That’s what “Internet Monk” Michael Spencer says. Since I’m generally considered to be an evangelical (maybe because I lead an Evangelical Free Church?) I’m just a little interested in what he has to say. Here’s his prediction:
Within two generations, evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its occupants. (Between 25 and 35 percent of Americans today are Evangelicals.) In the “Protestant” 20th century, Evangelicals flourished. But they will soon be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic 21st century.
This collapse will herald the arrival of an anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian West. Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become hostile toward evangelical Christianity, seeing it as the opponent of the common good.
Millions of Evangelicals will quit. Thousands of ministries will end. Christian media will be reduced, if not eliminated. Many Christian schools will go into rapid decline. I’m convinced the grace and mission of God will reach to the ends of the earth. But the end of evangelicalism as we know it is close.
He says all this will happen because of our close identification with a political movement (“we fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith”), and our superficial ministry (“the billions of dollars we’ve spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it”).
He’s right about that. And if the death of “evangelicalism” means the death of our desperate grasp for political power and our desperate attempt to lure people into church through expensive programs and shallow feel-good entertainment, then I’ll dance on the grave.
Now, Spencer doesn’t see these things dying anytime soon. He sees North American Christianity continuing on the same trajectory of “pragmatic, therapeutic, church-growth” ministry that it’s pursued for the last two decades, slowly growing more and more irrelevant and despised by the culture around us. Here’s where I disagree.
In his sovereignty, God seems to be hastening the death of our quest for worldly success: he ripped political power away from evangelicals in the 2008 election, and now he’s ripping financial power away too. Every church I know (including ours) is downsizing staff, facilities, and programs. It’s hard for a church to keep bringing in crowds through flashy gimmicks when you can’t afford the smoke machines in the sanctuary and organic food-courts in the lobby anymore.
As God kills off our twin idols of pragmatism and power, I believe he’s bringing something else to life (well, actually, back to life): a humble desire to glorify God more than we glorify ourselves. A proper view of God’s sovereign glory compared to our utter sinfulness and helpless dependence on him for everything in life.
Incredibly, two days after Spencer’s article appeared, Time Magazine identified this kind of thinking as one of the 10 ideas that’s changing the world right now:
In the early 1900s you might have heard “The Old Rugged Cross,” a celebration of the atonement. By the 1980s you could have shared the Jesus-is-my-buddy intimacy of “Shine, Jesus, Shine.” And today, more and more top songs feature a God who is very big, while we are…well, hark the David Crowder Band: “I am full of earth/ You are heaven’s worth/ I am stained with dirt/ Prone to depravity.”
The movement that’s growing from this God-centered theology is less interested in worldly success, and more interested in biblical faithfulness. Dedicated to changing the world, but not by luring people with a distorted gospel that blesses the lives they already lead and the things they already worship. Instead, helping people to see the greatness of their sin along with the incredible greatness of God’s grace.
If something needs to die to bring this shift about, then I say burn, baby, burn.