John H Armstrong

Religious "Reverts" -- Are Americans Coming Back to Church?

The Easter Weekend edition of USA Today had a front page story on religious "reverts." It explored the current push of various religious groups, including Jews and Christians, to reach out to a large and growing demographic. That demographic consists of millions of people who have left organized religion over the last two decades. The article told the story of people, ranging from cradle Catholics to former-Southern Baptists, who have come home.

For all that the article revealed about people who are on their way back this sentence said it all: "Then (referring to the reverts), unlike most, they came back." Simply put the stories of reverts make an interesting narrative but the numbers of such reverts is still small. Very few people who leave the religion of their childhood ever return to it.

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life noted that more than half of all Americans say they have switched religions at least once. Only 9% of them say that they've come back to the churches or religious centers that shaped them, or maybe I should say never shaped them.

The interesting thing here is how much energy and money various groups are pouring into trying to regain these former members. Catholic churches have seemingly done the most with their "Catholics Come Home" effort. While this effort is well conceived and very professionally produced it seems to have born limited results so far. Mark Gray, a Catholic political scientist, says that it is not clear if those who have come back will really stay, at least not yet. He notes that the Catholic share of the population still remains at 25%.

So what makes reverts stay, so far as we can tell at the present moment? At St. Bede's, a Catholic mega-church of 3,700 families in Williamsburg, Virginia, it is a seven-week program called "Welcome Home" that seems to bear the most fruit. This class is specifically designed to answer the questions that reverts have. The intention is to calm their concerns about what has kept them away from the church. The program seeks to intentionally draw them back into the life of the parish, not just to return to Mass on Sundays. Education and evangelization are central to this approach.

One clear trend is clearly at the center of the narrative accounts of these reverts. Family is very important, both that of their past and their present. This is not surprising. Could the growing breakup of the family prompt many to search for faith and discover the church again? It is possible. I am just not sure that the numbers strongly reflect a major movement quite yet. I pray this will be so but right now most of those who were churched, and left, are not coming back. It seems to me that the harder work for the church will be to reach those who were never churched at all, which is increasingly a very large percentage of younger Americans.

Getting Some Help in Ministering to Children

Training children's and youth ministry team members (volunteers) is vitally important but good resources are all too rare. Those that are offered often lack a solid theological perspective and/or field-tested experience. Most of us face the problem of shrinking budgets. So how can we better prepare for reaching kids in 2012?

Crossroads Kids Club, the mission directed by my son Matt, is pleased to offer you an opportunity to access high-quality, live training for your leaders at a very low cost. It is cleverly called “Spring Training.” It is a series of three unique and affordably-priced workshops led by high-caliber leaders in children’s and youth ministry. Each session takes place from 9 a.m. to noon on a Saturday during the spring of 2012. 

Information is available at Spring Training Workshops. Even if you do not live in the Chicago area there are resources Crossroads offers that you might find extremely helpful. Also, there is no time like right now to plan to begin a Kids Club in your local public school for this fall, 2012. Matt and his team can help you and your congregation begin and develop an effective way to reach the most reachable individuals in your community. Check out Crossroads if your have a real desire to reach into your public schools with the love of Christ. 

Outsider Interviews with Jim Henderson

My good friend Jim Henderson is one of the best interviewers I know. He has the ability to allow non-Christians to talk and tell us what they think about our views and practices. Check out Jim's work on this video attached to a recent blog he did after he was in nearby St. Charles, IL. We enjoyed a wonderful lunch and discussed several of Jim's projects. He has a new book, The Resignation of Eve, which will be out in early 2012. I happily endorsed it. It allows women to openly express how they feel about the church from a number of different perspectives.

Check out his blog and the brief YouTube clip on how people think about Christians and Christianity @ Outsider Interviews – St. Charles – Sept. 29.

The Power of the “Spoken” Word of the Gospel

Depending on your church background and experience many of you may think of the gospel (and almost exclusively) as a written message. The first Christians did not think of it this way at all. Let me explain.

While reading the Book of Acts recently I noted this again and again. Take the beginning of this book:

¹ In my former book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and to teach ² until the day he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles he had chosen. ³ After his suffering, he presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God. ⁴ On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. ⁵ For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 1:1-5).

Luke says “I wrote” in the NIV. But the NLT says, “In my first book I told you.” (That is a lot closer to what Luke means here.) J. B. Phillips nails it when he says, “In my first book I gave you some account.” Yes, it was a written account for sure. There is no doubt about that. “The first word” that is referenced here is Luke’s (written) Gospel. But this is called a “word” (see Luke 1:2 and Acts 10:36) precisely because what is behind this written account is an oral tradition. The oral gospel, simply put, preceded the written one.

