The coming collapse and a vital conversation

A firestorm of sorts has sprung up in some quarters regarding a piece in the Christian Science Monitor written by Michael Spencer, aka iMonk, a fairly well known blogger. The name of the piece in the Christian Science Monitor is “The coming evangelical collapse”. I will say that I have taken issue with some of what Mr. Spencer has written in the past, but this article absolutely bears reading and the points he raises demand a conversation.

The article is fairly provocative and widely referenced online (perhaps because a blogger got published by a “real” news organization!). Mr. Spencer wastes no time in laying out his thesis. From the beginning paragraphs of his article:

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.

One thing I think Mr. Spencer integrates well throughout his article is this idea: There is a difference between American evangelicalism and the rest of Christianity, if that makes sense. The church visible in America is a totally different beast from the church in the less developed world (at least that is what I gather, my only experience in the less developed parts of the world was living in Kentucky for a few years). Mr. Spencer even goes so far as to reiterate a call many people have been making for some time, prayerfully desiring that missionaries from Africa, Asia and South America will come to the shores of America and Europe, bringing back to these lands the Gospel that once went forth from those continents but that is under assault in these days. The breakaway portions of the Episcopal church that have come under the umbrella of the international Anglican communion, including in many cases African episcopates, is perhaps a sign of things to come.

I am not sure that the decline will be quite as steep as Michael Spencer portrays it, but the demographics indicate that he is right that the trend is accelerating very rapidly. There is an enormous infrastructure of cultural religion in America, churches, parachurch ministries, seminaries, schools, etc. that will keep chugging along by inertia but even as the outside of the evangelical house shows signs of weathering, the inside is rotting away at a precipitous pace.

This is one of my favorite lines from the article, because it really gets at an area where I think we have done the poorest job…

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.

I love the way he puts it, that we have spent billions trying to teach our young people and they know nothing about their faith other than the way it makes them feel. Future generations of Christian kids are being sent into the world to engage in the culture war but they have no idea what the underlying Gospel is. I am not arguing, far from it, that we should not teach our children to engage societal wrongs where they appear in places like abortion and “gay marriage”, but that we need a fundamental reordering of priorities: Gospel first, orthodox theology and doctrine second and then, and only then, how that relates to the culture. We have created a legion of kids who will stand up and say that God says abortion is wrong but cannot articulate who God is or why His Word is trustworthy.

One of the conclusions that Mr. Spencer came to that I found to be way off base had to do with who will “benefit” from this decline.

Two of the beneficiaries will be the Roman Catholic and Orthodox communions. Evangelicals have been entering these churches in recent decades and that trend will continue, with more efforts aimed at the "conversion" of Evangelicals to the Catholic and Orthodox traditions.

I am not sure where he is getting his numbers, but the Roman Catholic church is shutting down parishes left and right, their “priests” are aging rapidly with no one to fill in behind them (a recent article I quoted on the new “Archbishop” of New York spoke of how excited the Archdiocese of Milwaukee was to have ordained six priests last year. Six.) and frankly in my view Catholicism is decades ahead of where Protestantism is today in terms of decline, lack of doctrinal fidelity and culturification (that isn’t a word, but it describes a church becoming more of a cultural expression than a faith expression). The same numbers that show Protestant, evangelical churches declining also show massive declines in the number of people even willing to identify themselves as Catholic and I would hazard a guess that there are far more people willing to identify themselves as Catholics who haven’t been involved in the church for years than there are Baptists who would be willing to do the same.

Perhaps his most poignant statement comes near the conclusion of the article:

We can rejoice that in the ruins, new forms of Christian vitality and ministry will be born. I expect to see a vital and growing house church movement. This cannot help but be good for an evangelicalism that has made buildings, numbers, and paid staff its drugs for half a century.

Amen to that. Not just in the house church movement part but also in the more general desire for a more vital and vibrant fellowship. The quest for bigger buildings, more staff, more programs, the latest and the greatest gadgets and fads, the hand-wringing over giving and budgets, etc. has emasculated the church for far too long. Money changes everything and in the Gospel ministry the impact is almost always a negative. While I again would disagree with much of what Michael Spencer has said in the past and I don’t subscribe wholesale to everything he wrote here, this article being published in the Christian Science Monitor has taken this conversation to a new level. His article is the latest and one of the most public declarations of what has been rumbling among evangelicals for some time. Beyond being provocative for the sake of being provocative (which I don’t believe at all was his intent), what I hope it really does is generate conversation among Christians. Most of those who are most entrenched in the “culture wars”, those heavily invested in the institutional status quo and others who are trying to reform the church by maintaining the basic structure we currently have with minor tinkering, i.e. the people who most need to be engaged in this conversation, probably will not be involved. It is in local churches and among bloggers and individual Christians where this conversation will take hold.

I think it is hard to deny what Michael Spencer says; the coming evangelical collapse is at our doorstep and is mere generations away. The downgrade controversy in England faced by Spurgeon preceded a general collapse of evangelicalism on that island, and like England we are living out the fruits of what men like J. Gresham Machen warned used about almost 100 years ago in “Christianity and Liberalism”. The decline of America is sparing no corner of our national identity, including the institution of evangelicalism. Perhaps from the grave of American evangelicalism we will see the proclamation of the Gospel spring forth with renewed vigor and boldness, freed from the quicksand of the very institutions that were designed to bolster it. Rather than bemoaning the death of American evangelicalism, let us pray for the a renewed proclamation of the Gospel, for a return to simple, Biblical and genuine fellowship among Christians and a clearly defined Christian witness in a lost and dying world.