What is the role of the church?

Events have occurred over the last several decades that should raise the question for Christians:  “What is the role of the church?”  Most of us grew up with the values that we learned in church.  We learned a moral code that we try to follow, a code that has served us well in dealing with our fellow man.  It is based on the Ten Commandments and the teachings of Jesus Christ.

Over the course of the last number of years, families have moved away from regular church attendance.  That movement away from the church has been reinforced by Hollywood where television rarely shows church attendance.  On the few occurrences that church is shown, it is usually for humor, never a family attending services together.
The response to this has been an effort of various churches to try to lure folks back to the church.  Some have made various changes to their services.
Recently, Rachel Held Evans published a widely shared piece in the Washington Post decrying the Evangelical church’s shallow attempts to appeal to Millennials by trying to make church “cool.”  Ms. Evans critiques hashtag campaigns and concert-style worship services.  However, according to David French writing for National Review, her point is not really about style.  Evans believes the church shouldn’t reform its style, but rather its substance – by becoming, in essence, more progressive.  In other words, keep the ancient styles, but change the ancient beliefs.  Evans’s fervent belief is that the key to unlocking the millennial age group to spiritual energy is found in the old ways – not its actual beliefs, but the trappings of the faith.  It’s about the “inclusiveness,” neglecting that the American religious community has been engaging in a decades long experiment in exactly the kind of spirituality she proposes.

Last summer, the Federalist’s Andrew Griswold noted that liberalization was the single best way to shrink the church.  The numbers he conveys are startling. Several denominations, in just the last decade, have lost an alarming18-24 percent of their members, and attendance drops have exceeded that.

The decades long reality of American spiritual life is the loss of spiritual consensus and the growth of two intellectually and theologically competitive cultural thought processes: religious conservatives and secularists.

46 million Americans who identify themselves as Christians are religiously unaffiliated according to the Pew Research Center.  Pew determined these individuals are “not looking for a religion that would be right for them.”  For the moment, they’re not really “longing” for anything from church.  What does all this mean for the American church?  It means more cultural conflict and more cultural division.

If that is not enough, we now know that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is spending $84,000 through a University of Michigan grant to determine the best way to use pastors to advocate for environmental issue in their churches.  At the same time, the IRS is considering taking tax exemption away from churches that choose not to permit same sex marriages.
As the song says, “you have to stand for something or you will fall for anything”.  We are at a crossroad.  We must decide if is more important for our churches to be popular or more important to be a beacon to our families; uplifting traditional Christian values.  I believe we are best served by churches that provide that beacon.

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