What's Wrong With the Church

Wherever you look in the western world, something is seriously wrong with the church.  The church in America is declining rapidly, in spite of a huge revival in the 1970s that saw Billy Graham lead 3,000 Californians to Jesus every night for a whole week.  Scenes not unlike the day of Pentecost and then decline and decay within one lifetime.  In Britain and Europe people are even more anxious.  Operation Mobilisation have predicted that, if present trends continue, the last evangelical church in Sweden will close down at the beginning of 2050.  A few years ago they said it would happen in 2035, so perhaps the situation is improving.  Christians in Britain and Europe are running scared.  Will I have a Christian funeral?  Will we be a muslim country when I die and will I be cremated after a service at the local mosque?

Some churches don't look empty.  They're full of people.  But wait.  How old are those people?  The answer to this question may matter a great deal.  In the 1990s, Noel Stanton (founder of the Jesus Fellowship Church in England) was interviewed for a book that was being written about the history of his church (Fire In Our Hearts.)  He said, 'I am not concerned about the future leadership of this church as I have a very large team of church leaders who are mostly in their 40s.'  The problem is that 25 years later the Jesus Fellowship had exactly the same team of leaders and they were mostly over 65.  This is a good example of the demographic problem in the church.  Unless you have a steady stream of young people coming in, even if the seats in the church are full but they're full of people who are over 50, you will find that in 25 years time you have a rapidly declining congregation.  Those people will begin to die.  It's demographics.  The lifetime of a chuch is long, maybe a few hundred years since some of our biggest denominations started.  (I am basing this statistic on the fact that in 2019 we are still in the era of the stone church with an odd old fashioned sounding name like Methodist church or Baptist church.  By the middle of this century, these could all have closed down.)  The lifetime of a human being is 80 or 90 years.  In order to still have a church around in 30 years time, we need to be reproducing ourselves.  In the same way as parents have children, we need to produce more disciples like ourselves. 

Churches aren't very good at reproducing themselves.  A book about the history of the Methodist Church in the city centre of Sheffield pointed out that 2% of people had joined their church through evangelism and 90% had joined through a family member or a friend.  When was the last time their church did any evangelism?  In the 1950s.  If the church hasn't done any evangelism for 40 years (the book was written in 1989) that statistic isn't really surprising. If they did a little bit of evangelism every year, they would see those statistics become equal, even numbers of people led to the church by evangelists, friends and church members.  We never do evangelism because it doesn't work.  Evangelism doesn't work because we never do it.  It becomes a vicious circle.  Most of our church growth is centred around famous name preachers and the huge following that they have.  The Reverend Samuel Boyd could fill all 400 seats in Gateshead Baptist Church.  Some Christians still remembered him 50 years later.  When he retired the church went into decline.  It had a congregation of 20 when a young vicar took over in 2002.

This loss of numbers is no doubt related to the fact that there is something about the church that people dislike.  Operation World has an asterix beside the number of evangelical Christians in Britain, pointing out what readers of this book have suspected for a long time, that the number of evangelical Christians in Britain is estimated at between 7 and 8 million and this is more than double the number of people who go to church.  

What have people got against church?  The old historical churches lack cultural relevance.  I remember the first time I attended church as a teenager.  I had been invited to the Sunday night event and was walking down the street on my own.  What would it be like?  My sister had said that it was Remembrance Sunday.  They were bound to be talking about the war.  I imagined a man in long black robes uttering long prayers in old fashioned English that nobody could understand.  This would all be there if they would let me in, as I wasn't wearing a suit.  I was 14 years old and had never been to a job interview.  I didn't have a suit.  When I got there, they said nothing about my jeans and sweat shirt and the pop gospel band were playing a song.  There was tea and cakes downstairs.  The people in the church seemed friendly.  I was no longer alarmed, and afterwards told my father how good it had been.  Some churches really do have a man in long black robes who utters long prayers in old fashioned English that nobody can understand.  A church in Newcastle have a minister like this who comes running around the corner and begins lunchtime mass with all 4 verses of the Hail Mary.  The local Catholic church didn't use all 4 verses of the Hail Mary in old English but this was an historical Anglican church, the first building you saw as you sat on the bus and it crossed the bridge over the river.  He fits this description exactly.  That is what people have heard about church.  That is why they keep away.  When I was a young Christian, we always used to think that the old fashioned churches were dying and the people who went there weren't Christians anyway.  It would be survival of the fittest.  The church would evolve into something modern and evangelical.  The old churches would fail.  Churches like ours would grow.  In the twenty first century, the evangelical churches where everyone is born again are also declining.  We are doing no better.

