A Post-Christian and Post-Church World

 

What does the truth look like in a post Christian World? What does the preaching of the gospel look like in a world that wants no part of religion?

What happens when the COG inevitably dies out?

There’s a worry we share that’s based on the idea of this time we live in being the ‘great falling away’.

We worry that if we don’t “stay the course” that we are ‘falling away’. Part of this fear is justified by biblical phrases like “he who endures to the end” and ‘hold fast to the truth once and for all delivered”, those are real biblical phrases but do those phrases refer to what we think they do? 

There’s an idea that the truth is a straight-line path, is that correct? I want to challenge that Idea that the truth is a straight-line path.

This is a very uncomfortable exploration; I think we love church more than we think we do.

What is the church, and what is it for? I propose that the church is a conduit for the gospel to flow through. The church serves a function to funnel the gospel through crowds into individuals. That conduit has looked many different ways in the last 2000 years. If we can separate the function of the church from the appearance of the church in our minds, we can follow the path of the Gospel. We accept as fact, that our religious heritage goes through several ‘denominations’ of Christianity, however we draw distinctions between what we call the ’true church’ and the ‘false churches’. I argue that we cannot and should not draw these distinctions BECAUSE despite the very different appearance of each of these churches, the Gospel has been transferred. Even to the extent of the Catholic church, specifically in that, you know the Catholic church is responsible for the BIBLE. There is no Bible as we have it today without the Catholic church… period. 

What I want to propose is not a new approach to ‘church’, but a new paradigm entirely. 

We are used to viewing the church as a thing, a specific group of people who lay hands on successors, who lay hands on successors, etc.; however, that is NOT AT ALL our history; not even recent history for that matter. 

I want to view the church, instead, as a conduit for the gospel. The church is the package that the gospel comes in. Another way to say that is The Church is an artform.

Not specifically a statue or a painting technique, but a way of doing things. The church at whatever time you want to view it is contemporary art.

Think about this for a bit, what besides an artform is a block of architecture, organization, music, speaking style, writing style, publication technique, dress code, and choreographed religious rites? It’s an artform. Furthermore, the church has historically be a contemporary art form.

Jesus was born into Judaism. Judaism in its earliest form was based on a heavenly vision. Moses was given a pattern of heavenly things and the Tabernacle was built so that men would act out a pattern. 

We can see from secular history though, that the Tabernacle as well as the Temple many generations later were curiously similar to the contemporary ideas of worship. The whole Idea of a building as a place of worship, for instance is not alone in history… that’s what worship looked like, more or less at the time.

It’s as if God spoke to people in their own time. Like, He told Moses to build the Tabernacle one way, and He gave Solomon a completely different set of plans. Have you ever considered that? Why did God change His house plans? Isn’t He ‘the same yesterday today and forever’?

Yet, He changed his house plans.

Then we have the time of Jesus and Jesus is born into this Judaism, even though it had been corrupted, I do not argue that it hadn’t, it was still ‘the way’ at the time. 

Then Jesus began to say some strange things, He started using the term Temple as a synonym with Human Body… Did he change His house plans again?

Judaism was the conduit for the word of God… but then that packaging changed, after Christ’s death and resurrection the package became known as the way. This is a very interesting time period because the conduit for God’s message changed. The packaging changed and it changed to a contemporary artform. It was a new era of sorts and the artform changed from Judaism which orbited the Temple, to traveling speakers. These men went out and met people face to face somewhat like traveling salesmen and proclaimed the Gospel. This is happening at the height of roman highway travel. Rome has highways going between countries and cities and a great many people in those days made a living traveling, trading along these routes. The world of that era was very mobile, people were traveling, tourism was a big industry. In a world that now had highways and tourism, the Gospel was being moved around via traveling teachers. There were no ‘church buildings’ during this time period, there was just traveling… a contemporary artform, and an artform that people understood.

Then there’s about 300 years of intense persecution and there’s nothing concrete established, no buildings, no architecture just underground hiding.

