Five Reasons These Aren't Even The Right Issues Of Ecclesiology

Wealthy Mormon publicly leaves the LDS Church — shaming leaders for 'doing harm to the world' https://t.co/FYSGjSS7U0

— Raw Story (@RawStory) December 21, 2021

From that story I take this link, which is the article I want to discuss.  The two are related, however; just not in the way Raw Story used the connection.

I’ve talked to, listened to, and read interviews, blogs, and books by dozens of folks who’ve left the Christian faith. I’ve yet to hear a story from anyone who abandoned Christianity based on anything directly related to Christianity—at least the original version, anyway.

The decline of Christianity in America, the popularity of The New Atheists, and the meteoric rise of the “nones” underscore something that’s been true for generations but didn’t matter much until now.

Many expressions of Christianity are fatally flawed.

Many people see Christianity as anti-intellectual, overly simplistic, and easily discredited. For decades, college professors with biases against religion have found Christian freshmen easy targets.

Much of what makes American Christianity so resistible to those outside the faith are things we should have been resisting all along. While many of us have been working hard to make church more interesting, it turns out that fewer people are actually interested.

Here are five reasons people are really leaving the church.

1. We tell people the Bible is the basis of Christianity.

“Jesus loves me, this I know. For the Bible tells me so.”

It’s a line that many who grow up in the church know by heart, and it reflects a problem in modern American Christianity: many of us believe that the Bible is the foundation of our religion.

I recently read a blog post by a former worship leader who left the faith after she read a book “proving” contradictions in the Bible. Apparently, she grew up believing the foundation of our faith is a non-contradicting book.

It’s not. Jesus is.

When our faith stands on anything other than Christ, we put ourselves (and others) in position to fall.

First, “meteoric rise of the Nones”? I almost stopped reading right there.  It got worse with the dismissal of the Hebrew Scriptures (a/k/a the Old Testament) as something Jesus rejected. Maybe we’ll come back to that. But the worst sin (yes, I said what I meant) is the opening that teases a discussion which never appears. Pastor Stanley says many see Xianity as anti-intellectual and overly simplistic. Fair enough; except his “solutions” are anti-intellectual and overly simplistic.

But first, these paragraphs.  So, the central problem of Christianity is a lack of emphasis on Christology?  I think the liberation theologians of the last century would agree with you; but I doubt you'd agree on anything else.  The solution here seems to be the "church" needs to agree with the author of the piece.  But any pastor will tell you trying to get her congregation to agree on almost anything is like herding cats or trying to carry frogs around in a wheelbarrow.

And I've got news for him:  the "versions" of Jesus in the four gospels are rather contradictory, too.  You can no more smooth out the sayings of Jesus in the four gospels (or in Paul's letters) than you can smooth out the "contradictions" in the Bible.  My sympathies are with the woman who read the book, but a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.  That's where, in the church at least (outside the church what are ya gonna do?), a well-educated pastor is required.

And “the original version of Xianity”? Arrogance? Or latent Puritanism? The pastor needs to spend more than a little time examining his own faults. Just presuming to know what that is displays an overweening pride. And it’s not based on the Bible? On what, then? Traditions? Your interpretation of traditions and scripture? Mine? Interesting he wants to return to the “original” church, but never mentions the Acts of the Apostles.

But let’s go after "anti-intellectualism" for a moment:

2. They believe suffering disproves the existence of God.

Renowned New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman says he lost his faith and embraced atheism because of suffering in the world. And he’s not the only one.

But the foundation of our faith is not a world without suffering. Pain and suffering don’t disprove the existence of God. It only disproves the existence of a god who doesn’t allow pain and suffering.

Whose god is that?

Not ours. Our God promised there would be suffering until he makes all things new.

You want to make church interesting but you want to tell people they are doomed to suffer? Any idea why that’s not working out for you? You don’t want Xianity to be anti-intellectual: fine. Engage the anti-intellectual argument that the existence of God is of primary, even fundamental, importance. Because it isn’t. It's an early 19th century argument that Kierkegaard had shredded by mid-century.  It's as dead as Jacob Marley and the door-nail.  The only people bringing it up are “New Atheists” who think it’s a topic that makes them clever. It doesn’t. You want to fight the anti-intellectual reputation of  Xianity? Do it. Jesus did.