What have people got against church in its modern form?  The book 'Why Men Hate Going to Church' says much about this.  Men associate church with the children who are forced to go to Sunday school and the women who look after them.  Not only does that exclude 40% of the population, who are neither women or children, but it also creates a negative assoication.  Nobody goes to church by choice.  I had an interesting conversation with a friend who had had an experience of God speaking to her from the Bible.  She said that she used to go to church but not any more.  Sunday was her day of relaxation.  Church is not somewhere that people go to relax or to have fun.  Children are sent there.  Women are required to look after them.  Another point is that evangelical churches aren't particularly modern.  The Sunday school was a hugely successful and hugely needed thing in the 19th century.  It taught children to read.  Like many things it became a fossil.  The church no longer needs a Sunday school.  There may be Sunday school teachers who are not too bad, there may be youth work that is valuable, but to have a Sunday school and to call it that, is going back to a time when young people couldn't afford to go to school.  Another relic from the days when people couldn't read is the sermon.  How else would you get the gospel or the Bible into the heads of people in the industrial north who were probably a lot less literate than their children, who had, at least, been to Sunday school?  You'd have to explain it in great depth.  You'd have to give lectures that were hours long.  It seems that the Victorians never got bored with sermons.  Some of Charles Haddon Spurgeon's lengthy pieces are still available as books and sound recordings.  They would tax the patience of modern congregations, who would expect the message to be no more than 30 minutes long and expect it to be concisely limited to one subject.  Spurgeon psalms to himself and wanders around from one subject to another.  Methodist evangelists like Hugh Bourne and, of course, Wesley, could draw huge crowds by standing on a street corner and preaching.  We can't.  I know.  Many of us try.  This is not the normal way by which people in the 21st century assimilate knowledge.  If you go to college now, you will attend a tutorial group and be given some work to do at home.  Most modern training for lay leaders in the church takes this form.  'Why Men Hate Going to Church' also points out the need to cater for the person who is less intellectual.  If we are too much like a 21st century college we may become woman dominated or student dominated.  According to Why Men Hate Going to Church, Women are generally of greater intellect.  Men are often happier to just spend time together.  If you want men to come to church, give them something to do.  They like building things, repairing things, running things.  For the less intellectual relationships matter more than knowledge.  One Christian from the west end of Newcastle was completely illiterate.  'I don't read the books,' he said.  'I read the people.'  If a cell group has no teaching and no worship it may become very dry.  To some people this is acceptable if it is part of a wider experience and they also attend a regular church.  It is better to have some teaching but to pitch this at a level that is appropriate to the people in the group.  I had 2 extremely rough teenagers in my group who seemed to come to life when I stopped reading from my Bible and put on a video.  As soon as a video appeared on the screen, and it wasn't even a particularly good video, they were giving it their full attention.  Modern people communicate by video, not by the printed word.  If the printed word is used, books and resources should be purchased that have a degree of simplicity, they are easy to understand and not too intellectually demanding, but are also interesting and challenging.  It is better to buy books and materials rather than to simply work systematically through the Bible on your own.  Do online searches for things that are really useful to your small group.

You could ask everyone who comes to the cell group to prepare something in advance.  Something short, a passage from the Bible, a passage from a book.  It's also a question of how well you know your group and how likely they are to do this.  People are under pressure at work, have had a bad day and may forget.  Some people also dislike sharing anything or have absolutely no ability to speak in public.  If you ask people to do this, be reasonably understanding if they fail.  Maybe avoid asking people who throw their hands up in horror at the very thought.  Forcing people to do this against their will is not a good idea.  But it's good if a few people can bring something to share at the meeting and preferably not just one person.  If one person brings a guitar so you can sing a hymn, someone else brings a passage from a book they have read and someone else brings a request for prayer, that would be a lively and powerful meeting.