in Disneyland” illustration and asserted that too many churches today are trying to attract or serve a struggling world with whatever inadequate thrills they can manufacture.

One of the preachers in the group pushed back. “Small churches like ours know we can’t compete with Disney,” he said. “We can’t even compete with the glitz advertised by the megachurch down the street.”

“But I’m not sure it’s going so well for many megachurches, either,” I told him. And pieces in the popular press support my conclusion.

 Breaking apart

Last week I pointed to two of them, one a post by Geoff Surratt in which he critiques the church’s tendency to position itself in a win-or-lose battle with contemporary evils. The better approach, he says, is to play a long game of ongoing mission instead of a zero-sum game of finally defeating evil in our society.

The other, a post at a site called Mere Orthodoxy, analyzes a “six-way fracturing of evangelicalism” it claims is “likely to be irrevocable as the historical ties” binding evangelicals “have eroded beyond repair.”

Since then Atlantic posted a piece that has been widely distributed and discussed all week. Author Patrick Wehner, identifying himself as an evangelical heartbroken by the state of the church today, asserts “The Evangelical Church Is Breaking Apart.”

 Flagging interest

He gives several paragraphs to the problem of the church becoming politicized, a phenomenon brewing for decades but boiling and burning in the last few years. Another point he makes, however, is one I most want to mention today. He speaks of catechesis, a word not familiar to all readers of this blog, and says its decline in too many churches has led them to look more and more secular.

Catechesis is simply “informing and instructing people through teaching.” He quotes James Ernst, vice president and editor-in-chief at the evangelical publisher Eerdmans: “The evangelical church in the U.S. over the last five decades has failed to form its adherents into disciples. So there is a great hollowness.” 

I believe this hollowness, an empty lack of substance that does not satisfy, accounts for much of the flagging interest in church among so many today. Wehner spoke with Alan Jacobs, a humanities professor at Baylor University, who pointed out that even pastors committed to Bible teaching “get to spend, on average, less than an hour a week teaching their people. . . . Only some churchgoers attend adult-education classes, and even fewer attend Bible study and small groups.” And this assumes the church offers a robust set of Bible-learning opportunities for adults. Here’s an experiment: Ask a leader at your church what its strategy is for teaching the Bible to adults. I fear too many would be caught speechless.

All my life I’ve heard leaders decrying the decline of basic Bible knowledge among churchgoers as well as the general population. Could it be this is contributing to the apparent decision by many not to return to church after the long Covid lockdown? They haven’t discovered at church anything that truly changed their lives. After the pandemic broke their church-going habit, they feel no pull to begin again.

 Meaningful encounters

This possibility was in the back of my mind when I came across a news report posted by Christian Standard last week. Mike Cooper, minister with the Primghar (Iowa) Church of Christ, led an effort that ended up enrolling 110 in a weekly Bible study—this in a town with 880 population. Their guide is Mark E. Moore’s book Core 52: A Fifteen-Minute Daily Guide to Build Your Bible IQ in a Year, and students have been formed into 11 groups for their study.

In the midst of all the bad and sad news these days, I’m encouraged that so many were hungry for meaningful encounters with God’s Word. I can’t help but believe people like them everywhere would warm to a similar opportunity.

Admittedly, most of those in the Primghar study are members of one church or another in the small town. I don’t know how many non-Christians are participating, but it’s OK even if that number is small. We’d do well anywhere to involve one out of eight current church members in systematic Bible study. It will change their lives. It can bind them together. It will show them meaning and mercy beyond the din of cable news and internet videos. It will mold them into consistent models of Christianity in our watching world and mobilize them to serve missionally in their communities.

When I read articles like the ones I’ve mentioned above, I wonder what we can do about church division and decline and loss of influence.

Maybe simply committing to a serious study of God’s Word and helping each other submit to its demands on everyday life would be a good place to start.

Photo by Enoc Valenzuela on Unsplash

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