Few statements have been more validating for pastors ministering in our cultural moment than when, in an early 2021 interview, Tim Keller recalled telling his wife, “I got pancreatic cancer, but at least I’m not actually a working pastor right now.” Keller wasn’t just describing pastoral ministry during the pandemic. He was keenly aware that the American social and cultural consensus was shifting rapidly and understood that these changes would have profound implications for the future of evangelicalism.
In the four years since, those changes and their implications have become painfully clear. Derek Thompson is just one of a growing number of non-Christian writers and cultural commentators who are noticing the consequences of 40 million people dechurching over the last 25 years. And based on the opening paragraph in his April 2024 The Atlantic article, The True Cost of the Church-Going Bust, he’s not a fan:
“As an agnostic, I have spent most of my life thinking about the decline of faith in America in mostly positive terms. Organized religion seemed, to me, beset by scandal and entangled in noxious politics. So, I thought, what is there really to mourn? Only in the past few years have I come around to a different view. Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence.” (emphasis added)
Individualism isn’t new. The motivation for building the Tower of Babel, to “make a name for (them)selves” (Genesis 11), is timeless and universal to human experience. What’s new is that we’re living through a perfect storm of converging trends and circumstances that are pushing a post-Christian society past a tipping point. To name just a few:
- Algorithms have so polarized us that political positions, rather than theological distinctives, have become a litmus test for any and all church involvement…
- Over 10 years of being shaped and formed by smart phones and digital media has numbed us and disenchanted everyday life…
- Uncritical embrace of therapeutic language has shaped how we read scripture and left us more fragile and alone…
Right when we’re starting to see an historic openness to the existence of God and their need for Jesus among our neighbors, Christians have never been more closed to the goodness and beauty of his Bride.
The root cause for nearly all of Western society’s most dysfunctional symptoms can be traced back to individualism, and it has been a massive blind spot for pastors and laypeople alike. We’re all fish swimming in the same water. If you can’t shake the feeling that you’ve been ministering with one hand (or both) tied behind your back, it’s because we’ve been focused on equipping Christians to give “a reason for the hope that is in [them]” (1 Peter 3:15), but not how to get that hope into them. We long for our neighbors to invite Jesus into their hearts, but rarely invite them to savor or share his hospitality in his Body. That omission has become so implicitly embedded in the DNA of our spiritual formation that we’ve made multiple generations of very lopsided disciples who are church agnostic at best. And for many who grew up in church, leaving has even become a virtue and mark of spiritual maturity.
We can’t, in any meaningful way, take Jesus seriously and his Bride lightly. We desperately need a fresh apologetic; one every bit as saturated in the Gospel as Tim Keller’s The Reason for God, but in light of Individualism’s “church defeaters” - the unexamined cultural assumptions that weaken or prevent our attachment to a local church. I’m convinced that by overcoming our culture’s anti-institutional objections and showing how they fail to satisfy on their own merits, we can unlock a revival in both evangelism and discipleship.
How can we share the truth, goodness, and beauty of Jesus, if we ourselves only barely apprehend it in (the Body and Bride of) Christ? Imagine, if you will, the difference it would make if the average Christian were able to explain to their neighbors, not just conceptually, but from deep personal experience, how…
- … the meaning and significance we long for can’t be individually achieved, but is bestowed by God upon his people.
- … our refuge from unlivable modernity can be found within a spiritual greenhouse designed to rehumanize exiles and reintegrate life.
- … we can live in a true and better story, greater than any we could author for ourselves, as part of an embodied narrative (the Gospel).
Without a doubt, we live in an incredibly challenging moment, but the same moment presents the church with an incredible opportunity if we have eyes to see and ears to hear. 70 years ago, C.S. Lewis prophetically described this opportunity in That Hideous Strength, the 3rd book of his “Space Trilogy.” When one of the two protagonists, Mark Studdock, finally sees the dehumanizing implications of the evil organization he’d been unwittingly sucked into (much like a fish in water), he has an epiphany:
“As the desert first teaches men to love water, or as absence first reveals affection, there rose up against this background of the sour and the crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. Something else - something he vaguely called the ‘Normal’ - apparently existed. He had never thought about it before.”
What if, whether by direct intervention or natural consequence, God is allowing our modern Tower of Babel to collapse under its own weight and for the same effect? What if he intends to use and redeem all our dysfunction and polarization and stubbornness to ultimately restore something of the life we’ve lost?
If we’re learning anything through our cultural moment, it’s that we definitely cannot flourish apart from God, either as individuals or as a society. And even if we could, he loves us too much to let us. No matter what happens, we can rest assured that God is steadfast in his love and faithfulness to his people (the church) and that Jesus is, even now, making all things new. Nothing is too far gone for God to co-opt for our redemption - including our dislike, distrust, and even discarding his gift of the church.
So whether we’ve never “thought about it before” as Mark, or just need the dots connected to explain it to our neighbors, we’ve never had more reason to fall back in love with the Bride of Christ.