Here’s some disheartening data:
“If you were born between 1925 and 1945 there’s a 60 percent chance, you’re in a church today. If you were born between 1946 and 1964 there’s a 40 percent chance, you’re in a church today. If you were born between 1965 and 1983 there’s a 20 percent chance, you’re in a church today. If you were born after 1984 there is less than a 10 percent chance, you’re in a church today.”(Missiologist Alan Roxburgh, Joining God, Remaking Church, Changing the World, p 6.)
As many as 20 years ago Lyle Schaller recognized that we were careening toward the end of the influence of cultural Christianity, or evangelicalism in North America. He called it discontinuity. He wrote, “The normal, natural, and predictable response to discontinuity is denial. stage of denial often endures for a generation and usually is accompanied by confusion, gloom, conflict, attempts to perpetuate yesterday, bewilderment, confrontations, pessimism, and sometimes even chaos, but rarely by support for creativity” (Lyle Schaller, Discontinuity and Hope, 1999).
Reggie McNeal added, “The current church culture in North America is on life support. It is living off the work, money, and energy of previous generations from a previous world order. The plug will be pulled either when the money runs out (80 percent of money given to congregations comes from people aged 55 and older) or when the remaining three-fourths of a generation who are institutional loyalists die off or both” McNeal wrote this 18 years ago, and every syllable is proving to be right. (Reggie NcNeal, The Present Future, 2003).
The good news is there is Good News! God made every one of us with an inherent capacity to contribute something to His mission to reach the world as we proclaim the story of Jesus (Ephesians 2:10).
Here are some thoughts about turning things around where you are if the trajectory in your church is not where it needs to be:
I’m not recommending gimmicky tricks and gadgets. It’s really just breaking the molds, attitudes, and traditions that have grown up to inhibit real biblical Christianity. If there is any hope at all of reaching North America with the Gospel, it will be necessary for Christians in church communities to behave like missionaries:
If we adopt the mindset of missionaries, the culture we are a part of will have the opportunity to experience the kind of life and hope God intended! And that is an invigorating thought.