Christianity is facing a profound crisis in America. The world continues its downward spiral, and people, lost and desperate, are seeking something solid to hold onto. A mental health crisis is robbing a generation from dreaming about the future. Yet, fewer and fewer people are turning to the church for answers. A significant Pew Research study from five years ago highlighted a rapid decline in Christianity. While some of this may be attributed to a necessary purging of less committed individuals, the numbers remain troubling.
Decline in Church Attendance
In addition, church attendance among self-identified Christians is declining sharply. Amidst this downturn, three groups have emerged: the “nones” (those without any religious affiliation), the “dones” (individuals who have left the church), and the “umms” (those who value the church and are fond of the church but no longer actively participate). COVID only exacerbated these already troubling trends, revealing deep-seated issues previously ignored. It acted like an x-ray machine showing us what was really going on under the surface. Instead of turning to the church for their discipleship needs, more and more people have turned to cable news and social media.
The Great Dechurching
Over the last 25 years, 15% of all adult Americans have “de-churched.” In real numbers, that’s 40 million people. Notably, it’s not just mainline churches people are leaving. Some 15 million of these individuals have left growing evangelical churches like the one I pastor. This phenomenon, known as ‘The Great Dechurching,’ has resulted in more people leaving the church in America over the past 25 years than the number of new Christians who came into the church from the 1st Great Awakening, the 2nd Great Awakening, and all of the Billy Graham crusades combined. Since the 1980s, the perception of evangelical churches has shifted in society from being seen as the “good guys” to being perceived as closed-minded, corporate, flashy, overly political, phobia-riddled “bad guys.”
A Call to Rethink Church
We need to rethink how we do church—not because we have a public relations problem, but because we have a discipleship problem. The world has never needed the power of Jesus or the strength of a vibrant church more than it does right now. The Church is God’s Plan A for this lost world; there is no Plan B.
The Church as a Missionary Outpost
These trends provide the backdrop for why we are reinventing our church. If you were running a company and saw these trends, you would act. Similarly, if your personal financial investments faced such negative trends, you would react immediately. Yet often the church is too slow and change-averse to respond in a timely manner. Fortunately, Christ’s church has a history of self-correction. Whenever it has started to slip in its effectiveness, it has reformed. Historically, whether the church became too clergy-focused, building-focused, or politics-focused, it changed and reformed. The message of the gospel remains unchanging, but the methods of the church must adapt to the needs of its current culture.
The church is a missionary outpost, and adopting a missionary mindset is crucial as we move into the next season. There’s a significant principle repeated throughout the Bible: when humanity is lost, God sends. From sending Adam and Eve out of the Garden with a blessing, to sending Abraham from Ur to bless the nations, to sending judges, prophets, priests, kings, and missionaries, and ultimately, sending His only Son, Jesus, to redeem the world from sin. And from the time of Christ, we see a “Cascading Sending” throughout the New Testament that extends to us today. Initially, God sends Jesus (John 3:17), then God and Jesus send the Spirit (John 15:26-27), and finally, God, Jesus, and the Spirit send us (John 20:21-22) and the Church (Matthew 28:18-20).
The Mission of the Church
The church is now the focal point of God’s mission in the world. God’s sending station. As the saying goes, the church doesn’t have a mission… God’s mission has a church. We are His missionary outpost, tasked with reaching a lost and dying world. If the world is no longer coming to us, we need to go to them. Most local churches have members who are engaged in every industry in their town, living in many neighborhoods, perfectly positioned to bring hope to the hopeless, providing a breath of fresh air to those living on fumes. Yet most individual Christians have forgotten that this is the reason they are on the planet. Church is not merely a place of worship for the saints; it is a launching pad from which they scatter on mission. It exists not just to meet the needs of Christians, but to train and equip Christians to meet the needs of the world.
Lessons from Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass was one of the most important prophets in American history. Born a slave in Maryland in 1818, the world opened to him when, at age 10, his white mistress taught him the alphabet and how to spell simple words, he possessed a brilliant mind that he used to change the world. As a teenager, the Bible came alive for Douglass, and he experienced a powerful conversion to Christ. But Douglass recognized an irreconcilable gap between the faith he found in the Bible and the one practiced by the white slave owners. Out of respect for the Lord, Douglass’s owner refrained from beating his slaves on Sunday, but Monday was another matter. This obvious religious hypocrisy would animate and drive Douglass for the remainder of his life. For how many of us – do our Sundays and Mondays not match? You see, church is not a destination that you attend one day a week, it’s a movement that you are part of all seven days of your week. When the church started, there was no liturgy – there were no traditions. They had no bands, there were no banners, no buildings, there wasn’t even a completed bible yet. No staff, no programs, it was just a movement of people who were devoted not to a weekly event, but to a life on mission. Their goal was to lift up the name of Jesus, and to live out God’s story in their lives every single day and everywhere they went.
The Call to Mission Today
The church began as a movement of people devoted not to a weekly event but to a life on mission. As each Christian leans into this, embracing their calling as an apprentice of Jesus and being trained and sent out as a light in the darkness, we will see transformation one life at a time. This missional reorientation, modeled by Jesus, challenges us to engage with the lost and broken by going to them instead of waiting for them to come to us.
The church has been sent into the world. They’re not coming to us anymore. We need to figure out how to reinvent how we do church, so that we can go to them.