This is why New Testament scholar Robert H. Gundry says in his Commentary on the New Testament (Hendrickson, 2010, 464), “In fact, the expression Luke uses could legitimately be translated, ‘I spoke formerly’.”

Verse one says that Luke gave an account of what Jesus “began to do and to teach.” The point here seems to be that this is about deeds backed up by teaching, not the other way around. I believe the sense is clear and important to notice. What Jesus “began” to do is what he will continue to do and the Acts of the Apostles clearly demonstrates that this is how we should understand the written account given by Luke. The disciples were specially chosen “witnesses” to the doing and teaching of Jesus. And most of their witness was in deed and speaking, not in written form. Only two of the four Gospels were actually written by the twelve apostles of Jesus. (Mark might have had Peter in the background in writing his account!) And most of the New Testament letters were written by one “untimely born” who did not walk with the Twelve. This fact is quite clear—the early church did not have the first of the four Gospel accounts for decades. And the last one might have come nearer to the end of the century than the beginning. This means the church grew in the grace and power of God without a New Testament text as we know it.

Think about this for a moment? Before there was a written Gospel record the message of the good news was declared orally and with great power in the Holy Spirit. The church “did” what Jesus commanded and “spoke” what he had spoken. This was all passed down from person to person, or from group to group. This was an oral culture folks, not a written one.

What is my point here? We are rather quickly moving away from a Western print-based written culture. This does not mean that we will not read in the future but reading will have less and less importance, at least in terms of careful, analytical, precise reading. (The fact is such reading has little to do with 99% of the world’s people.) What is coming is a culture built on action and story. The dynamic person and that person’s dynamic speech acts will shape and form the new situation in a way that looks more like the ancient world than anything we’ve ever known in our lifetime.

Remember, the gospel is first and foremost an oral message that we pass along by what we do and say. Do you have a story of God’s grace working in your life? Are you a witness to the power and love of Jesus? If so you have been given the gospel message and you can speak this message, probably with more power and authority than you’ve ever realized, to others. Preaching from a Bible text in a sermon is a powerful and liberating force. But preaching the gospel story is primary for the witness of the church to those who are still outside. I believe even formal preaching inside the church would be far better, and more life-changing, if we regained the practice of orality and stopped reading sermon manuscripts! But I’ll save that for another blog.

Why We Do Evangelism: What Does Hell Have to Do with It?

In the recent debates about hell, stirred by the book Love Wins and the various blogs, articles and books now written in response to Rob Bell, I have heard many rather ridiculous arguments and statements on every side of this debate. At some point I may say more but there is one argument I want to take up today that I’ve heard all my life and find completely lacking in biblical evidence.

The argument goes like this—if people are lost eternally without consciously knowing and hearing about Jesus then if we remove this doctrinal point, namely that they must “hear” or they will burn in hell forever, we destroy the/a primary motive for our doing evangelism. My point here is not to open Pandora’s Box about the destiny of the un-evangelized but rather to ask a simple question: “Is this motive about saving people from hell who have not heard really a necessary and biblically given motive for evangelism?” So far as I can tell it is not.

To ask the question in another way, “Why should we take evangelism seriously?”

1. Because of the commission Christ gave to his church; that is the mandate he gave to all of us as members of the body of Christ. Matthew 28:18-20 says this commission is rooted in the “authority” of Jesus. The primary reason the church ought to go and make disciples is because Jesus told us to do so. If we love Jesus then we want to do what he tells us to do. If that is not motive enough something is desperately wrong in our understanding of Jesus and his love.

Evangelism is not the last step in making disciples but rather the first. We cannot “make disciples” unless people hear the good news and believe it. Jesus calls people us all into life-transforming relationship with him and his followers (i.e. the church). He does this through a message that must be shared (preached/proclaimed) with people. Simply put, Jesus tells us directly and indirectly that the church is to spread the good news. But note carefully—it is the church holistically that spreads the good news. Not every single Christian is an evangelist. But every single Christian shares in the work of evangelism as part of the mission of Jesus, namely by being a vital part of his church on earth. This is at the heart of a missional understanding of the church and the Trinity.

2. If we keep this gospel message to ourselves then we fail to share  the most power life-giving message that brings meaning to life now through forgiveness and positive hope for eternity to come. Is sharing this news an act of love? How does the love of Christ actually inform our personal and collective actions in this regard?

