THE DECLINE OF THE EVANGELICAL CHURCH IN AMERICA--Part III of III

The Church Conformed To The World In The Sanctuary.

As stated in my first installment in this series of three articles on the decline of the Evangelical church in America, I named 12 foundational distinctives that make Christianity what it is supposed to be. Here I will deal with the last 4. (Find all three together in reverse order here.) These last 4 are not about the world around us at all. Nor are they primarily about how we interact with the world. Rather, we will consider the radical paganization of the Evangelical church within its walls. We have bastardized Christianity with an eclecticism that is shameful.

NUMBER 9. SCRIPTURAL PRACTICE. By this I refer to the idea that no pagan religious practice be brought into the church and approved. Here again, I will appeal to our collective memory. While most will not remember some of the changes I have written of to this point, this new change is recent and electrically fast, and it shows the acceleration of wickedness in our circles.

"Christian Yoga" was the first paganization I remember. It has percolated for quite some time, but now it is fully integrated with the "Christian faith" of some church goers. Zondervan has published a book called Yoga for Christians: A Christ-Centered Approach to Physical and Spiritual Health through Yoga by Susan Bordenkercher. In 2003, the Osgood Files had this to say about Bordenkircher:

"However, Bordenkircher says the movement and rhythm of hatha (physical) yoga made her more centered and reflective and more able to pray. Hindus strive for wisdom, knowledge and inner concentration, which clearly overlap with Christian goals, Bordenkircher says. 'My feeling was it's worked for them, why shouldn't we be able to do that?' she says. So Bordenkircher combined poses with Christian references. During the warrior pose, she talks about breathing in the Holy Spirit. She relates the child's pose to being at peace with God. And the balance poses are about finding spiritual balance. 'If it feels good for your body and soul, you should do it.'"

Notice how that last sentence takes us back to the sixties and seventies theme which said, "If it feels good, do it."

I want to be very clear here. There is nothing magically evil or magically good about the physical exercises done for the benefit that exercise has for the body. But look at Bordenkircher's words about it. She is pushing it as a spiritual exercise. She says it gives one "spiritual balance."

Recently we've seen an influx of "spiritual formation," "contemplative prayer," "prayer" labyrinths, candles, and incense. All of these are derived from mystical religions and most Evangelical leaders are not opposing them at all. At counterpoint to this is what Moses said to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 12:29-32. He warned, "When the LORD your God cuts off before you the nations which you are going in to dispossess, and you dispossess them and dwell in their land, beware that you are not ensnared to follow them, after they are destroyed before you, and that you do not inquire after their gods, saying, 'How do these nations serve their gods, that I also may do likewise?' You shall not behave thus toward the LORD your God, for every abominable act which the LORD hates they have done for their gods; for they even burn their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods. Whatever I command you, you shall be careful to do; you shall not add to nor take away from it." I think that would include yoga, don't you?

Yesterday, I was in a Christian book store and found prominently displayed a flyer for Rob Bell. He's a young man who has made quite a name for himself by selling videos of breathing exercises and meditation to young church goers. These are practices borrowed from Hinduism and Budhism. Not only is he not censored in the church, he's a celebrity.

Again, the very fact that the debate rages on in the Evangelical camp over whether or not to accept pagan practices into the church and use them is a disgrace and 50 years ago, it would have never taken place.

NUMBER 10. GODLY ZEAL AND DOCTRINAL VIGILANCE. The lack of godly zeal has actually been a danger to the Evangelical movement from the start. The reason is a bit subtle, but worth looking at.

The beginning of the Evangelical church in America was a reaction to the collision of three forces. One force was godly men and women who wanted to obey God. Many of them called themselves Fundamentalists, just as many of us call ourselves Evangelicals. The Fundalmentalist movement began as a wall against the incoming liberalization of Christianity from German scholars of the 1800's and early 1900's. Schliermacher, Bultmann, and others wanted to change Christianity to become more acceptable to modern man. The Enlightenment was still a fresh idea. The impact of the Enlightenment on the European mind was to reject the God of Scripture as unnecessary. Hence, Neitzche said, "God is dead." We didn't have to postulate a God to understand the universe. We had science for that. All causes were natural and material. Miracles were not conceivable. So the virgin birth, resurrection, healings, and walking on water were myths. Now it was too great a change for Europeans to simply jettison the religion that had shaped their nations, so they simply set out to subtly change Christianity. Genesis is true, but only as a myth. Myth was redefined to be any story with a moral to it. So the Bible was a crock, but a very nice crock. With a moral, of course.

As this sort of thought floated across the pond, men like Harry Emerson Fosdick decided that preaching a new and improved Christianity was a good thing. He was a Baptist minister in New York and he took the east coast church by storm.