Then there’s the Catholic Church, this is a very strange time in history, at least from my perspective, because here is a time when ‘the great whore’ as I was taught brings the Gospel out of hiding. This next several hundred years of this universal church give us the structure of the bible we have today. It quite literally didn’t exist and they made it. They also used modern art and architecture and songs… a modern artform to move the Gospel. They were not without fault… I cannot stress that enough, they didn’t have everything right, but God used the church as a conduit to move the Gospel foreword.

Then around 1300 the world began to change again. The renaissance, the secular artform changed. That is, the way people thought about the world and viewed the world changed. With it, the church changed yet was still a conduit. The world was looking at art and architecture and song in a new way, poetry and verse were the in thing. So the church forwarded the Gospel by the use of art. We would call that Idolatry from our vantage point, and if we did the same thing right now, I would say it very well COULD be idolatry, but at the time, they were speaking the common language. I wonder if you’ve ever studied the meanings of the famous works of art, their intended purpose. They were explanations of stories and concepts, they were attempting to tell THE story in modern language. They got a lot wrong… I understand that. But they were forwarding the same Gospel. The world had ‘rediscovered’ antiquity, and they were retelling the lost stories. They did that with statues and paintings and Latin, with glass windows and pipe organs… it was the language. It was the artform.

Then came The Enlightenment, and the world changed again. No longer was the world talking in terms of songs and poems and paintings, they were now talking about science. You guessed it… the church started speaking that language. The world was exploring the nature of things, and measuring things… The church did that too, they continued being the conduit that the Gospel flowed through. They wrote long papers, argued over details and tested hypothesis. They tried to explain the Gospel in empirical terms. Like every time period before them, they didn’t get it all right… but they used the modern language, the printed word, and gave the world the biggest thing it had ever seen. They printed a Bible in the modern language. THIS WAS THE CATHOLIC CHURCH mind you. If you are a dispensationalist I challenge you to find a ‘Philadelphian era’ with a better ‘open door that NO MAN CAN SHUT’ than this. This church that got a whole lot wrong but still tried to speak the modern language WAS an effective conduit. Sure the artform was excessive and overbearing to the point of death… I understand that. The artform, the method by which they spread the gospel was contemporary. People understood it, that’s provable because of the existence of the Reformation. The conduit, though flawed, transferred the gospel well enough and end the proper language so well that people understood it and attempted to fix what had become corrupted!

Then came a new world… literally I mean. New land. With new land came the opportunity to start fresh. The people whose fathers had attempted to fix the corruption in the church now had an opportunity to start from scratch and that’s what they did. They were Puritans, fundamentalist. They had no old architecture, no paintings, no statues they just had the gospel that came through the conduit. Now they were the conduit and they built small churches out of wood. They sang simple songs and had simple rites because that’s all they had. They carried out that artform with renewed zeal though. Their worship wasn’t traditional at all, it was real. They used the contemporary artforms to preach the Gospel. They used what they had even though it wasn’t much… yet, despite the fact they too got a lot wrong, and didn’t have much to start, WE are proof that they did a good enough job.

Then came the industrial revolution. The world changed again, and with that change the church changed, with the world speaking industrially, the church coined evangelism. The world began to speak politically, and the church did too... there’s a reason that evangelicals today are so highly political it’s not new. Once again, they didn’t get it all right, but they spoke the modern language, churches became lecture halls because that’s what the people spoke. The people began speaking about social issues, and the church spread the gospel through social issues. 

Despite the fact that they got a lot of things wrong, WE are proof they still did their job! They forwarded the Gospel.

I say all these things because we today, are in a changing world. It’s not a different world as in, the president is different or some regime change has happened, it’s different in that the entire way people view and talk about the world has changed.

Today the brass of nearly every Christian church in the world are having meetings about how few people are in church. Precipitous growth rates, uninterested younger generations, literally dying membership with no replacement.

I ask you, what does every generation think about their parents taste in music and art? Do children speak the same artforms as their parents? 

