Challenge for Today’s Church Leaders

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“America is a less Christian nation than it was 20 years ago, and Christianity is not losing out to other religions, but primarily to a rejection of religion altogether, a survey published Monday found,” according to a new survey published by CNN.

The above statement is exactly why I’m not afraid of leading our church community towards the really, really tough questions on Sunday mornings. We need to seriously wrestle with our faith, and to do so we need to lean hard into the really big questions with honesty and transparency. The decline of Christianity in this country is in fact directly related to  (though not limited to) church leadership’s petrifying fear of honest and real-time wrestling with very, very difficult questions. This decline also has something to do with church leadership’s penchant for silly, hackneyed, and sometimes completely ridiculous answers for the careful handful of semi-difficult questions towards which it only tosses partial answers in the misused name of belief. Instead of playing it so detrimentally safe, and looking like complete tools to sensible onlookers everywhere, we should just toss the trite image of church we have in our piously-fragile little minds and start to focus all of our energies upon the immediate and two-fold task at hand: Honesty and Authentic Relevancy (not to be confused with the buzz-word relevancy).

Let’s for example, start right here, with this issue: Pastors who reduce the faith to some sort of lowest-common-congregational-denominator just to make Sunday morning a pleasant experience for everyone do no one – no one – any favors and the church no – zero – good. This sort of “leadership” neither results in an engaging, authentic, and relevant faith experience, nor does it produce healthy or mature disciples. It’ll keep a large group of nominals really happy, but that’s about it! The only thing this “leadership” approach really accomplishes is numerical growth for the hollow sake of numerics and the accompanying tithe (the money will dry up too, and sooner rather than later). It doesn’t create and/or nurture a people who can authentically and productively engage a world that is already engaging all of the issues we pretend to engage via ignorance and neglect. Ha! What do we honestly have to offer a people who have already journeyed further than we want to go?!?

Today, the Church needs courageous leaders who are willing to step into the day’s fray and actually lead. And for those who will step into the fray and actually lead, I’ll simply suggest the following: The current rejection of faith will not be reversed with cool music, expensive buildings, or making people feel warm and fuzzy and comfortable on Sunday mornings via lowest-common-denominator living, rigid doctrine, and/or the promise of a full-service Christianity. Nope. There are no answers or solutions in any of these things. A focus upon such useless things may fill a very big building on a very small chunk of American real estate, but overall the larger Church will continue to fail because these are at best trivial and under-whelming and irrelevant issues. And these things are clearly trivial and under-whelming when juxtaposed with the bigger, existential questions people wrestle with everyday. People want the truth! We would do well to turn our attention away from all those things the “church growth experts” of last 10-20 years said we should be doing (it’s now safe to say that it hasn’t worked, right?), and honestly begin wrestling with the big questions and issues that those who reject the faith are wrestling with right now. We have to wrestle with one another, the world, and God. We have to become uncomfortable with all of our easy and canned answers, and once again become comfortable with theological tension.

Today’s leaders need to introduce congregations to this tension with which the people living and working and playing in the world all around us are already accustomed. Then maybe we will see …

Today’s leaders must resist the “banking model” of education (teaching/preaching) and move towards a pedagogy dedicated to creating teachers who will go on to lead and teach within our local contexts. We have to resist solving all the questions (as if we actually could do such a thing anyway) and invite the people in the pews to search for the answers to questions raised all by themselves! In other words, today’s leaders need to get over themselves and stop pretending that the entire ministry of the church depends upon them and what they have to say every Sunday. If we are doing our jobs, then the entire community will be capable of teaching, preaching, ministering, etc., etc. Truly, we should be working ourselves out of a job (but then again, that would require us to actually trust God, and why would a church leader do that?!?).

Today’s leaders need to fight the easy temptation to offer people a full-service faith built upon lowest-common-denominator living and instead challenge congregations with the invitation to the tension that accompanies – this tension always has been and always will be – the Incarnation. We need to nurture and celebrate authentic diversity, while we wrestle with big questions and one another within community. Said differently, we need to preach a unity that is strong enough to actually handle differences of opinion and thought. Are we really so weak and fragile that we can’t handle healthy internal debate and difference? If so, then we should all just quit right now, because we clearly haven’t learned anything from the Bible and we are living far from the Kingdom of God.

Today’s leaders must be willing to let those who disagree with this very necessary direction … go. Send them on their way! More than a few individuals will have issues with all of the above, for a number of different reasons, and they will tell you all about their issues. In fact, a few may even go on slinging mud long after they have left (which speaks volumes). We must listen – for a time – and then prayerfully send them on their way. If you do not send them on their way, they will sink you and they will thwart the larger mission. Be quick to discern who will help and who will be a drag. There is no nice way to say it.

And if the CNN article is not enough for you to chew on, also see: The Coming Evangelical Collapse, by Michael Spencer (an evangelical). Here are a few of that article’s most profound points:

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.

Then there is these gems of truth, which I’ve been preaching – in not so many words – for the past five weeks at IMG:

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.

Despite some very successful developments in the past 25 years, Christian education has not produced a product that can withstand the rising tide of secularism. Evangelicalism has used its educational system primarily to staff its own needs and talk to itself.

So, there you have it! Now, I ask you, what sort of leadership do we need right now? What should our church’s start doing (if it’s not already too late!)? What should a Sunday morning look like? Are you simply playing violins and rearranging deck chairs while the unsinkable titanic sinks? And should today’s leaders and church planters be building a ministry and philosophy of ministry that appeals to those who dig sinking ships, or should we be thinking out of the box and trying to do things differently and prayerfully? That’s the big question for everyone.

Note: I’m not an anti-numbers leader. I want to quadruple our 50 people. I hope we become a movement in our context. I do, however, think that if it’s only about numerics than we have failed. You can be big (movement) and do it (ministry) correctly and with authenticity and relevancy.

Related posts:

• 10 Tough Questions Sermon Series at Manor Church

• Jimmy Carter Leaves Church

• Brian D. McLaren’s Everything Must Change

• An Emerging Church in Lancaster City

• A De-centralized and Emerging Ecclesiology