Why doesn't the North American church at the beginning of the 21st century exercise a more transformational, provocative, and prophetic role within our culture?

As one of the generation of "younger evangelicals" I find myself asking this question quite a bit. In many ways the question has shaped my approach to church life and my imagination about what the future of the church in North America could look like.

Now of course it may be argued that the question itself is wrong. After all, look at all the sprawling megachurches that dot the landscape in our culture. Heck, even 30 years ago, you'd be hard pressed to find a church nearby that topped 1000 people. Now, you may have half a dozen just in your city. And look at the abundance of Christian media and books and the like. We're putting out more music, have more magazines, more movies and online media than ever before. We're ubiquitous in the blogosphere and, depending on where you live, you may have SEVERAL Christian television stations to watch.

We're everywhere, right?

Well, not so fast. The evidence suggests that despite the explosion of megachurch growth around the country and despite the pervasiveness of "Christian" media, the church in North America is in retreat. Rather than growing and spreading, rather than penetrating culture and transforming it for the glory of God, we, in some ways, are admitting defeat, pulling together, and consolidating our resources to make one last stand.

You get the feeling that the ship is sinking.

It is likely that there are numerous reasons for this, and in some ways I wonder if this eclipsing of Christendom at least in North America is not related to the coming of age of our culture in general ... in the same way that when you hit adolescence, you push off of the authority of your parents, rejecting the "mystique" they held over you when you were a child, so perhaps our culture is rejecting the mystique of its Christian parents. And perhaps then this is just a natural vicissitude of history that we should neither feel guilty for nor be alarmed by. The Prodigal has left the house. What can his father do?

That may placate our consciences for a time, but if we're honest I think deep down we know that it's deeper than that. That it's not just about the coming of age of culture, not just a historical inevitability that we had nothing to do with. Somehow I think we're aware that this retreat is about fundamentally about US, that WE are implicated in this, that a certain soul-searching is demanded of us along with a reevaluation of what it means for us to be the church of Jesus Christ at the start of the 21st century.

I would like to suggest that at least part of the problem is that we fail to represent and embody a real, alternative "other" to the culture we live in. Christians have long held the conviction that part of our calling is to penetrate and engage the cultures we find ourselves in. One thinks immediately of the four Jewish youths in Babylon in the book of Daniel - taking on and learning the culture of the Babylonians to such an extent that they put the Babylonians to shame. Yet I would contend that precisely what made those youths salient in their culture was not exclusively that they knew how to engage and take on the culture, but rather that they had learned how to RESIST and SUBVERT the culture. Over and again throughout the book of Daniel we witness the gritty resolve of these youths not to let their Jewishness be co-opted by ideology of Babylon.

And that, to me, is precisely where we've failed--and not just "we" individuals in our individual lives (though that is certainly the case)--but "we" the church. We've figured out how to penetrate our culture, how to speak it's language and engage its thought-forms, but in the final analysis I think we've become SO fascinated with the culture, so bent on interpreting ourselves to the culture, that we've forgotten that the shape of our life is not to be determined by culture first but by the Christ-story first and then by culture secondarily, after we've ferreted through what pieces of culture are compatible with life in Christ and which are to be rejected.

In short, I would contend that in the attempt to make ourselves "relevant" to the culture, we've given up our Christian imaginations and in so doing have given up any sense of Christian uniqueness and along with both of them the ability to actually make a difference.

Here's a question for you - What if we've actually LOST relevance and effectiveness in the attempt to be relevant and "effective" for Christ?

Luke tells a fascinating story in the book of Acts 17. Paul and Silas head to Thessalonica where they find a synagogue. They preach the gospel ("Jesus is Lord") and a fair number of folks are persuaded. A community of nurture, worship, and discipleship begins. And it is THIS that causes a huge, dis-equilibrating, culture-transforming stir in the city.

Let's review:
- Paul and Silas
- Preached the gospel
- Formed a community
- Learn to actually live out this Messianic reality
- Get accused of "turning the world upside down" and "defying the dogmas of Caesar"

Really? They had THAT kind of effect? For doing what? For breaking the bread and drinking the cup and reading Scripture and singing Jewish hymns as they sought to make "Jesus is Lord" a reality in their lives? And they're actually stirring up persecution for that? REALLY?!

Indeed they did. And not for mirroring culture, but for subverting and resisting it. There is no apparent attempt to be "relevant" by Paul and Silas, no obvious marketing strategy at work, no slick presentation tactics being employed.

Just an announcement.
A bold, stark announcement.

And it makes the city tremble.

I think there's something to that. Something that should give us pause and wake us up. These apostles and this community had done nothing more than let the substance of their lives be shaped by the "Word" of God made flesh, Jesus Christ, and this "Word", like the prophetic "word" of the past, jolted the city awake, for there was a genuine "other" being announced here, an other that both judged Thessalonica and provided the means for its salvation as well.

Perhaps, then, it is advisable for the church of the 21st century to be much less enamored by the task of "relevance", and much more enamored by the task of figuring out how the heck to be faithful to Jesus--in our worship, our preaching, our praying, our witness, our public life, etc.; how to let his life and work determine our life and work.

Now let me be clear (before I get accused of advocating a wholesale rejection and retreat from culture), that such a stance does not entail withdrawal or a retreat into an aesthetic from another era (pull out the organs!).  Rather, it is to suggest that the WAY in which the church penetrates the culture must be such that it actually stands a fighting chance of being DIFFERENT. In the absence of this, we simply have nothing to offer the world other than a tacit acceptance of "the way things are."

Decades ago, during the rise of the Nazi regime and in the face of the so-called "German Christian Church" (a collection of churches that accepted the dogma of the Third Reich including nationalism and anti-semitism in an attempt to enhance their evangelistic effectiveness), a group of Christians came together and decided to be different. Led by Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, these Christians (who came to be known as "The Confessing Church"), drafted a charter entitled The Barmen Declaration which sought to re-draw the boundaries of Christian uniqueness for the people of God in 1930s Germany. The first article of this Declaration stated:

"Jesus Christ, as he is attested for us in Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God which we have to hear and which we have to trust and obey in life and in death. We reject the false doctrine, as though the church could and would have to acknowledge as a source of its proclamation, apart from and besides this one Word of God, still other events and powers, figures and truths, as God's revelation."

Barth and Bonhoeffer were convinced that part of the reason the church of national Germany was incapable of seeing Hitler and his dogma for the profound lie that they were was because they simply were not enamored enough with the reality of God's revelation in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Their uniquely Christian imaginations had been evacuated and filled with the propoganda that made the Third Reich possible, and as such, in an attempt to stay "relevant" to the culture, they got co-opted by it. They failed to be a unique "other."

Let me suggest that here, with Christendom in the throws of death and the evangelical church in North America in retreat, that we pause to reflect on the ways in which we've been so enamored with our culture that we've gotten co-opted by it, failing to maintain the prophetic distance and distinctiveness necessary to actually give us a fighting chance of making a difference in the world.

Walter Brueggemann once said, "The contemporary American church is so largely enculturated into the American ethos of consumerism that it has little power to believe or to act ... The church will not have the power to act or believe until it recovers its tradition of faith and permits that tradition to be the primal way of enculturation ... The church has no business more pressing than the reappropriation of its memory in its full power and authenticity."

Would to God that the church in North America would have its imagination liberated in and for Jesus Christ again.