Softening the faith

(Guestpost from Drew)

Wintery Knight has written a couple good posts recently about the dumbing down of American churches. As one piece of evidence regarding this dumbing down, he points to the scarcity of men. Men tend to thrive on logic and aggression, but modern churches promote emotion and passivity. Hence, men do not want to attend church.

My own experience tends to support this theory. I look around sometimes when I’m at church, and the large percentage of female congregants usually stands out.

Moreover, when I attend church, I frequently feel like a gifted student sitting in a special ed class. Complex doctrines do not get communicated. I often feel like I’m wasting my time.

Wintery Knight describes the benefits offered to congregants in the wussified churches:

• Never learn any of the excellent reasons why the Bible is reliable or trustworthy, or even how to test its claims
• Believe things without anyone explaining why you should believe them
• Avoid discussing the evil happening in the world, and don’t make plans to do anything about it
• Avoid discussing anti-Christian, anti-liberty policies being enacted by Obama
• Help people to feel comfortable with their lack of engagement by talking about the weather, television shows and movies
• Avoid hurting people’s feelings by expressing your views, or worse, by disagreeing with them
• Sit next to screaming babies who need their diapers changed
• Sing songs about your emotions with a crowd of strangers who will never talk to you about anything interesting
• Have your aggressive male nature and apologetics knowledge suppressed by stuffy, insecure church pastors
• After the sermon, hear about everyone else’s home renovations, children’s graduations and vacation plans

I mostly agree with these characterizations. But whereas Wintery Knight emphasizes the lack of apologetics in churches, I think the real problem is an overall lack of substance. In many churches, both the sermons and the music lack substance. And you have a better chance of winning the lottery than of finding a Sunday School class with meaty, intellectual teaching.

One problem is that lots of churches have given into the “seeker-sensitive” movement. This movement constitutes a corroding influence in Christianity akin to John McCain’s and Lindsay Graham’s influence within the Republican Party. That is, the movement tries so hard to please potential converts that it forgets to please God, and thereby cripples Christian churches from the inside. (In the long run, this dumbing down actually results in fewer converts.) The church where I officially hold membership, for example, has largely given way to this movement – to the point that it recently abolished Sunday School for all high schoolers. Apparently, learning is not a priority anymore!

Meanwhile, the simplistic worship music of the modern era often tends to lack any real doctrinal substance. Or worse, sometimes the lyrics are so poorly thought-out that they actually promote false doctrines. Yes, I know that rock music can be fun to listen to, but let’s face it:  Waking up early on Sundays isn’t just about fun. We attend church to train ourselves for better service to the kingdom.

But even mainstream churches that have resisted these movements often tend to suffer from non-intellectualism. For example, most pastors have gotten into the habit of preaching three-point sermons. I’m not going to declare myself the voice of God and suggest that three-point sermons are sinful, but they do create the opportunity for pastoral laziness. I think pastors frequently take advantage of this opportunity, and wind up presenting watered-down sermons filled with extrabiblical philosophy. By contrast, expository preaching forces pastors to focus on and wrestle with the Word of God itself. (Of course, it’s possible to take the expository technique a little too far as well; I’ve attended Presbyterian churches where they’ll spend an entire year or more on a single book of the Bible!)

Instead of intellectual teaching in church, I often hear general messages like, “Love God,” or “Submit to God’s will,” or “Love other Christians,” or “Pray.” Certainly, loving God is a useful command (if you don’t love God then you can’t perform any other good deeds from your heart), but boiling down Christianity to such simplistic principles keeps us spiritually immature. And praying is good, but there’s only so much you can say about it. ”Put your faith in Jesus for salvation” is another excellent message for any unbelievers to hear, but Hebrews 6:1-2 explicitly tells us to move beyond this simplistic preaching and deepen our faith.

If more American churches dealt faithfully with the complex matters of God’s will, Christians would have little problem recognizing the wicked fruit of socialism. I mentioned in a post a little while back that I visited a new church where I live. The preacher passionately and aggressively (i.e., in a manly manner) dealt with the issues of human liberty and the corruption of socialism. I was pleased to hear the sermon, but also shocked because I had never heard such a fiery sermon dealing with politics. It was sort of like listening to Mark Levin on the radio, only a Christian-version and in church.

Anyway, if more preachers would fully engage the wickedness of the world, God would most likely deliver our country from its sins. But the way things are going now, I’m not real sure what to expect of the future.