The State of Our Churches

Intro

The Christian Church in America is in a state of decline and has been for many years. This we already know. The Church has been in a recession cycle for the last 3 decades losing nearly 1/3rd of population percentage over that time period. Most readers will be able to anecdotally align with this statement, recalling one or more friends or family members who were professing Christians who later stepped away from the Faith.

Although this almost certainly has multiple contributing causes, I want to focus on one in particular: the gradual watering down and ultimate subversion of church institutions. Having spent the better part of a year looking for a new church, I've seen first-hand the sorry state most churches are in.

ELCA: Progressive and Terminal

A simple example I like to give when trying to convey just how badly churches in my area really are is by taking a look at the Evangelical Lutheran Church of American (ELCA) as a case study. ELCA, a subdivision (Synod) of the Lutheran denomination, split off from the LCMS (Lutheran Church Missouri Synod) in the 1980's over female ordination and other theological issues.

Hopefully it should be obvious the trajectory that would follow, but eventually in 2009 the ELCA finally explicitly allowed homosexual clergy. Most recently, the ELCA bishop at the time, Elizabeth Eaton, argues that the ELCA's social teaching states that: "... abortion must be legal, regulated and accessible. People who choose to have legal abortions should not be harassed or prevented from accessing abortion due to economic or other factors." Interestingly enough, Eaton's statement does not fully align with the three decades earlier ELCA statement on abortion, which states that every measure should be taken to ensure the life of the unborn after the point of infant viability:

Although abortion raises significant moral issues at any stage of fetal development, the closer the life in the womb comes to full term the more serious such issues become when a child can survive outside a womb, it becomes possible for other people, and not only the mother, to nourish and care for the child. This
church opposes ending intrauterine life when a fetus is developed enough to live
outside a uterus with the aid of reasonable and necessary technology. If a pregnancy needs to be interrupted after this point, every reasonable and necessary
effort should be made to support this life, unless there are lethal fetal abnormalities indicating that the prospective newborn will die very soon.

This raises a few questions for me:

• Are the issues of female ordination, abortion, and homosexuality linked?
• Where will the ELCA position move to in the future? Will we see the steady move toward even more progressive positions?

And lastly, to answer my own question, this sub-denomination is in decline, losing about half its members since it's inception in 1988, with Sunday worship service attendance being much lower than that of Evangelical churches. At some point ELCA members should ask themselves why membership continues to drop, despite increasing attempts to be more winsome and welcoming to all.

As a side note, this tracks with current data regarding Christian affiliation in relation to political leaning. Conservative Christian denominations are more resilient to membership decline than Liberal ones.

Here's the data: most Lutheran churches in my area are ELCA. Based on my napkin math, it's about 63% This represents a large majority over more conservative LCMS and WELS congregations. Below is a list of Lutheran churches and the Synod they belong to:

If you're still not convinced, look through some of the websites listed. Many churches straight up celebrate or encourage homosexuality and other sins.

I believe what is happening in the ELCA is a microcosm of the battle for Mainline denominations, and to some degree, all American churches. What I've covered is also only beginning to scratch the surface of issues within the ELCA. How many of these problems exist in your church? Does your church take stances that actively prevent this kind of erosion and watering down of God's Word?

As a bonus, here's a guide on how to perform a land acknowledgement during your ELCA church service. I wonder what Martin Luther would think about the ELCA in it's current form.

Intermission

I've decided against arguing the case for the specific issues (e.g. abortion) I use in this blog post. Some readers might have gotten this far and will disagree with my conclusions because they disagree with the premise that X is wrong. If this is the case, I'd ask that you please read through the Bible and pray for discernment. The Bible contains many inconvenient truths for every reader. Instead of discarding these, we want to embrace them, especially the uncomfortable ones. Additionally, see what stances the Church Fathers had on these issues. Many of the hot-button issues our Church faces today were relatively dead theological arguments up until 100 or 150 years ago.

Evangelicals Are Not Off the Hook

Sometimes those of us who were raised in an Evangelical or more serious Christian church setting (think expository sermons, usually preached by an older white dude), can get into the habit of thinking we're immune to most issues related to straying from the Biblical text. It has been an unfortunate wakeup call that indeed no, Evangelicalism is similarly susceptible to the spirit of our age. Instead, we have our own issues with with Christian Zionism, proto-feminism, and female pastors. It's possible that if we do nothing about the current Evangelical trajectory, we may just be 40 years behind the ECLA in apostatizing from the Faith. Let's check in on the Evangelicals, shall we?

I could hardly believe the results above, so I went looking for additional datasets just to see if other sources had results as odd as the one listed above. Based on my parsing of Pew Research survey data, we can also see similarly horrifying results.

In many ways, the Evangelical camp is the silent battleground where moral and Biblical issues are being fought. In my experience any roughly Evangelical church has an unspoken tension in the air regarding issues of race, abortion, egalitarianism, sexual sin, and much more. You'll observe God-fearing men, women, and families who are either unwilling or trepidatiously hesitant to speak up on these issues of conscience for fear of offending their church neighbor or losing status among ideologically opposed peers.

Just Tell Me the Application

If many mainline Protestant churches (e.g. ELCA) are completely compromised, the Evangelical church is headed down the same path, currently in a struggle for it's life. So what should you do if you're a Christian who came to the same, but currently unfashionable conclusions that our forefathers in the Christian faith did? A few ideas:

• The first step is to understand the bleak reality of the church. Finding a faithful, Bible-believing Christian church is more difficult than it used to be. It may take months to find a church where the congregants/parishioners fully believe everything in the Bible.
• Find a church that does not ordain women, as this seems to be the first step toward bigger theological issues. Additionally, this is a stance that every church must post on their website and can be used as a quick litmus test of what their related views would be.
• Search for churches with traditional liturgy. Reject new-school "Jesus is my boyfriend" or pop worship band-style churches. The order of service within a church and the beliefs often follow and reinforce each other.
• Find churches with growing families. Healthy church members have kids. Unhealthy church members abort their children, never have kids, or their children exit the church as soon as they can.
• Make friends with likeminded Christians and build deep relationships that can survive the strain from both within and outside of the Church. An individual's capacity to build or fight by themself is limited. You'll need good friends along the way.

If you're already committed to a church, push toward these ideals in your church. Anecdotally, they can have a snowball effect on the rest of the members. For example, if you start standing for the reading of God's Word, maybe others will too.

Most church growth happens either by raising up a new generation of Christians or from Christians deciding to switch churches. As Mainline and many Evangelical denominations continue to decline, we can hope and pray that members are realizing the issues in their churches and are switching over to solid Biblical and traditional churches.