3. Playing off number two above I believe one of the most loving things that we can ever do, if not the most loving, is to share this good news with needy and broken people. There are many things that we can and should do so that we truly love our neighbors as we love ourselves but for the Christian evangelism has to be very high on the list of things we do when we love our neighbor.

We should collectively and personally ask God to give us a passion for the spiritual welfare of others. We should pray for a longing to extend his kingdom (reign of grace) into the lives of all people everywhere. This starts right where you and I live. And it extends to all people everywhere according to the New Testament (cf. Revelation 5:6-10).

The desire of God’s heart is to seek and to find the lost, as we saw yesterday. We act in accord with God’s seeking heart when we join him in seeking for the lost. This is THE motive for evangelism. And if understood and correctly taught it will motivate people to evangelism.

But where, I must ask again, does hell come into this picture? Jesus warned about judgment and hell for sure but nowhere can I find him telling his disciples “You must now go tell everyone this message or they will die and go to hell because you failed to do this work.” This is a huge deduction. It is a powerful leap from one category to another. It is common but it needs to be challenged.

I have personally known two missionaries who went overseas to preach the gospel driven by this sense of obligation that they had to go or they would answer for those who perished without them going and warning them about hell. They spoke graphically of multitudes plunging into hell unless they went and preached. It was convicting stuff when I was a young minister. But I’ve always wondered about this appeal, especially the logic and motive behind what they appealed to in these stories.

Sadly, both these missionaries left the field and their wives. Both gave up the mission and quit. I’ve lost track of them both.

I am not saying they quit their mission because they believed this way about hell as a motive for doing evangelism but it makes me wonder. I am sure of this—you cannot sustain, at least in a healthy emotional and spiritual way, the logic and fear bound up with this kind of appeal. It is not plainly biblical and it is clearly not healthy.

We Must “Put Butts in the Seats”

My son, an advocate and practitioner of missional-ecumenism, had a conversation with a staff member of a large church recently. As he appealed to this person to see the priority of reaching into the public schools to make disciples of Jesus he met resistance. This church, like so many other large churches, invests a lot of money and effort in tutoring and mentoring in the school system but without bringing the good news to those that they tutor and teach. Somehow they seem to separate their good works shown through tutoring from the actual sharing of the good news in their words and actions. This should not be an either/or choice but a both/and response. The fact is that Christians and churches can do both in public schools, as I’ve said here before. Matt’s Crossroads Kids Clubs mission demonstrates this clearly.

As Matt spoke to this person they said to him, “With our very large facility and campus our goal has to be to put butts in all our seats.” That says it very well. The building was built because of the mission but now the mission is determined by the size and upkeep of the massive building.

I am not opposed to church buildings. This is a debate that in the end leads us down a road to nowhere. But I am opposed to allowing our buildings to determine how we follow Christ’s missional mandate. Once we build these large arenas and churchy theaters it is very hard to escape becoming a lecture hall or a place for first class “come and watch” church, something no one in the early centuries of Christian faith would have understood. We need to be honest about this. Large churches keep telling themselves that because they have so many people they must be right. This needs to be challenged in a loving and gospel-centered way.

Small churches have their own problems, don’t misunderstand me. But this is less a problem for the small church, at least so long as it does not have a huge debt. This may be why Matt finds a lot more interest in reaching into public schools with the gospel from churches of less than 300-400 people. Time will tell. Clearly the largest and most wide-open missional field in the United States is among children between the ages of 4 and 14, that is children under the age of 14 inside our public school systems. And clearly the church is doing almost nothing to reach such children unless a parent takes them to a local church, which is becoming less common with every passing year. VBS hardly makes a difference any more and Sunday School has little or nothing to do with un-churched kids. So who will take the good news to these children? I believe the answer is churches that think beyond filling their seats. 

Are Christians Effective in Making New Disciples?

I ponder this question every day: “Are we being effective in making new disciples?” And even more to the point, “Are most churches effective in reaching people with the good news and teaching them how to follow Jesus 24/7 in the real world context of the 21st century?”

In short, the answer is a not-so-surprising no. Put in marketing terms author Tim Sinclair is correct when he says in his new book, Branded: Sharing Jesus with a Consumer Culture (Kregel, 2011), Jesus needs to be “rebranded or remarketed” in our fragmented and diversified culture (29).