To stem this tide of sewage, east coast Christians, lead by orthodox Christain scholars on the faculty of Princeton Theological Seminary, began to meet in conferences. The conferences began meeting before Fosdick came on the scene, but he served to intensify the efforts of orthodox people to make lines of demarcation between liberals like Fosdick and themselves. The conferences began in the late 1800's and continued until about 1920 in upstate New York, with at least one at Niagara. The fruit of these conferences was what they called the "fundalmentals of the faith." That is, those doctrines one must believe in order to be a Christian. The exact doctrines decided upon varied from conference to conference, but usually included these five: 1. the virgin birth, 2. the bodily, substitutionary death of Christ for sin, 3. the bodily, immanent return of Christ, 4. the inerrancy and authority of Scripture, and 5. the deity of Christ. These were the five decided on in 1910 by the assembly of the Northern Presbyterian Church.

So one force was the original Fundamentalists. Their enemy, the liberals, was another force. The third force was a number of folks within the Fundamentalist camp. Remember the early Fundamentalists were Presbyterians with only five or six rules. They were really minimalistic in their approach. They were not more narrow than Scripture. However, as time went by, some in the Fundamentalist camp came to add cultural markers and rules that were not biblical. They became the third force. As the orthodox Fundamentalists battled liberals, some Fundamentalists became hyper-Fundamental. As the Fundamentalist-liberal war raged, of course, most of the unsaved world sided with the liberals. Fundamentalists were branded as obscurantists, ignorant throw-backs, and worse. As the hyper-Fundalmentalists became more prominent, it was easy for the world to make the charges against real biblical Christians stick.

In the 1950' many church-goers wanted to be Christian without being marked out for ridicule. As a result, beginning with men like Billy Graham and Carl Henry, a new movement started. It took its name from the Greek word for "gospel," the Evangelicals. Most Evangelicals wanted to be orthodox. All wanted to distance themselves from the Fundalmentalists. It was America. We all wanted to be happy. Why face scorn?

Did you notice two things about this story that might sound familiar to those in the modern American church? First, the trouble started when the liberals set out to improve on the gospel to make it relevant and acceptable to the worldly mind. Second, otherwise orthodox Christians were not willing to accept the scorn of the world. They wanted to change their name so that no one would hate them. In so doing, they added to the scorn of many real brothers and sisters in Christ. Even today, many godly people call themselves "Fundamentalists." I cringe everytime I hear an Evangelical talk down the Fundalmentalists. At one time the Fundalmentalists were the only ones holding the fort. If you're an American believer, there's a real good chance you wouldn't have heard the gospel if not for the Fundamentalists many of you hate.

In this way, the seed of compromise in the Evangelical church was planted. The Fundamentalists were zealous for God and His Scripture. The Evangelicals were more interested in getting along.

To this day, in the Evangelical church, the man who points out error is hated by many, if not most. That's who we are.

NUMBER 11. FEAR OF GOD. Some years back someone started lying about the fear of God as presented to the saints in the Old Testament. When I was young, the first two church songs I learned were "Jesus Loves the Little Children of the World" and "Jesus Loves Me, This I Know." When I heard that I was supposed "fear God," it was a shock. Obviously, the contrast between the love of God and His fierceness can cause a great deal of consternation. It's tempting to pick between the two, discard the other, and not deal with the cognitive dissonance these biblical twins cause. You can only imagine how long it took a little kid in Montana to warm up to the idea of the fierceness of an angry God who hates sinners. I knew I was one. So I had a problem with the fear of God.

It turns out, so have a number of pastors and theologians. They are liars. There is no faith without the fear of God. The lie goes like this: "Fear" doesn't mean "fear," it means "respect" or "reverence." It's funny to me how little a vocabulary God has that He should mispeak so easily and so often. The fear of God is mentioned dozens of times in the Psalms and Proverbs alone. If God meant "reverence," why didn't He say so? The Spirit says, "The fear of the LORD is clean, enduring forever; the rules of the LORD are true, and righteous altogether." This lie started in the 70's with the bromide, "Don't be negative." "No one will follow you if you're negative," we'd say to each other. We were helping God. We were getting rid of all the hellfire stuff and concentrating on personal fulfillment. You know--the fun stuff.

I distinctly remember first being gripped with the fright of hell when I was very young. Jesus mentioned hell in 42 verses in the gospel of Matthew alone--many more times than any mention of heaven. Evidently, He had the idea that being scared of God's judgment is a good thing.

Because we do not fear God, we hate reproof, we tolerate false teaching, we despise those who seek truth over relationship, and we spurn doctrinal clarity of any kind. Because we don't fear God, many of us will go to hell.

