From InternetMonk: MY PREDICTION: THE COMING EVANGELICAL CRASH
I believe that we are on the verge - within 10 years - of a major
collapse of evangelical Christianity; a collapse that will follow the
deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and that will
fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.
I believe this evangelical collapse will happen with astonishing
statistical speed; that within two generations of where we are now
evangelicalism will be a house deserted of half its current occupants,
leaving in its wake nothing that can revitalize evangelicals to their
former “glory.”
The party is almost over for evangelicals; a party that’s been going
strong since the beginning of the “Protestant” 20th century. We are
soon going to be living in a very secular and religiously antagonistic
21st century in a culture that will be between 25-30% non-religious.
This collapse, will, I believe, herald the arrival of an
anti-Christian chapter of the post-Christian west and will change the
way tens of millions of people see the entire realm of religion.
Intolerance of Christianity will rise to levels many of us have not
believed possible in our lifetimes, and public policy will become
particularly hostile towards evangelical Christianity, increasingly
seeing it as the opponent of the good of individuals and society.
The response of evangelicals to this new environment will be a
revisiting of the same rhetoric and reactions we’ve seen since the
beginnings of the current culture war in the 1980s. The difference will
be that millions of evangelicals will quit: quit their churches, quit
their adherence to evangelical distinctives and quit resisting the
rising tide of the culture.
Many who will leave evangelicalism will leave for no religious
affiliation at all. Others will leave for an atheistic or agnostic
secularism, with a strong personal rejection of Christian belief and
Christian influence. Many of our children and grandchildren are going
to abandon ship, and many will do so saying “good riddance.”
This collapse will cause the end of thousands of ministries. The
high profile of Christian media will be reduced, if not eliminated.
Hundreds of thousands of students, pastors, religious workers,
missionaries and persons employed by ministries and churches will be
unemployed or employed elsewhere. Christian schools will go into rapid
decline. Visible, active evangelical ministries will be reduced to a
small percentage of their current size and effort.
Nothing will reanimate evangelicalism to its previous levels of size
and influence. The end of evangelicalism as we know it is close; far
closer than most of us will admit.
Why Is This Going To Happen?
(1) Evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and
with political conservatism. This was a mistake that will have brutal
consequences. They are not only going to suffer in losing causes, they
will be blamed as the primary movers of those causes. Evangelicals will
become synonymous with those who oppose the direction of the culture in
the next several decades. That opposition will be increasingly viewed
as a threat, and there will be increasing pressure to consider
evangelicals bad for America, bad for education, bad for children and
bad for society.
(2) Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people the evangelical
Christian faith in an orthodox form that can take root and survive the
secular onslaught. In what must be the most ironic of all possible
factors, an evangelical culture that has spent billions of youth
ministers, Christian music, Christian publishing and Christian media
has produced an entire burgeoning culture of young Christians who know
next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it.
Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not
know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology or the
experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of
Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for
culture-wide pressures that they will endure.
(3) Evangelical churches have now passed into a three part chapter: 1)
mega-churches that are consumer driven, 2) churches that are dying and
3) new churches that whose future is dependent on a large number of
factors. I believe most of these new churches will fail, and the ones
that do survive will not be able to continue evangelicalism at anything
resembling its current influence. Denominations will shrink, even
vanish, while fewer and fewer evangelical churches will survive and
thrive.
(4) Despite some very successful developments in the last 25 years,
Christian education has not produced a product that can hold the line
in the rising tide of secularism. The ingrown, self-evaluated ghetto of
evangelicalism has used its educational system primarily to staff its
own needs and talk to itself. I believe Christian schools always have a
mission in our culture, but I am skeptical that they can produce any
sort of effect that will make any difference. Millions of Christian
school graduates are going to walk away from the faith and the church.
(5) The deterioration and collapse of the evangelical core will eventually
weaken the missional-compassionate work of the evangelical movement.
The inevitable confrontation between cultural secularism and the
religious faith at the core of evangelical efforts to “do good” is
rapidly approaching. We will soon see that the good evangelicals want
to do will be viewed as bad by so many, that much of that work will not
be done. Look for evangelical ministries to take on a less and less
distinctively Christian face in order to survive.
(6) Much of this collapse will come in areas of the country where
evangelicals imagine themselves strong. In actual fact, the historic
loyalties of the Bible belt will soon be replaced by a de-church
culture where religion has meaning as history, not as a vital reality.
At the core of this collapse will be the inability to pass on, to our
children, a vital evangelical confidence in the Bible and the
importance of the faith.
(7) A major aspect of this collapse will happen because money will not be
flowing towards evangelicalism in the same way as before. The passing
of the denominationally loyal, very generous “greatest generation” and
the arrival of the Boomers as the backbone of evangelicalism will
signal a major shift in evangelical finances, and that shift will
continue into a steep drop and the inevitable results for schools,
churches, missions, ministries and salaries.
PART 2 of InternetMonk's 3-Part Series is The Coming Evangelical Collapse: What Will Be Left?
HT: TallSkinnyKiwi
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