The Unchurched

[CoreIssue]

Is it my imagination, or are the numbers of unchurched growing?

And while at it, does it seem like many 'Christians' are locking themselves into their current beliefs to an extent they will not even entertain any kind of questioning?

I would like to get the feel and observations on this from others to aid in a thought I have formulated on these issues.

[Jessie]

I'd say yes.

many dont even have much bible knowledge either, and
many cant find a decent church.

so many are into wof and one does get locked into
traps of not being able to think etc.
and others think they know it all and wont study or look to be sure they are correct in what they believe.

[eahaddix]

Is it my imagination, or are the numbers of unchurched growing?

"Americans Have Commitment Issues, New Survey Shows," by The Barna Group, 4/18/2006 (http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdate&BarnaUpdateID=235)

"Annual Barna Group Survey Describes Changes in America’s Religious Beliefs and Practices," by The Barna Group @ Barna.org, 4/11/2005 (http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdateNarrow&BarnaUpdateID=186)

"Fewer Americans Than Thought Going to Church, Says Study," Fred Jackson & Jody Brown, AgapePress @ Crosswalk.com, 2006 (http://www.crosswalk.com/news/religiontoday/1396537.html)


I wholeheartedly believe that your observation is correct. There is a subtle growing movement, which is called "the Home Church (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_church)" movement. Specifically, people are choosing to gather together at friends' homes, instead of going to traditional, institutional "church."

"Home Churches Growing Increasingly Popular as Worship Alternative," by Natalie Harris, AgapePress @ AgapePress.org, 6/13/2006 (http://headlines.agapepress.org/archive/6/132006d.asp) [Survery Article at Barna.org, 6/19/2006] (http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdateNarrow&BarnaUpdateID=241)

"Going to Church by Staying at Home," by Washington Post Staff Writers @ WashingtonPost.com, 6/4/2006 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/03/AR2006060300225.html)

Why is this "home 'church'" trend occurring? According to various online complaints:
1) Many mature believers outgrow "churches." Specifically, most "churches" cater to special interests, such as attracting the unsaved, entertaining people with social activities, making money for the "church" budget, and/or coldly upholding denominational doctrine and practices. As a result, many mature believers feel that these special interests inhibit their spiritual growth.
2) The vast majority of "churches" do not equip believers for good works. To the contrary, most "churches" train believers to passively sit in parallel pews, while less than 10% of the congregation does all the work of ministry. As a result, many motivated believers feel that the clergy suppresses their Spirit-led desires.
3) Many believers do not receive necessary interpersonal support. Specifically, many "churches" overlook many believers, as the result of "church" growth, the formation of cliques, and/or internal politics surrounding the clergy. In particular, "visitors," "guests," and "new members" commonly complain about feeling unwelcomed. Yet, when the same "churches" need monetary donations or volunteer service, these "churches" suddenly "remember" everybody.
This list of complaints could continue . . .

However, the center of many believers' complaints surround the definition of "church." The structure of today's "churches" are vastly different than the local assemblies of the New Testament. And today's "churches" cannot explain or justify this difference.

Comments?

[CoreIssue]

Good points, Lucky.

I am hopiing to get some more comments before responding to what has been said. Get some more comments and feelings in first.

[CoreIssue]

Well, there doesn't seem to be any more comments.

What I feel I am seeing is most denominations have largely become businesses. Pastors, and so, enter in for careers.

As someone pointed out, when they feel 'called' to another ministry it is always a bigger church with more pay.

What happened to ministers that worked jobs and did this on the side? What are they doing that demands week long involvement?

The higher ranks control the teachings. They vote on beliefs instead of studying and debating them out. Thus personal desires end up doctrine.

It is so bland and empty those who actually care about truth end up frowned upon. They feel the time is wasted and more rote than purpose.

A norm of feel good and don't offend has become 'spirituality' to most. Thus anything that says anything is dangerous. It might loose attendance and donations.

Thus it attracks the 'I want' crowds. Not the I am seeking crowds.

Those driven out seek alternatives. Some do forums, some small home groups and others just give up trying.

The fire is gone. The zest for God left. The Church is old and dying, on this earth.

