Just over 100 years ago, many people thought the Great Commission was about to be fulfilled. The missionary movement would soon reach every corner and recess of the world, and the 20th Century would indeed be the Christian Century. A magazine by that name still exists. Not so the dreams of a fulfilled Great Commission. This week The Washington Post published a story entitled, "Christianity Faces Sharp Decline as Americans are Becoming Even Less Affiliated with Religion." And the certainty of a century ago erodes a bit more.
For some this simply reinforces the angst that is already prominent in American Christianity, one more bit of confirmation that the sky is falling. But I suspect that this angst is as overblown as the confidence of a hundred years previous. Both the confidence and the angst emerged more from the perceived strength or weakness of the nation than from any promise of divine presence and help.
Old notions of a Christian Century were closely connected to American confidence and hubris. Expectations that the 20th Century would be an American Century buttressed hope for a Christian one, and at times it was nearly impossible to separate American hopes of expansion and empire from missionary zeal. Similarly, America's current, shaky self-confidence gets mirrored in today's religious angst. But just because Christendom folded wedded faith to culture doesn't mean God ever did.
In fact, if by "Christianity" that article in The Washington Post means to speak of discipleship, the sort Jesus commands in his Great Commission, then the headline may even be a factual error. By measuring Christianity largely on the basis of participation in institutional churches, the statistics in the article may actually chart a decline of cultural expectations rather than a decline in faith of any real significance. For decades, the culture propped up church participation, meaning church affiliation was never an accurate measure of the Great Commission's fulfillment.
I have long felt that the demise of "cultural Christianity" was a great opportunity for the Church. (By Church I mean the body of Christ and not any particular denomination or congregation.) We have the chance to consider whether what we do is about following Jesus and his counter-cultural Way, or whether it is a remnant of days when we had been co-opted by the culture for its purposes. And here the measure is not adherents or the number of folks who "believe" in God or Jesus. The measure is discipleship which Jesus describes as obeying "everything I have commanded you."
Congregations are always a messy amalgam of discipleship and culture. This is necessarily the case because we exist in the world. It is quite appropriate for a congregation to use its culture's styles of communication and interpretation in teaching and living out its discipleship. But this cultural connection becomes a problem when the congregation or denomination starts to exist to propagate its culture. This happened in the missionary movement a hundred years ago when converts in sub-Saharan Africa were told they needed to adopt Western clergy attire and Western music and instruments in order to be Christian. And it happens today when congregations imagine that part of their calling is to ensure that their cultural ways of being church survive.
This is not a call for churches to junk their pipe organs or embrace whatever the latest fad for attracting people to faith is, far from it. It is a call for us to step back and wonder WHY we do the things we do. Are our activities about faithfully striving to become disciples who obey Jesus and about helping other to become disciples, too? Or do they primarily serve some other purpose? This is critical information because when our efforts are about making disciples, it is hard not to be optimistic. After all, Jesus promises to be with us, and what could be better than that?
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