The church needs to change it’s artform, we are literally failing at reaching people, and our only response is ‘must… hold… on…”.

What about the falling away?

I want to propose a thought to you, what makes you think the correct path is straight ahead? Has the path in the past not been winding? Take the apostle Paul, he was traveling East, being led by the spirit, preaching along the way and all of the sudden the spirit forbid him to go into Asia and turned him north instead.

Was the spirit not leading him east? 

What happens if you’re driving on a winding road, looking at the scenery, and following the winding road round a mountain edge, looking out over a beautiful valley with a river at the bottom and waterfalls… What happens if at ANY point in the road you decide to keep going straight ahead?

We think the falling away looks like the truth being a straight line and we make a left turn, but that’s not necessarily the case.

The church I came from closed its doors to me and the world during covid, they did so in the name of continuance. I argue on their behalf in that, that they are truthful in that assertion. They did not take a left turn, they continued down the same straight path and fell off a cliff.

If the road is straight, why do we NEED the Spirit to ‘lead us’ into truth? Shouldn’t it just be right in front of us?

There IS a wide, flat and straight path in the Bible, do you recall where it’s said to lead?

We look around the world and assess our churches and find them failing and we bang our fists and say ‘keep doing the same thing harder!’… is that not literally the definition of insanity?

The church needs to change our artform so that we can properly forward the Gospel. 

The ‘Church’ model is dead. The ‘church’ has too much baggage, people are for good reason disinterested. Churches will never be full again in our lifetimes at least. That’s not the language people speak anymore. 

The current generations speak in language of discussion. Longform interactive conversation. They also have zero grasp of history, they also are searching desperately for individual meaning. 

If we want history to look back at us as having successfully forwarded the Gospel we have to start speaking that language.

The rows of forward-facing chairs and pulpit, the hierarchy of government, the ‘old people music’, the depressing prayer requests, dress codes, the sermon content, all these things have to either go or be translated. I like those things, I grew up in them, but they are out of date. That doesn’t mean the gospel is out of date, it doesn’t mean the truth is out of date… it just means our language is out of date.

This is a POST-CHURCH, POST-CHRISTIAN world, and NOTHING we can do can change that. 

If we want the future generations, the CURRENT generation to have the Truth delivered to them to set them free, as we have experienced, we have to bring it to them in their own language. EVEN GOD speaks to different generations in different languages.

God IS the Same yesterday, today and forever… He’s the God who speaks to you in a language you understand.

We DO have to hold fast to the Gospel, the Gospel that we are supposed to bring to the whole world.

We DO have to endure to the end, because it’s tiresome work to have to constantly translate the whole Gospel.

Church is Dead, but The Gospel is Alive and people NEED it.

Do we blame a small child for not knowing how to read the pages of their book? Do we just assume they’re rebellious when they have the book in their hands but can’t explain to you what it says? 

WE are the ones that aren’t doing our job if people don’t know how to understand the Gospel.

The falling away warning includes the idea that love will grow cold, is complaining about the world not understand a foreign concept in a foreign language Love?

We look back through history and see each one of these time periods as having a representative church today in this world. Everything from Judaism to Protestantism, to armstrongism and everything in between. When we look at them we see idolatry though. Even though they carried the Gospel at some point in the past, certain people of each time decided to go straight ahead, rather than be led by the spirit. So they are still present today, with all their original flaws, but no longer able to reach the world with the Gospel. 

Christianity has been around for 2000 years, on average we live about 80. It’s easy to take those 80 year spans and draw a beginning point, an end point and a straight line between them and say ‘this is the way’, but that doesn’t even work in 80 year spans! Has the spirit not led you down paths and into truth that you were not facing before? 

The spirit is there to lead us because the path is not straight ahead.

The spirit is also there to help us judge fruit, why do we need to judge fruit if all we need to do is walk straight forward?

The path is curving, the Yellow warning signs are getting closer and closer together, If we don’t follow the path we’ll fall off it.

-Seth 6-30-22