As those with knowledge, fire and drive are dying off, they are not being replaced.

The time for the Rapture must be near. Or those in the flesh taken are going to largely be the ones without rewards and as if escaping from a fire barely.

Hope that is not too depressing. But it is what I am seeing.

[CTZonEdit]

I think you have shown the light on many churches today.

They are too consumed on being a business that they have lost what the purpose of the church is.

The purpose of the modern church is to stay in the business of keeping and maintaining a building to assemble in. Just keep the building going and report back to the regional or national heads, so they can stay in business.

So where in the bible is all this "new" purpose of the church?

People assembled in their homes or in public places in the NT. So I expect that is why many that are seeking are returning to this type of assembly since the "typical" church has failed in a major way.

[Jessie]

That was excellent Core and CTZ

exactly what is going on

[CoreIssue]

On our local paper I post on their forum.

A Charismatic Episcopal pastor has a column. I respond to what he says, often making notes not in agreement with him, or bringing in aspects not favorable to him.

I believe he has used his last couple of columns to respond to me. And not until the last column has he actually posted a direct response.

To get to the point, for this topic, the last column was about leaving a denominational church. The right and wrong ways.

That got to the unchurched issue.

The pastor responded in a predictable fashion.

But that brought in a fellow Christian who brought in his points, which were largely in line with mine.

The pastor, whom I refuse to call Father, invited him to his church.

Here is muddle's response. He gave me permission to post it here.

As I told him, I found it a breath of fresh air and from a different perspective some here mind find useful.


The Perfect Church? (http://www.thecitizen.com/node/node/8114#comment-10117)
http://www.thecitizen.com/files/pictures/picture-1047.gif (http://www.thecitizen.com/node/user/1047)
Submitted by muddle (http://www.thecitizen.com/node/user/1047) on Sat, 07/08/2006 - 8:55am.
Thanks very much for the invitation.
I hope it isn't that I have unrealistic expectations and am looking for the non-existent Perfect Church. I agree with you that God uses sinful and imperfect people. You'll never hear the old argument "The church is full of hypocrites" from me. Of course it is. So is the mall.
This month's issue of the Wittenburg Door has a piece titled "Megachurch Burnout" with the caption "The younger crowd has had its fill of big, flashy churches." (And, no, I'm not the author of that one if anyone wonders.) I don't know about the "young" part, but the "burnout" part describes me.
I am tired of the antics of the contemporary evangelical church and, indeed, the entire pop culture that has grown up around it.
When I go to church I do not want to be entertained. And, quite frankly, contemporary Christian music leaves a lot to be desired for this Allman Brothers/Grateful Dead/Neil Young listening, guitar-picking, aging hippy. When I listen to music, I don't want to be preached to.
As theologian David Wells has argued, the contemporary evangelical church, with its pragmatic and therapeutic concerns, leaves *No Place for Truth*. Wheaton historian, Mark Noll, opens his book *The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind* with the line, "The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind." This mindlessness is played out every Sunday across the country.
One church that advertises frequently on this page includes short bios of the staff. The ministers make it clear that they don't read books. One includes "reading" as one of his "turn offs." God help us. He's really into the latest Christian band and follows his favorite sports team, but this spiritual leader likely thinks that Caesar and Washington were contemporaries, that the "Nestorians" invented the chocolate bar, and offers his descisive "refutation" of Darwin's theory in the form of a silhouette of the Fish of Truth devouring the Darwin amphibian.
Is it asking too much to find a group of people interested in cultivating what might be called the Christian Mind? (I believe it was Harry Blamires who first introduced this notion in print.) If it is true that "as a man thinketh in his heart so is he," then wouldn't it be a good idea for us to attempt to think through the full implications of a Christian worldview? Aren't we supposed to be transformed by the renewing of our *minds*? Not by cell groups or praise choruses or big, super duper programs.
I would like to attend church where my intelligence is not constantly insulted and, perhaps even where people know who Isaac Watts and Frances Havergal were.
*Every* church in this area of my own denomination has gone the contemporary, "seeker-sensitive" route. They all keep an eye on Willow Creek and Saddleback. "Rick Warren did such and such; Go thou and do likewise." I've had it.
So it's really not the presence of "imperfect people" that has me staying home of late. I just don't enjoy the circus and don't look good in face paint and spotted tights.

