HAS CHRISTIANITY DIED IN AMERICA?

During the first week of April two very significant events spoke to this issue. First was the cover story of Newsweek magazine, “The Decline of Christian America,” a well-written and thought-provoking piece. The second was a statement that President Obama made while speaking in Turkey, “America is not a Christian nation.” What an interesting place the President chose to make this statement. Turkey is a predominately Muslim nation.

Frankly, I don’t have an argument with either the Newsweek article or the President’s statement because I think they are simply confirming the obvious. We live in a post-Christian nation and the quicker we wake up to this fact and embrace it, the better off we will be.

More than once in the last couple of years I have written that we are in a critical time in the Church and stormy weather is ahead. The dark clouds gathering in our future are more significant than any we have experienced up to now.

You may think I’m crazy and I very well may be, but the days ahead can be the best time ever for the Church. I’m hinting to the fact that the best thing that could happen to the American/Canadian Church is some good old-fashioned persecution. Some hard attacks on the Church that threaten its existence will have a cleansing and refocusing effect. The rats will clear out and head for safer places, everything that is not tied down will get blown away, and many will find that their witness will either be strong and visible or it will disappear and be nothing at all.

Persecution is not bad for the Church. When the early Church had difficulty fulfilling the Great Commission and simply wanted to hang out in Jerusalem, God put an end to their unwillingness and let the hammer of persecution fall. God took a missionary in pre-training and used him to scatter the Church. Before his conversion, Paul was used of God to savage the Church and cause them to spread throughout the Roman Empire. They didn’t go willingly—they ran in fear of their lives. We need some of that now.

In China today, the Church is spreading more rapidly than just about anywhere else on earth. The more the Communists try to stamp out Christianity, the more it spreads. The more persecution falls on the Church, the greater the purity of the believers; the greater the purity of the believers, the more they are available to the Holy Spirit; the more they are Spirit-led, the more the Church spreads, resulting in more evangelism.

I hope what I just wrote causes some of you to be uncomfortable, maybe even angry. We call ourselves a Spirit-filled community and yet the Chinese Church is much more powerfully alive and well than we are even though they have almost nothing in comparison to our freedom and affluence. Our Church in the West is shrinking and losing what little influence we had. The Church of the East, living under tyranny, is thriving, growing, and no matter what the oppressors do, they cannot shut it down. When the heavy boot of persecution stomps on the Church, the remnants squirt out the sides and start all over. What began as one body of believers and was persecuted suddenly becomes four or five and all of them have the life of Jesus flowing in and through them.

I think the best thing that could happen to the Church in America right now would be a good slap of persecution. Maybe a hard head slap would knock some of the silliness out of the Pentecostal/charismatic Church. Maybe throwing a few evangelical pastors in jail would cause contemporary thinking to get reoriented to what is really important instead of what is cool and culturally relevant. Maybe the blows of the persecutor would cause some of the pastors of historic denominations to get up off their padded chairs and walk the streets ministering the life of Jesus to the lost and lonely. Maybe a good punch in the nose would cause the sleepy Church of 2009 to wake up and act like the Church was destined to be. Maybe taking away the tax incentives for charitable giving and taking away the tax-free status of churches would get us back to the basics of why we worship through giving!

“The world would love you as one of its own if you belonged to it, but you are no longer part of the world. I chose you to come out of the world, so it hates you. Do you remember what I told you? ‘A slave is not greater than the master.’ Since they persecuted me, naturally they will persecute you” (John 15:19-20 New Living Translation).

A little less love of this world and a little more persecution, please!