Later they sent some of the Pharisees and Herodians to Jesus to catch him in his words. They came to him and said, “Teacher, we know that you are a man of integrity. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are; but you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. Is it right to pay the imperial tax b to Caesar or not? Should we pay or shouldn’t we?”

But Jesus knew their hypocrisy. “Why are you trying to trap me?” he asked. “Bring me a denarius and let me look at it.” They brought the coin, and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”

“Caesar’s,” they replied.

Then Jesus said to them, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.” 

And they were amazed at him. (Mark 12:13-17, NIV)

Again, pastors have this primary responsibility; at least to their congregation.

3. They had a bad church experience.

Most bad church experiences are the result of somebody prioritizing a view over a you – something Jesus never did and instructed us not to do either. Self-righteousness and legalism are leftovers of the Old Testament laws, which Jesus replaced through his death on the cross.

Relationships are messy and complicated. But if our actions are rooted in Jesus’ command to love one another (John 13:34), we can prevent many of the experiences that lead people away from his body.

4. We’re bad at making people feel welcome.

It wasn’t just his message that made Jesus irresistible. It was Jesus himself. People who were nothing like him, liked him. And Jesus liked people who were nothing like him. Jesus invited unbelieving, misbehaving, troublemaking men and women to follow him and to embrace something new, and they accepted his invitation.

As followers of Jesus, we should be known as people who like people who are nothing like us. When we invite unbelieving, misbehaving troublemakers to join us, they should be intrigued—if  not inclined—to accept our invitation.

I want to take these two together, they are so closely related.  "Legalisms" are "leftovers of the Old Testament laws" is just insulting and stupid.  Jesus himself said, in Matthew, that he came to fulfill the law, and not a bit of it would be set aside until what it set out to accomplish was fulfilled (specifically the visions of the "holy mountain" from Isaiah, and similar pronouncements from all the prophets).  Even Paul didn't set the law aside; it just didn't apply to Gentiles, who are not part of the covenant with Abraham.  Indeed, Paul saw Jesus as fulfilling the promise of universality through the Law of Moses as announced by the prophets.  So, as I say, this is just insulting and stupid, and I discard it.

As for relationships being messy and complicated: indeed they are! But if you think you fix that by telling congregation members to follow the command of John 13:34, good luck with that.  It's how they should behave, but when they don't, what do you do then, pastor?

"We’re bad at making people feel welcome.” Yes, we are. I pastored two congregations that wanted desperately to grow, to add new members. They thought it was the path to their survival. But they didn’t want new members at all. They didn’t want change. They wanted the “product,” their church, to be “new and improved” and not be changed at all. They didn’t want any strangers. They didn’t want to meet and learn about new people. Both congregations have come to an end. I had nothing to do with it. Things die; even churches. In part they die because people get old, and don’t want to change anymore. But that’s a problem connected to the larger changes in society. The last church I served was 150 years old. Why did it come to an end after all that time? Partly because the world that had nourished it for a century ata half had changed, had passed it by. The generation of the “founding families” (as they thought of themselves) were people my age, trying desperately to preserve their parents’ church. That was a failed purpose. They were anchored to the past, a past that was entirely their childhood. How do you welcome people into that? And why would anyone want to join it?

Every failing church is failing in its own way. So my story is hardly a universal one. Except so many churches are full of old people (of my age, I mean) seeking the comfort of familiarity. Yet what is familiar to me is beyond strange to my daughter who, having grown up in the church a child of a pastor, wants nothing to do with it. ( I still remember her, at age 5, wanting to stay with me at my second church when it was new. It was after an Advent service, I had a meeting to attend. She wanted to stay with me to protect me.) Churches are wonderful places; churches are very nasty places.  They tend to be especially nasty to pastors and priests, at least in my experience.  If not the entire church, then some subset of the congregation, is permanently pissed at whoever is the pastor/priest of that congregation.  You can get screwed by your church hierarchy, too.  I speak not just from my personal experience, but from my experience in churches where I was not the pastor.  Making people feel welcome often starts with being welcoming to the pastor at all times under all conditions.  Unless, of course, the pastor is simply an ass.  But that's another matter, isn't it?

