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| A Message for Christians |
A newspaper columnist recently wrote a piece about the need for young people to return to religious groups. She bemoaned the fact that 103 parishioners from her church had died during the previous year and nowhere near that number of new people had joined. In fact, her church was already a consolidation of three churches, two of which had closed. She asked for advice from churches that weren’t experiencing these problems.
The writer felt the causes were the disappearance of religion from family life and a smaller number of people choosing church life as a career. But these aren’t causes; they’re symptoms. The root cause is the marginalization of Christianity by a steady drip of attacks that’s produced at least one generation of Americans who’ve fallen into secularism and have limited, if any, knowledge of Christian faith.
Why – and how – would parents introduce their children to something they know little about aside from the fact that Christianity is disrespected and attacked? And why would potential clergy choose careers in a dying industry? These symptoms can only be addressed by reaching parents and children who are truly lost when it comes to faith.
I contacted the columnist because she asked for help and I could offer it. In our brief conversation she told me her church already had a program for outreach and I should contact other pastors in the area. She had publicly complained but wouldn’t even listen to a new idea. She’s probably just a typical Christian and, if so, it’s no wonder secularists have successfully whittled away at our faith.
Here’s the bad news: the U.S. has a Christian heritage but it no longer has a Christian culture.
The good news is that everyone – secularists included – has a God sized hole in their heart, even if they don’t recognize it. They try to fill it with substance abuse, “wisdom” invented by secular gurus, New Age fads, perceived alien visitations and who knows what else. Millions of misguided people trying to pound square pegs into round holes. Christian faith is the missing round peg and it’s our job to help them find it.
Christianity has been cast as hateful, judgmental and bigoted by secularists whose own “beliefs” are incredibly shallow – and wrong. We need to tackle this in order to share our faith, and it’s a disservice to both the unbeliever and to Jesus if we don’t. Fortunately, ways to do this are easy to teach and simple to use.
In his classic comic strip Pogo, cartoonist Walt Kelly coined the phrase, “We have met the enemy and he is us” to point out that individual people were personally responsible for a massive littering problem 40 years ago. We Christians are personally responsible for living, defending and sharing our faith, and if we merely convey a message of noncommittal uncertainty we ARE our own enemies.
There are practical, friendly ways to communicate with today’s unbeliever but we need to know how to do it. We’ll discuss some ideas in the next post.
Graphic credit: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us, Walt Kelly, Simon & Schuster, 1987.
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