[InTheWind]

Good Posting, right on

[CoreIssue]

Mega Church Burnout (http://www.thecitizen.com/node/node/8114#comment-10297)
http://www.thecitizen.com/files/pictures/picture-1047.gif (http://www.thecitizen.com/node/user/1047)
Submitted by muddle (http://www.thecitizen.com/node/user/1047) on Mon, 07/10/2006 - 8:20am.
I mentioned the attached article in an earlier post. This appears in this month's Wittenburg Door. It has also been printed in a Dallas editorial column as well as at the following website where I lifted it for print here.
www.christianethicstoday.com/ issue/057/Issue_057_Christmas_2005_PDF.pdf -
The author is likely the age of my sons--in his twenties or early thirties. His point: the mega church approach is backfiring on his generation.
Heck, it has backfired on me.
I think this is a good piece to follow up the bit of discussion we had in the wake of Father Epps' opinion piece.
Mega-Church Burnout
By Clint Rainey, Journalism Student
University of Texas, Austin
“Our studies consistently show that churches base their sense of success on indicators such as attendance, congregant satisfaction, dollars raised and built-out square footage. None of those factors relates to the kind of radical shift in thinking and behavior that Jesus Christ died on the cross to facilitate.” Pollster George Barna
Forgive the irreverence, but there’s irony in the fact that my 10-year stint inside a local megachurch began in the same decade as the fall of the ‘90s lip-sync imposter band Milli Vanilli.
In a decade—the time it took the country to totally forget those dance-pop boys—my church developed religious Beatlemania and went from a small community of several hundred members to a behemoth megachurch of nearly 10,000.
My generation, the offspring of the megachurch’s most loyal fans, isn’t quite so gripped.
I understand that this thriving model comes from the baby boomers’ rejection of hellfire-preaching ministers who so beleaguered the idea of church that fleeing churchgoers brought their children to megachurches in hopes of saving them from what theirs had become. But we were saved only to be part of a new problem: a church philosophy massive and impersonal in every way.
As megachurches go, ours is the quintessence: a skate park, a sports league with enrollment exceeding the city YMCA’s, a cafe and a game room outfitted with a half-dozen Xboxes. When baptisms take place during the service in the nearby “baptismal sanctuary,” the word “LIVE” appears in the corner of our auditorium’s three Jumbotrons as the event is telecast to us.
All of this, we’ve been reminded interminably, is to “attract seekers.” I’ve grown very disenchanted with this concept. Attract seekers to what? A sanctuary worthy of Broadway production? An auditorium mimicking a convention center? A complex of expensive buildings?
Thumbing through the biblical church model in Acts, I can’t find anything about seeker-friendly buildings. What’s there is a lot about seeker-friendly Christians.
Big numbers and a big building aren’t wrong on their face, but they often accompany bad motives. Case in point: The newest monster of megachurch monsters, Houston’s Lakewood Church, shelled out $75 million to renovate the NBA arena of the Compaq Center. Lakewood credits much of its success to Pastor Joel Osteen’s New York Times best seller on Christian “self-discovery.”
While many Christian bookstores consider the book a hodgepodge of biblical shallowness and have pulled it, Lakewood is in no hurry to denounce—or even clarify—its pastor’s work after seeing how the feel-good message attracts surface-level seekers. Is it just coincidence that spectators once cheered the Go-Gos and the Rockets in this same building?
Evangelicals should want to attract seekers; that’s what evangelicals do. But most megachurches do this in an impersonal way. Jaded by this philosophy, my generation has seen how being a mile wide and an inch deep allots, unsurprisingly, a whole mile for approximately an inch’s worth of deepness. As my church has grown, so has the frequency of cell phone interruptions and families sneaking out early under cover of the dark movie theater environment.
These churches attract middle-age adults like iron filings. If they can be spiritually filled there, then bully for them. But my generation isn’t in such awe.
Amid a culture inundated with bigness and cellular technology, iPods and TiVo, the technologized megachurch is no longer impressive. In fact, many young Christians come to church to get asylum from this worldliness. Infinitely more than the megachurch’s “stuff,” my generation wants religion. We want everything our parents didn’t, and that seems increasingly to be summed up in the word “meaning.”
Studies say our generation is the most conservative in decades on issues of religion, suggesting we’re averse to the risks that churches with a flashy, pop-culture bent take to appeal, ironically, to us.
So when we grow up, we’ll likely look for religion elsewhere. This leaves the surface-level seekers who are looking to plumb new spiritual depths for the first time, but for whom the church instead wastes time crafting pop culture analogies and brewing espressos, as the meat-and-potatoes churchgoers. They’ll come on Sundays in search of significance and find it in the same place they do the other six days: in “stuff,” in “things.”
In Europe, mass religious apostasy left its churches people free, but the American megachurch could bring this irony: We, unlike the Europeans, have people in our big, empty churches.

