Today I would like to do something I have never done before -- re-post a "thought" I posted almost two years ago. It is by David F. Wells, a gracious man I have both met and spoken with. He was a professor at Gordon-Conwell, a prolific writer, a rigorous researcher, and a profound thinker committed to pursuing and understanding truth. His book, from which I have taken this excerpt, is entitled: "God in the Whirlwind."
I
share it because recently I have been looking at figures regarding the current
state of the Church/Christianity in America, and I have sought to understand
"why"? Figures like, 4000-7000 churches are closing their doors
every year. Figures that tell us that 70.6 Americans identify themselves
as Christian while less than 20% ever actually go to church. Figures that
show that at the turn of the last century (1900) there were
approximately 27 churches for every 10,000 people, but at the turn of this
century (2000), there were only 11 churches for every 10,000 people. Or
the recent Barna study which found that only two in every 10 Americans under the
age of 30 believe attending church is either important or worthwhile.
Some
of this disillusionment is surely the fruit of scandals that have rocked the
church - both evangelical and Catholic - which eroded people's
confidence in organized religion. That must obviously be said. Yet in this
thought, Dr. Wells hits on a few other significant issues that have led to such
statistics. I found them helpful. I trust you may as well. Enjoy.
"Many
therapists are now finding that although young people grew up in good homes,
had all they wanted, went on to college, and (perhaps) entered the workplace,
they are nevertheless baffled by the emptiness they feel. Their self-esteem is
high but their self is empty. They grew up being told they could be anything
they wanted to be, but they do not know what they want to be. They are more
connected to more people through the internet, and yet they have never felt
more lonely. They want to be accepted, and yet they often feel alienated. Never
have we had so much; never have we had so little. That is our paradox...
On
the one hand, the experience of abundance, of seemingly unlimited options, of
opportunity, of ever-rising levels of affluence, almost inevitably produces an
attitude of entitlement. Each successive generation, until recently, has
assumed it will do better than the previous generation... It is not difficult
to see how this sense of entitlement naturally carries over into our attitude
toward God and his dealings with us. It is what leads us to think of him as a
cheerleader who only wants our success. He is a booster, an inspiring coach, a
source of endless prosperity for us... Purveyors of the
health-and-wealth "gospel" that is being exported from the West to
the underdeveloped parts of the world, seem quite oblivious to the fact that
their take of Christian faith is rooted in this kind of experience. Had they
not enjoyed Western medical expertise and Western affluence, it is rather
doubtful that they would have thought that Christianity is all about being
healthy and wealthy. At least in the church's long, winding journey through
history, we have never heard anything exactly like this before...
And
while it is the case that we moderns have had this experience of plenty, it
also the case -- and this is the other side of the paradox -- that our
experience of plenty is accompanied by the experience of emptiness and loss. We
carry within us many deficits -- a sense of life's harshness, frustrations at
work, bruised and broken relationships, shattered families, inability to
sustain enduring friendships, lack of a sense of belonging in this world and a
sense that this world is vacant and hostile. So we look to God for
some internal balm, some relief from these wounds. We become inclined to think
of God as our Therapist. It is comfort, healing, and inspiration that we want
most deeply. That is what we seek from him. That, too, is what we want most
from our church experience. We want it to be comforting, uplifting,
inspiring, and easy on the mind. We do not want Sunday (or perhaps Saturday
evening) to be another workday, another burden, something that requires effort
and concentration. We already have enough burdens and struggles, enough things
to concentrate on in our workweek. On the weekend, we want relief.
It
is not difficult to see, then, how this two-sided experience, this paradox, has
shaped our understanding of God... It is the end product of at least two closely
related mega-changes that have been underway in our culture since at least the
1960's. FIRST, in our minds, we have exited the older moral
world in which God was transcendent and holy, and we have entered a new
psychological world in which he is only immanent and only loving. This is the
framework in which we now understand everything. SECOND, we
are now thinking of ourselves in terms, not of human nature, but of the self.