When Jesus starting preaching, His message could easily be summed up the way Matthew did in chapter 4, verse 17 of his gospel: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." Not exactly seeker-friendly. It was a warning. If all of Jesus' ministry could be summed up in a warning to repent to avoid punishment and to participate in God's kingdom, we should follow His example. Instead, we follow after preachers who give us five steps to a happier whatever through the Spirit, Jesus, or God. Such sermons are really blasphemous because they remake God into a waiter, not The Warrior. One of the most common names of God in the Old Covenant is "Yahweh of Armies." In the King James and many other translations, it is "LORD of Hosts," "Hosts" being armies, and LORD being a euphemism for His Name, Yahweh, or "HE is." This is the personal name He gave Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3. There He said, "Ehweh asher Ehweh." That is "I am that which I am." Change the verb form to "Yahweh" and you get "He is." That was God's personal name. "God" is a title or description. I am a man. "Philip Daniel Perkins" is my personal name. I am "Phil a welder." God is "Yahweh owner-leader of armies." He is a warrior and He will one day war against all the unrighteous.

As you read through Matthew, Jesus mentions hell about 40 times. He does so in a number of different ways, but you will find the following items mentioned over and over again: "everlasting," "weeping and/or wailing," and "gnashing of teeth." When was the last time you heard a sermon on these things? Jesus talked about them all the time. We ought to as well.

NUMBER 12. THE WRATH OF GOD PREACHED. MAN VS. GOD. At the risk of repeating myself, my last point has to do with something that is associated with the absence of teaching about the wrath of God. That is the primacy of man in evangelical preaching.

Here we have a chicken-and-egg question. Did humanism/cowardice seeping into our churches cause us to no longer emphasize the wrath to come, or did that compromise lead to a man-centered pulpit, prostituted for the popularity of the preacher and the comfort of the church-goers?

Based on my personal recollection of the times--approximately 1960-1985--I personally believe the driving force was the cowardice of individual pastors, parents, and Evangelical organizations. It was at that time the sexual revolution was happening. The youth were in full rebellion. As the culture became darker and darker, Christians, Christianity, and those who remained faithful were marginalized more and more. Parents became intimidated by almost everyone else in society. So did pastors. Whole institutions from schools, to churches either had to change or be seen as dinosaurs. And rather than being passed by in favor of those more hip, many in the church compromised.

I went to college from 1975-1979. From 1981-1987 I stuffed a 3-year seminary degree into only 6 years. The transition from God-centered to man-centered pulpits began when I was still in junior high and high school. By the time I was in seminary the new make-everybody-happy "gospel" was in the house. All it had to do was to make itself at home. Get in the furniture, settle in, change the drapes, make a stay of it. The buzz word of the time was "relevance." It was the job of the clergy to make the Bible "relevant" to folks. No matter what.

This may seem rather milk-toast to some, but I assure you the change was cosmic. Before this time, the job of the man of God was to study the Scripture and tell the folks what it said as accurately as possible. Other than that, his only duty was to plead with people to make their lives and beliefs come into conformity to the Scripture.

With Pastor Human in the pulpit, things were different. As a preacher-in-training my greatest role model was Chuck Swindoll. His word for "relevant" was "winsome." He constantly harangued against the Christian who was too somber for his tastes. He was wrong and he lead many Christians astray. Another name that was big in those days was Tony Campolo. Campolo is still a dymanic speaker. His entire schtick was relevance, left wing social issues, bombast, and oozing out at least three quarts of sweat during any one sermon or lecture. We weren't relevant. We needed to take up left wing causes and if we didn't we'd never reach the folks. A third name in those days was James Dobson. Dobson has always stood for biblical truth in matters having to do with family. However, the fact that he was a psychologist added weight and credibility. Many faithful teachers and pastors said all the same things he said, but without training in psychology. All they had was the Bible. As we began to honor man over God, we even turned to man's wisdom for spiritual answers. Dobson was a perfect answer. He was a "Christian psychologist." So we could look to a source other than Scripture and still feel as though we had not compromised. But we had. Big time.

Well, we layered all that stuff on top of the Bible. Did it help? No. We are stuck in an anemic church full of believing infidels heading for hell. Swindoll is getting cozy with Emergents like Dallas Willard. Tony Campolo has written a book with Emergent heretic, Brian McLaren, and his wife endorses a gay-friendy church. And you can go to the local "Christian" book store and buy them all.

So what's the answer? It's not complicated. It's on your shelf. Read your Bible. Promise yourself and God you will obey it. Then become vocal in your church and denomination. Pay the price.

In Christ,
Phil Perkins.