[Sid]

All of this, we’ve been reminded interminably, is to “attract seekers.” I’ve grown very disenchanted with this concept. Attract seekers to what?

A sanctuary worthy of Broadway production?

An auditorium mimicking a convention center?

A complex of expensive buildings?



This link is from an Irish Catholic:



To put it as simply as possible, we males can't stand being talked down to weekly by other males who often seem to claim not only an exclusive expertise in interpreting the gospels for our own times, but unlimited license to use them against us. Now that the area of sexuality has become unsafe, we notice that some priests have moved on to other fields of complaint, for example, 'materialism.'

As the excess consumption of material goods is driven, above all, by the desire for social status, the typical parish priest's consciousness of his own social status – expressed eloquently in modes of accommodation and transport – tends to deprive his message of moral impact.

We have all heard the lesson of the mote and the beam too often to be unable to apply it ourselves. Unconvinced and alienated by this kind of unthinking moralism, we males tend to opt out – leaving 'religion' to the priest and the wife.



Why so many males are alienated (http://www.catholicireland.net/pages/index.php?nd=2&art=475)


Maybe we need to explore the $64K?:


Why do men avoid going to church, and what can be done about it?

[CoreIssue]

Modern day realities have brought the RCC to the point where they can no longer exalt their leaders as holier than thou. The Biblically rejectable labels of Father, Reverend Most, Most Reverend and so on stick in the throats of many when they actually consider what it means.

Even more so if they actually read what the Bible says about such titles and what men should actually be to hold any role in a church.

So, what does the RCC do to respond? Instead of seeking truth, they try to entrench their authority more, reach out and absorb more into them by accommodating different beliefs.

Ironically, they have reverted to the ancient Roman Empire practices of how conquered and other nations became part of the Empire. Absorb key aspects as part of the Empire and do not try to change the people. A practice carried over into the Empire days of the RCC itself.

We need, I believe, to get people to take a look at the history of the RCC. To see how and where the structure and practices of the RCC came from. To see they are not based on anything from God, but political strategies of conquest.

They need to see in these times of threat to the RCC, they are retreating backwards in times, more and more, to the pagan roots they grew from. Back to the fundamentals of Pagan Rome, where religion was a tool of power, not truth.

They need to see the titles of Father and such were never intended to convey a meaning of more holy and pure by those who hold them. But as tools of indoctrination that say do not challenge us, for we hold your eternal fate in our hands. We own you.

I truly believe that only when folk see these truths, can they ever be free of the RCC and free to come whole heartedly to the Biblical God.

How many RC know the word propaganda originate in the RCC? From the Office of Propaganda that was designed to talk around and defuse embarrassing issues away from Rome?

Sadly, as long as the idea that the authority lies in full with Rome, while some leaders simply fail in their offices, I don't think there is any way to bring these folk to the Bible and God. To them Rome is the Bible and God in too many ways. So when Rome fails, God fails.

My perspective on this.

[eahaddix]

Why do men avoid going to church, and what can be done about it?

Easy. If you show me a local fellowship which functions like the fellowships of the New Testament, then I will attend this local fellowship.

Otherwise, "church" attendance is a "no go" for me.