Disappearing Church - Mark Sayer

Introduction: darkening clouds or a disappearing sun?

Therefore, the final checkmate of this secularist coup is accomplished not by a frontal assault upon theology, but by a practical atheism that offers the fruit of shalom minus the tree of biblical faith that bore it.

The Gospel of Self

We will find that progressive, contemporary Western culture is shaped by an ancient heresy—Gnosticism. Gnosticism at its heart is an alternate gospel, which moves authority from God to the self, in which the individual seeks to power their own development and salvation.

Scot McKnight:

Scot McKnight observes that contemporary Christianity “has increasingly displaced the Bible as its foundation for knowing what to think and how to live and supplanted it with experience, desire, and preference. In other words, it has surrendered its heart to personal freedoms.” Our challenge, therefore, is not found just outside the walls of the church—it is also within.

PART ONE: Understanding Our Craving For Cultural Relevance

A history of Post-Christianity

the medieval theologian Joachim of Fiore. Joachim hoped for a future epoch of the Holy Spirit, in which the gospel of Christ would be transcended by a new order of love, and the church replaced by a new, spiritualized elite. Hope would not be in the return of Christ but in the arrival of an enlightened future, an idea that is central to post-Christianity.

...

in Joachim’s three-part division of history that would grow into the trisecting of history into ancient-medieval-modern. This is the foundation of the belief that Western, developed culture is more progressive, enlightened, and evolved than other cultures. Hope then lies not in God, but in being on the right side of history.

...

The German philosopher Schelling, building upon Joachim’s age of the Spirit, predicted a coming age of perfected Christianity, creating the idea of a liberal or progressive Christianity. The thought that Christianity must change and evolve into a new progressive form is ubiquitous both inside and outside of the church. Anytime anyone complains that the church must evolve its core theology with the times to stay relevant, or that the church’s future is found in ditching the structures, institutions, and forms of “organized religion” and embrace a fuzzy notion of “community” or “spirituality,” we can detect Joachim’s fingerprints.

...

the cultural critic Joseph Bottum further sharpens our understanding of post-Christianity. For Bottum, our cultural post-Christianity bears a tremendous likeness to liberal Christianity, in particular its Protestant forms. Liberal Christianity grew alongside modernity, attempting to reshape faith and theology around the worldview of the Enlightenment. Miracles, the supernatural, and Scripture were viewed through the lens of skeptical scientism. A more materialist faith was formed, which removed the transcendent elements of Christianity and focused the believer’s attention on an achievable kingdom of God that could be shaped by responsible and diligent human hands.

Chapter 2: The history of relevant

The period during and immediately following World War Two was a high point for the church in the Western world. Despite the ongoing hostility of cultural elites, churchgoing attendance was significant in the United States, Britain, and even my own country of Australia. The horror of war and the spectre of political movements such as Nazism and Communism had seen a whole host of intellectuals and writers such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene embrace or return to Christian faith. C. S. Lewis’s wartime BBC lectures on Christianity had gripped the United Kingdom.

..

As the 1960s progressed, things began to change. A cultural revolution broke out... the spirit of the ’60s paradoxically also contained desire for a radical personal autonomy, a shedding of inherited cultural wisdom and prohibitions, and questioning of not just corrupt authority, but of all authority.

..

This rebellion against all inherited authority led to the enshrinement of the individual as the highest authority. By the 1970s, the communal spirit and desire for culture-wide change had been subverted into a quest into the self. The novelist Tom Wolfe famously labeled the 1970s The Me Decade. The desire for societal change devolved into a pursuit of self-development. This was evidenced as the famed 1960s countercultural radical Abbie Hoffman by the 1970s proclaimed that “it is more important to get [your] own head together than to move multitudes.”1
..

The beginning of the ’80s saw the rise of the contemporary church movement. Missionaries returning home from the Two-Thirds World found their home culture secularizing, and they began to adapt some of the missiological methods that they had learned on the mission field back home in the West. They began to look to the corporate world to gain insights that might aid the church. This train of thought grew into the church growth movement. A growing belief that secularism could be arrested by an emphasis on relevance began to take hold.
..
As the church growth movement grew, denominational distinctives began to recede. Believers chose churches according to their tastes rather than their denominational heritage. Previous emphases on dogma, doctrine, and ecclesiastical authority were replaced by a taste for community, experience, and the relational. The assumed belief was that people were uninterested in Christianity because they found church traditions and rituals alien and unwelcoming. If the church could be made relevant—with culturally relevant forms instead of traditions and ritualized trappings—then Christianity would flourish in the Western world again.

..
The contemporary church model thrived in American soil.... However, in other parts of the West, namely the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Western Europe, the model struggled to work as they found themselves further down the road of secularization.

..

In the 90s with the popular rise of alternative lifestyles/choices: A kind of panic swept the Christian cultural landscape. If this new generation was defining themselves against contemporary church, what was to be done? The need for an even more radical approach to relevance seemed only to be given more impetus by a discussion that began to grip the evangelical world around the cultural condition of postmodernism.

..

Despite the contemporary church’s decades-long quest for cultural relevance, it continues to struggle to gain ground in the secular West. The aging profile of the church inevitably means that many churches are demographically disappearing. Intriguingly, churches that pursued cultural relevance with the greatest gusto have also suffered their own disappearances. Those who have pursued a policy of relevance in their theology—attempting to reshape their theology into unorthodox forms to suit the contours of contemporary sensibilities—suffer the fate that liberal churches have throughout church history: inevitable decline and eventual disappearance.

..