"As followers of Jesus, we should be known as people who like people who are nothing like us."  Again: good luck with that. I'm all for being a part of the Church of Sacrifice for Meaning and Belonging, because I think what's being described in this article as dying off is the Church of Meaning and Belonging.  But I think the latter is a fabulous invalid and the former, albeit perhaps more intriguing, is far more often honored in the breach than in the keeping.

I wanted to bring rustypickup in on this, and get back to the gentleman withdrawing his support from the Mormon church, too.  First, the comment:

The AP News has an article on the fall off in church attendance with the pandemic. Anecdotally I know from our old church that attendance is down and donations are permanently off at least 20%. It seems clear for the survey and the comments from pastors and rabbis that some reasonable number of people will likely never come back. We still haven't found a new church, some places we would like to visit are still all or mostly remote, and even those that have in person are socially distanced, there is little to no singing, and there is little fellowship to meet people and get a sense of the congregations. The longer we don't go, the less likely we may ever go. Once people break the habit of attendance it's harder to reestablish it in the face of typical American life.

coronavirus-houses-of-worship-struggle-rebuild-attendance-40db85787a53244dc0253fbd526de55f

Yes, this is a problem of the pandemic which is affecting, and going to affect, all areas of life in America.  I understand the problem of finding a church home.  I went without one for decades before seminary; joined a church that convinced me I had a calling to ministry, and after seminary found out how hard it was to be a pastor, especially a middle-aged pastor just starting out with a wife and a young child.  I had a church home after I lost my church, but a year or two into that the priest was removed (no fault of his own, church politics and money; too much to discuss here) and my application for the priesthood of that denomination pending at the time, with his support.  Well, that died rather quickly, and the congregation once supportive of my efforts became suspicious and angry in its grief over losing their priest; so I left again, and haven't been back to church much since.  That was over 20 years ago.  If is very hard to find a new congregation and sense of fellowship.  I've only managed it a few times in my life, and I truly don't expect I can do it again.  The churches I attended all had congregations about my age at the time, and about my economic status.  I doubt I'll find one like that now.  I'm certain not to find one that would find my theology compatible.  So it goes.

As for the Mormon donor:  I find the story interesting because it reflects the reality that not every worshipper or supporter of a church is hidebound and determined to preserve the world of the past in amber.  His disagreement, as I understand it, is with the church's position on LGBTQ+ matters.  In other words, he's arguing for this blog's unofficial motto:  "Ideas don't matter.  Things don't matter.  People matter."

The church universal is going to have to yield on that point, or leave the continent.  I remember reading, a few decades back, dour predictions of the church in Europe and America going they way of the Druids and being only saved by the Christian church in Africa, mostly because it was seen as representing the "true" Christian way of condemning LGBTQ+, as well as abortion, "socialism," and whatever else you're against.  I'm pretty sure Jesus faced those same issues of exclusion in his day (the Syro-Phoenician/Samaritan woman; women, period; Samaritans; sons who told Dad to drop dead,  tax collectors, wine-bibbers, etc.).  We (the church) have a model for this.  As in all things, whether we use it or not is up to us.

Is that intriguing?  Or not?  I have so much trouble with knowing what is, and isn't, anymore.

Does this mean the church is doomed?  No.  Does it mean the church is facing even more struggles?  Yes.  We forget the massive changes in society in Europe that led to the success of the Reformation, indeed to the need for it.  Are we facing that again?  Undoubtedly.  The Reformation is usually dated as running from 1517 to 1600.  The Counter-Reformation, or Catholic Revival/Catholic Reformation, is dated from c. 1501-c. 1650. Church attendance in America was low in the early 20th century, peaked after WWII, and has been in decline as Baby Boomers grew up and quit going to church with the diligence of their parents, a diligence basically unprecedented in American history.  Is something going on?  Or is this a return to status quo?  Whatever it is, Christianity will survive.  The church as we know it may not; but that's okay, too.