There are many new religious options and there are many new ways to embrace and talk about faith. What most Christians are saying is just not working. You don’t need a doctorate in missiology to see that this is true. Sinclair asks what I believe is the $64,000 question: “Hasn’t there been consistency in the number of people who are embracing Christ over the years” (29)? The answer is very clear. Actual research shows the church is failing rather badly and the number of actual Christians in North America is in decline. You can put lipstick on a pig, and some authors and writers are doing everything they can to make evangelical Christianity look better on this account, but the math here doesn’t lie. We are in serious decline. Fighting culture wars, reworking the techniques of church, even planting new churches, it is not working. (Yes, thank God, there are a few exceptions!)

Sinclair provides a brief account of some of commonly known data. The number that stunned me the most was that according to the World Christian Encyclopedia the average church  spends $1,551,466 for each new follower of Jesus! Read that again. Be shocked and be deeply concerned if you care about reaching people who are outside the church and outside the Christian faith.

If your church’s annual budget is $500,000 then on average it will take you three years to reach one honest-to-goodness non-Christian who will be converted to faith through your efforts. Sinclair writes, “Seeing that kind of ratio on a balance sheet would get every CEO in America fired. And it should” (30).

There are some churches that are really good at outreach but I am persuaded, after forty years of study and experience, that these are actually very, very rare congregations. Even most large churches are reshuffling the chairs on the church ship more than they are reaching the un-churched and never converted. On the whole most movements, groups and churches that claim great things in evangelism are actually doing a very bad job. One thing is for sure – the typical church does very little inside the church to excite and then equip their people to actually help outsiders come to faith. The real work in reaching people will not happen inside the church so how will people be reached when most churches never teach whole-life discipleship and “business as mission” to their congregants? I am not even sure that pastors know how to teach this way since the schools they attended never taught them how. And given their centuries old penchant for making a sharp distinction between clergy and laity they never will. This is a universal Christian problem not one limited to Catholics, Protestants or the Orthodox. We think evangelization is reaching the already churched!

What we’ve done is create safe places, places for worship and education, places that teach our children (most of whom will leave the church when they are 18 and older). Tim Sinclair opines: “If the World Christian Encyclopedia figures are correct, today’s Christians have run some expensive bathwater, sat down, and gotten all wrinkly from stewing in our own, pricey filth” (30).

Humble Dependence Crucial to Mission

There is no short cut for humble dependence if mission is to remain vital and fresh. We have to be willing to listen, to follow and to change. So much of my life has involved change that at times it frightens me. It especially frightens donors and friends. But I know no other way to be involved in mentoring and mission but to seek for complete dependence upon God.

This wonderfully transparent video clip by Steve Sellers explains what I mean much better than I can explain it in a few paragraphs.It is about seven minutes but I believe you will find it extremely useful in modeling a humble, listening heart that follows Jesus.

A Global Survey of Evangelical Leaders: Unity Not a Major Concern

Newly released data from the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life provides the results of polling gathered from 2,196 evangelical leaders from 166 countries and territories who were invited to attend the Third Lausanne Congress of World Evangelization in Cape Town, South Africa, last October. The results make for a very insightful discussion about the state of evangelical Protestant Christianity around the world.

Evangelical leaders who live in the Global South (sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, Latin America and most of Asia) are generally optimistic about the prospects for evangelicalism in their countries. But leaders who live in the Global North (Europe, North America, Japan, Australia and New Zealand) tend to be more pessimistic. The reasons are quite obvious if you read the poll and the attendant comments on it.

One that stands out – evangelical leaders around the world view secularism, consumerism and popular culture as the greatest threats they face today. More of the leaders expressed concern about these aspects of modern life than expressed concern about other religions, internal disagreements among fellow evangelicals or government restrictions on religion.

This last sentence troubles me. The same evangelical leaders who went on to approve The Cape Town Commitment, which I have written about a number of times here, did not express deep concern about disunity in the church and its implications for mission. Simply put, the schismatic tendencies their evangelical faith and practice create in the world should make them grieve over this tragedy but it doesn’t seem to have reached the place in their hearts where it causes them spiritual consternation of any magnitude. I find this deeply troubling. While evangelicals are great at making discipleship and evangelism a priority they seem unconcerned about the damage they cause in the larger church when they refuse to make visible unity a much higher priority.

Bishop Kallistos Ware: “The Center of the Christian Message”

A few months ago Christianity Today editor David Neff did an interview with Orthodox Bishop Kallistos Ware. This interview is now available online. Bishop Ware, who is from Great Britain, was an Anglican before he entered the Orthodox Church as a young adult. His story is widely known and can be accessed online as well. He is probably best known for his written work, much of it explaining Orthodoxy to the non-Orthodox. Unlike so many leaders in the Orthodox Church Bishop Ware understands and loves evangelical Protestant Christianity.

