The Bible Nerd

You definitely get the feeling that some people don’t like going to church. Just taking a stroll through some of the Emerging Church book titles gives you that nagging feeling. “Unchristian”,  “They like Jesus but not the Church”, “Lord, Save us from your Followers”, and “A New Kind of Christian”. After reading through many of the most popular Emerging Church books, I could pretty much guess what the first few chapters were going to be (especially if it was the author’s first book on the issue). Chapter 1: Why I don’t like to go to church. Of course, it takes many paths and gets more complicated, but the core is that these people love Jesus, yet struggled with their church experience. Are they just disgruntled, self-centered Christians, or is there something more to this?

Clearly with the traction that their books have gotten, there is the something BEHIND the movement that we need to see. There will always be people who complain about the church and leave it to start their own thing. That is not what we are witnessing in our generation. What we are witnessing is a large movement away from the traditional, mainstream, historic churches. It didn’t start with the Emerging guys either, but rather with the whole “non denominational” trend beginning with the Jesus Movement of the 1970’s. It is funny that we think of churches like Calvary Chapel and Four Square as “established” denominations, when in reality, they are relatively new expressions of Christians leaving denominations. The next wave hit with the Seeker church (sometimes known as the mega church model) when even more people left their old Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian, or Lutheran home. The Emerging church is simply another stage of the larger exodus away from the historic denominations.

This isn’t just a theory, but statistics will back that there is a radical change happening in our generation of church history.  Mainline Protestant denominations continue to decline, according to the 2012 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches. The United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church USA, and the United Church of Christ, all reported decreases in membership in 2011. For several years now, the Southern Baptist Convention, a conservative evangelical denomination, also lost members. Who is growing? (other than Mormons) The non denominational, evangelical church (in these churches who have over 1,000 people, the growth rate was around 83%!!!) It isn’t that these people are walking away from God, but they are walking away from their “old” churches to new ones. Why?

There is no single answer, yet the voice of the Emerging Church writers accurately captures the dominant reason: people don’t “like” going to their old church. This could be because of the music, the lack of community involvement, legalism, fire and brimstone preaching, lack of women in leadership, boring services, etc… You can’t make everyone happy in a church, and we shouldn’t be trying to anyway. We should be staying faithful to the Bible and Jesus’ heart for the church. BUT, when this many people walk away, there is something these churches were not seeing. As we talk through the issues of the Emerging Church, we will have to ask ourselves the question: are the older churches hanging on to dead, lifeless tradition just like the Jews of Jesus day, or is our materialistic, me centered, post modern generation creating a church to fit their needs, not God’s?

All I know is this, people in Acts sure appeared to “like” being a part of the church. Acts 2:46, “Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts.” Seriously, every day they wanted to meet? I see people struggling to go just for one hour on Sunday. Acts 4:22, “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had.” Wow! I see pastors begging for people to tithe to keep the church from going under. Acts 11:26, “So for a whole year Barnabas and Saul met with the church and taught great numbers of people. The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch.” A whole year? great numbers? proud to be called followers of Christ? Now that sounds like people who “liked” going to church.