The Dutch cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker note that our cultural mood has shifted from the postmodern mood of cynicism and irony, to what they label as metamodernism.3 The era of postmodern irony and cynicism has been replaced by what they label as the “new sincerity,” which is visible across Western culture and can be seen in the new folk music movement, the films of Wes Anderson, and the novels of Michael Chabon and Zadie Smith. Vermeulen and van den Akker use the term “meta” to prefix modern in the sense of swinging between poles, not learning from either pole, but simply bouncing between sincerity and being overwhelmed, between hope and anxiety, between modernity and postmodernity.

..

Despite the desire of many to again engage in institutional, communal life—such as the people drawn to the Sunday Assembly—many know nothing but this posture of disengagement. This is true too of faith, threatening the viability of many of our churches. Some churches, while keeping their theology and their traditional church structures alongside a strategy of making their communications, worship, and aesthetics culturally relevant, find themselves experiencing another kind of disappearance. The church as an entity stays and even grows in size and influence. Yet, the majority of its members disappear annually to be replaced by another class of attenders. The size of the church stays the same or even grows, yet the annual turnover of attendees can run at between 60–90 percent. Such turnover may be sustainable in the short term, but one must wonder how such an approach can work long-term. Such churches are in danger of becoming what could be called flashmob churches: churches that are able to harness social networking and energy to gather an impressive crowd, but who soon disappear.

Chapter 3: How Much More Relevant Can We Get

As they transitioned out of their allegiance to what they saw as the failed ideology of Communism, Chinese leaders, schooled in the art of the long-term view, looked curiously to the West to uncover the secret of her ascent from a murderous medieval backwater to a peaceful and prosperous culture. Their investigations uncovered a key factor, as an academic from China’s Academy of the Social Sciences explained:

We were asked to look into what accounted for the … preeminence of the West all over the world. … At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible … the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.1 

The irony of the observation could not be thicker when you think that for half a century the Chinese, officially atheistic, persecuted religious minorities. Yet now their pragmatic vision allowed the Chinese to see the vital role that Christianity had played in producing the West’s most life-giving cultural fruit.

..
On the draft of the 2004 EU's constitution that ignored its Christian roots:

Even the atheist president of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski, could see the lunacy of such an omission, protesting that “there is no excuse for making reference to ancient Greece and Rome, and to the Enlightenment, without making reference to the Christian values which are so important to the development of Europe.”

The three cultures: Pre-C-Post

COLONIZING AND BEING COLONIZED  The danger for Christian second cultures communicating the gospel to pre-Christian cultures is that they may inadvertently colonize them. The danger when Christian second cultures communicate the gospel to post-Christian third cultures is that they themselves may be colonized—

..

In the third culture, you can reach levels of blistering hipness, gain position within a key industry, hold an encyclopedic knowledge of popular culture, throw yourself into the great justice causes of the day, and still your belief in the second culture values of faith will see you viewed as beyond the pale.

A desire for a killer app:

All we need to do is discover the Killer App, and the discomfort we feel, the obstacles we face, will disappear. We just need that program, that new expression of church shape, the silver bullet to defeat secularism. But what if there is no Killer App? Solutionism is ultimately a belief in novelty, and a lack of patience and faith. Solutionism is instant gratification.

In the book of Jeremiah, God proclaims, “Stand by the roads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths, where the good way is; and walk in it, and find rest for your souls” (Jeremiah 6:16 ESV). God invites us to follow the ancient paths. A path is not a Killer App.

Civilisation in collapse:

In 2013, in New York, a group of Christian leaders anxious to negotiate the new cultural landscape gathered to listen to the advice of a contemporary Hebrew prophet, in the form of Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the UK and Commonwealth. Sacks captured the sense that something fundamental was occurring within Western culture, noting that “there are moments in history, and we are living through one now, when something new is taking shape but we do not know precisely what.”7 For Sacks, an incisive observer of contemporary culture, this new moment was shaped by a crisis within Western culture, a crisis of which “the results lie all around us: the collapse of marriage, the fracturing of the family, the fraying of the social bond, the partisanship of politics at a time when national interest demands something larger, the loss of trust in public institutions, the buildup of debt whose burden will fall on future generations, and the failure of a shared morality to lift us out of the morass of individualism, hedonism, consumerism, and relativism. We know these things, yet we seem collectively powerless to move beyond them.”8


Chapter 4: The Gospel of Self (Gnosticism)

ANCIENT GNOSTICISM, CONTEMPORARY GNOSTICISM & THE GOSPEL

The world is inferior.            Your world is inferior.                         Creation is good, although broken by the fall. Yet Christ has won victory, and creation now groans for the day heaven and earth will be reunited.

Matter is the problem.            The mundane is the problem.             Sin and rebellion against God and His created order is the problem.

Escape from your body to perfect-spirit. Turn your body into a perfect-looking body. Jesus’ gift of grace frees us from sin and death.

Look inward to find truth and the god within.     Look inward to find the real you.     God’s revelation opens our eyes to God and the true nature of things.

Escape the world to the perfect spiritual place.        Escape the mundane to the amazing life.     Joy and meaning is found in worshiping and serving God.

Move toward perfection through finding hidden spiritual knowledge.            Move toward the perfect life through tips, tweaks, hacks, and the secrets of success. Self-create.                  Pursue Christlikeness.

You are a seeker, pursuing spiritual truths and hidden knowledge.           You are a seeker, pursuing fulfillment through incredible experiences and pleasure.              You are a recipient of Grace. Pursued and loved by God.

Move past the inferior god to find the real God beyond.         Move past organized religion, and find spirituality.            God chooses to partner with us in His mission in the world through the church. The church is a foretaste of the coming kingdom. Build up the church.

Move toward fulfilment by breaking past the barriers left by the inferior god.             Move toward fulfillment by breaking past the barriers set by tradition, religion, and others.                Move toward spiritual maturity through battling against the flesh. Gain wisdom.

You are a god.           It’s all about you.        It’s all about God.