Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Alive and Well?

Alive and well?
An Article by Marty from The Briefing

I recently attended a large pastor’s conference where I was joined by 3,200 evangelical pastors, ministry leaders, seminary students, youth leaders and children’s teachers. It is always encouraging to be with so many people who trust in God’s word to turn people from idols to serve the true and living God. And this is just one out of dozens of similar conferences that gather Bible-believing Christians. Surely this is a wonderful sign of Christianity here in the States.

However, I am not sure what to make of it all. For, statistically speaking, even though Evangelicalism is on the rise here, our culture is pulling away from God faster than ever. Further, Christians—especially evangelicals—have an alarmingly low understanding of Scripture. Is what I see at conferences like these a fair reflection of the state of American Evangelicalism?

My experience of evangelical churches is this: I know a woman who teaches at an evangelical Christian school who rarely reads the Scriptures; I know an evangelical pastor who preaches more from Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life than the Bible; I know an evangelical church that gathers people in small groups to give them tips on healthy eating and coping with job-related stress while paying very little attention to Matthew or Ecclesiastes. And I could go on with similar examples for pages.


How do the two trends I’ve identified above square with one another? I’ve been reading Tom Schreiner’s excellent article on preaching and Biblical theology (PDF). Schreiner reminded me how it is that such a dichotomy can exist. He said, “[C]onservative churches may embrace the inerrancy of Scripture while denying in practice the sufficiency of God’s Word. We may say that Scripture is God’s inerrant Word, while failing to proclaim it seriously from our pulpits”. I would add that churches also fail to practise God’s word seriously in their ministry programs.


This is why there are so many evangelical pastors and churches who have no positive effect on Christianity and Evangelicalism as a whole in America: we assume our beliefs rather than practice them. It is easy to claim to hold to evangelical beliefs; you can post them in the church bulletin, use keywords like “inerrancy” and “justification” in your sermons, browbeat liberals for their opposing views. But it is difficult to actually put into practice the doctrines we hold to so fervently. And so it’s hard to find a church that centres its ministry on God’s word rather than on the culture.


My hunch (based on the fruit of our labours) is that most of our growing evangelical population knows little of what it means to participate in or run a ministry on the idea that God’s word is inerrant. As Schreiner points out, this comes back to our fundamental distrust in the fact that God’s word is actually sufficient. Simply put, our evangelical churches just don’t believe that God’s word alone is capable of producing God-glorifying Christians—assuming that they have reached the point where they think that that is the goal of being Christian.


Many cultural pundits say that Evangelicalism is alive and well in America today. I would agree it is alive, but I remained unconvinced as to how “well” it is.

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