And the self is simply an internal core of intuitions. It is the place where our
own unique biography, gender, ethnicity, and life-experience all come together
in a single center of self-consciousness. And every self is unique because no
one has exactly the same set of personal factors. It is no surprise
that we are now inclined to see life, to understand what is true, to think of
right and wrong, in uniquely individual ways. We each have our own perspective
on life, and its meaning, and each perspective is as valid as any other. And
none of it is framed by absolute moral norms.
This
is where the overwhelming majority of Americans live... And out of this has
come what Philip Rieff has called "psychological man." This is the
person who is stripped of all reference points outside of him or herself. There
is no moral world, no ultimate rights and wrongs, and no one to whom he or she
is accountable. This person's own interior reality is all that counts, and it
is untouched by any obligation to community, or understanding from the past, or
even by the intrusions of God from the outside. The basis on which lives are
being built is that there is nothing outside the self on which they can be
built. And this self wants only to be pleased. It sees no reason to be saved. This
is therapeutic deism, where morals are self-focused and self-generated...
The
institutional aspect of the Christian faith, the church, came to be viewed with
skepticism. Credence was given instead to what is internal. Not to church
doctrine, which others had formulated. Not to church authority. Indeed,
not to any external authority at all. Rather, it is in private intuitions
that God is found... Here were the seeds that by the end of the 1990's had
produced throughout the West millions of people who were spiritual but not
religious. In both America and Europe, around 80 percent said they were
spiritual, but were decidedly hostile to all religions. They were opposed to
doctrines they were expected to believe, rules they had to follow, and churches
they were expected to attend. They resisted each of these... The impulses
that began in the 1960's had by the 90's become dominant... Robert Nisbit
in his book, "Twilight of Authority" says, "Across the
board, given our self-preoccupation and our total self-focus, there is a
retreat from what is important to the community to what is important only to
the individual, from the weighty to the ephemeral, from others to
ourselves"...
There
come those times in a nation's life, Os Guinness has written, when its people
rise up against the founding principles of their own nation. This is one of
those times in America. It is far more dangerous than any terrorist attack. It
is, in fact, "a free people's suicide," as Guinness put it in the
title of his book. Why? Because what holds the republic together has
never been simply the Constitution and our laws. The law is an exceedingly
blunt instrument when it comes to controlling human behavior. There are many
things that are unethical that are not illegal. Most lying, for example, is not
illegal but it is always unethical. Our criminal and civil laws can control
only so much of our behavior. It is virtue that does the rest. And
that is precisely what is being eroded in this self-oriented, self-consumed
culture. Here is the acid that is eating away at the nation's
foundations, degrading objective values, uprooting older customs, and leaving
people with no clear sense of purpose and, indeed, no purpose at all other than
their own self-interest. Under the postmodern sun, everyone has a right
to their own version of reality. When this comes about, any culture loses its
ability to renew its own life."
I
share this not to be pessimistic. God is not bound by our statistics or
cultural trends. I share it as a way of asking the one question that
always confronts the Church in any such situation -- how will we respond?
What will we do? Our society (even the world) seems to be at a turning
point. You can feel it in the air. Yet it lacks a consensus (a "common
sense" regarding the core truths of life). And thus we must ask what will
hold it together as the tension of conflicting ideologies threaten to tear it
apart?
Obviously,
I don't have all the answers. But I have been praying. Praying for
wisdom. Praying for compassion. Praying for the Church and the
world we all live in. Praying for the Spirit of Jesus to fill human hearts and
replace all the hostile rhetoric. Praying for a Church that often seems
more captive to culture and political allegiances than to Christ to get back to
her roots of trusting in the power of the Gospel to redeem and fill people's
hearts with love -- even for those they disagree with. In fact, even for their
enemies, as Jesus made so clear in Matthew 5:44, where He laid that out as one
of the defining characteristics of someone who claimed to be a disciple that
bore His name. Praying all the more earnestly for divine intervention every day
- as one who believes the self must be built -- for it is deeply
reliant, whether it admits it or not -- on things outside itself.
Just
some food for thought! Pastor Jeff