The Christianity Today interview was actually conducted while Bishop Ware was in the Chicago area speaking at North Park University and Wheaton College. I heard the Wheaton address at the Billy Graham Center. His lecture at Wheaton was titled: “What Have We to Learn from One Another?” He answered, at the outset, “We need one another to be truly human!” I shall never forget this answer so long as I live. This is at the core of what I’ve discovered through missional-ecumenism. Knowing my brothers and sisters from the whole church has, I sincerely believe, made me more “truly human.”

Bishop Ware also said that there were only two kinds of Christians in the end: (1) Those who make it up as they go, and; (2) Those who live on the basis of a revealed religion. Priceless. He then explored three areas: (1) Church and Eucharist, (2) Scripture and Tradition, and: (3) The work of Christ. Quoting J. I. Packer he agreed that “We should do everything we can together that we are not obligated to do separately.”

In the final point he stressed that the Orthodox and the evangelicals focus on the cross is different. The Orthodox make no clear distinction between justification, sanctification and glorification. They stress salvation as union with Christ and include all three but without the sharp distinctions we’ve made. Quoting Antony, “Conversion begins but never ends.” This is a “Yes/But” approach, or better yet, a “Both/And.” Example: Christ died, yes he died for me.

Bishop Ware told a story about an evangelical asking him if he was saved? He said he did not answer “No.” But he did not say “Yes.” Nor did he say, “I don’t know!” He answered, “I trust by God’s grace I’m being saved. Life is a journey home to Christ.”

This type of thinking is captured in the interview David Neff did with Bishop Ware. Here is a small part of the interview that touches on the points I just made:

David Neff:

If I were to meet you on a train and ask you, "What is the center of the Christian message?," how would you succinctly put that?

Bishop Ware:

I would answer, "I believe in a God who loves humankind so intensely, so totally, that he chose himself to become human. Therefore, I believe in Jesus Christ as fully and truly God, but also totally and unreservedly one of us, fully human." And I would say to you, "The love of God is so great that Christ died for us on the cross. But love is stronger than death, and so the death of Jesus was followed by his resurrection. I am a Christian because I believe in the great love of God that led him to become incarnate, to die, and to rise again." That's my faith. All of this is made immediate to us through the continuing action of the Holy Spirit.

David Neff:

Evangelicals agree with everything you have just said. But we tend to focus on a transaction that happened at the Cross and a transaction that happens when the believer puts faith in what happened at the Cross. We take up Paul's courtroom metaphors. How would you describe the East's way of looking at it?

Bishop Ware:

It's true, we Orthodox would, on the whole, not use the word transaction. It's also certainly true that we do not emphasize legal language.

We prefer the image of Christ as victor over death, love stronger than death, the kind of victory that we sense at the Paschal service Easter midnight in the Orthodox Church, when there is a constant refrain, "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and to those in the tombs he has given life." That is the image of Christ's work that we chiefly stress.

But certainly within the New Testament there is a whole series of images. There is no single systematic theory of the Atonement, and we should make use of all these images. So, yes, we should find a place for the idea of substitution, which the Orthodox don't stress so much. It is there in the New Testament, in 2 Corinthians 5:21: "He who was without sin was made by God to be sin for us, that we in him might become righteousness." The idea of the sacrificial Lamb is also a profound scriptural image. We should make use of those images as well as Christ the Victor.

I don't care so much for the idea of satisfaction. Satisfaction is not a scriptural word. The legal imagery, I think, should always be combined with an emphasis upon the transfiguring power of love. The motive for the Incarnation was not God's justice or his glory, but his love. That was the supreme motive. "God so loved the world." That is what we should start from.

Thus ends only a small part of an interesting interview. You can read it all online. You can also see a video clip of parts that were not printed.

The final paragraph above is a pretty good summary of what I have come to believe over these many years. The idea of satisfaction is rooted more in culture of the West than in a central theme in the Bible, at least in my view. I believe in substitution and I believe in the legal category we see in Pauline language. But I also believe evangelicals have gone much too far with both of these in how they have reduced the cross to them almost exclusively. What I do not see is the over developed dogma of satisfaction, which makes God into someone other than the God of love who redeems the world because of his love. What convinced me of this was preaching six sermons on John 3:16 way back in 1991.