Disappearing Church

The disappearance of a mode of church engagement characterized by commitment, resilience, and sacrifice among many Western believers. In its place a new mode of disengaged Christian faith and church interaction is emerging. This new mode is characterized by sporadic engagement, passivity, commitment phobia, and a consumerist framework.

They don’t bludgeon you out of your faith; they subtly coax you, each option quietly proclaiming a kind of gospel in itself, in which the good life can be yours.

What we are experiencing is not the eradication of God from the Western mind, but rather the enthroning of the self as the greatest authority. God is increasingly relegated to the role of servant, and massager of the personal will. 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.

Salvation does not come as a work of self-improvement, but as a divine shock, an undeserved gift given.

The contemporary liberal ethos of not doing something that harms another believes—influenced by materialistic underpinnings—that harm is only physical.

What if the answer to our culture’s challenges is still the gospel?

The only authority left then in the third culture is the authority of the self.

Recently, I watched a documentary that explored the diversity of teeming life in the deepest and most remote jungles. We are shown the incredible response of the jungle to the falling of a tree. We see the open space created when a huge tree falls in the dense jungle. Instantly, a race begins among the plant life to fill the space. Light pours in and space opens up to be filled. The space where the tree once stood is filmed for months using time-lapse photography. The space is quickly filled with a variety of broad-leafed plants; their large leaves are able to capture large amounts of sunlight, ensuring rapid and spectacular growth. Soon thin trees begin to break through the broad-leafed plants, shooting their wispy trunks up into the unoccupied space, beginning to fill their branches with leaves. The growth of these trees seems impressive compared to the broad-leafed plants around, yet next to the giant trunks of the large trees that surround them, their height is not that impressive. In reality, their position is precarious, for soon something begins to happen around their thin and vulnerable trunks. Small, thin vines begin to lap at the bottom of their trunks, snaking their way up. At first there are just a few vines, but soon they are legion and, piggybacking off the preexisting structures of the thin trees, they soon dominate the space and the sunlight. The thin trees now are almost invisible, buckling under a suffocating blanket of vines. The vines appear to have won the race. For a while there is nothing, just the vines. The growth appears to have halted, but then something magnificent happens. A lone trunk appears seemingly from nowhere, piercing the blanket of vines. Its trunk is thicker, its form solid. Rising above the vines, it keeps moving, at first doubling the height of the other trees and plants competing for the open space. Soon, it is ten times their height. Before long it has reached the height of the surrounding trees. It is a gigantic, magnificent tree. The space has now been filled. This tree will last for centuries. The broad-leafed plants that initially fill the space do so by gaining spectacular, visible early results. Yet their leaves, roots, and structure are fragile. They sacrifice sustainability and longevity for short-term gain. The trees that break through next also gain some success, but their structure, too, is not resilient. The vines gain some success at the expense of others. They parasitically exist on the hard work of surrounding structures, only to eventually overwhelm them. All of these strategies do not succeed. When it comes to doing ministry and mission, in the open space created by the disappearing church in the third culture, we can face similar temptations. We can create something that is spectacular and visible, but ultimately fragile. We can attempt to grow quick at the expense of long-term sustainability. We can parasitically live off pre-existing structures, eventually overwhelming them with our…

In the third culture which rips at roots, which tears at foundations, we need depth, we need roots, and we need foundations. As churches, we need to move to a strategy of rebuilding.

We as followers of the Messiah Jesus, living within the time of His kingdom rule, now must take up the mantle of being rebuilders. We face a cultural landscape, inner private worlds, devastated and depleted by the pursuit of unlimited autonomy. This pursuit has seen churches and believers disappear. Thus, we need again to rebuild the devastated spaces and structures of our culture; we need to breathe commitment, responsibility, and dedication back into our faith and our churches. Richard Foster once said, “The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.”2 The deep roots and foundations in Christ of creative minorities will ensure resilience.

To be shaped by grace in a culture of self, the most countercultural act one can commit in the third culture is to break its only taboo: to commit self-disobedience. To acknowledge that authority does not lie with us, that we ultimately have no autonomy. To admit that we are broken, that we are rebellious against God and His rule.

The beautiful world seems to offer the potential to possess beautiful things and experiences. However, in possessing them we fail to acknowledge their role as gifts, given for our enjoyment with instructions on how to best enjoy them. A gift is ultimately a thing of grace. When we try to possess a gift, to claim it as our own, we rob it of its grace. We insult and ignore the giver of the gift.

We need to release ourselves from the addiction of trying to win over the public and the burden of trying to influence public opinion, of trying to build ministries upon pitch alone. Instead we need to remember that if we are to build resilient disciples in our “on-to-the-next-shiny-thing” culture, we need to do as Jesus did and focus on the concreteness of actual people. We see Jesus building His ministry upon going deep with a few, rather than going shallow with the public.

The challenge faced by the church in the West is not the rise of unbelief, but rather the rise of a belief that is detached from an idea of belonging.

What an institution does is structure a desirable experience, so that it becomes repeatable on a regular basis. Institutions are not a problem. But institutionalization is. An institution is meant to enrich life. But institutionalization takes that good thing and turns it into death. How? The institutional structure, the mechanism, takes on its own inherent purpose.12

This was a blood and guts religion that did not tolerate a distance between heart and mind, word and deed.

The voices of the past provide us wisdom, they can show us where the dangerous rocks lie, they can teach us the principles, beliefs, and values that operate in any time or context. The wisdom of those who went before us teaches us to think long term, to see beyond just the instant. The value of the wisdom passed on to us by past generations encourages us to wonder what our contribution to the next generation will be.

Yet we expect church to always be pleasurable, enriching, and exciting. Maybe the limitations of church, the discipline of regular attendance, the commitment it requires, also teach us to be Christlike.

Maybe we need to reimagine church in our minds as a spiritual discipline, which teaches us the value of delayed gratification, of personally investing in change, of becoming more like Jesus.

Those of us who lead and believe in a time of spiritual ghostliness feel this dislocation all around us. It is the discomfort of feeling a great distance between the vision of the kingdom and the direction of the culture we live in. It is the hurt as friends leave active faith or faith altogether and disappear into the beautiful apocalypse. It is the relentless pressure that pastors, leaders, and disciples face as we call people to submission and worship of God in a culture of seduction and pleasure. In the presence of such pressure, we have before us two options. First, we can become bitterer, more despondent, more isolated. We understand the situation we face and we flounder in the face of the challenge. Second, we can simply attempt to lessen the pressure by shaping our theology, spirituality, and lifestyle to suit the dogma of the surrounding culture.

In isolation, exile, and withdrawal, God enables us to grasp our own flaws and fallenness. The disciple who wishes to influence others, yet is unaware of his or her own flaws, has the potential to do much harm.