Thursday, July 2, 2009

The Collapse of the Church in America

The Evangelical Church in America is collapsing around us. This will be the big story of the Twenty-first Century Church. The primary force here is that the Church in America simply no longer had allegiance to Jesus Christ as the primary allegiance. The Church and it's leaders have a different agenda. The Church has been in bed with various political and cultural movements for quite some time. There are at least three consequences to the Church practicing what the Bible calls spiritual adultery

The first implication of this is that the Church modifies it's message to fit into the political realities. It begins with a change in which scriptures and which doctrines to emphasis and ends with wholesale mutilation of the Christian message.

The second is that the Church takes on the ways of the politicians. The Church in America is full of schemes and chicanery. The pulpits of America are full of pastors who tell people what they want them to hear rather than the truth. the people who warm the pews give both their neighbor and their pastor a bunch of spin. Corrruption and immorality is pandemic. While the Church in the past may have been to strict or may have drawn hard boundaries on frivolous points, the primary tendency of the twenty-first century is to never draw a line, no matter how wicked the wickedness is, unless it is to silence the man or woman of God that shouts REPENT. The Church in America no longer knows what the word repent means.

The third consequence is that by marrying a given political or cultural movement, the destiny of the Church is tied to that of the movement. Such an approach works when the culture is moveing in the same direction as the Church. However, when the culture switches direction-when a given movement is repudiated-churches who threw in their stakes with that movement are also rejected. The Evangelical Church in America has thrown in her stakes with a dying Republican party and self-implosive Neo-conservatism. Because these cultural forces which formed the foundation of American Evangelicalism are collapsing Evangelicalism collapses with them.