The Church that Died
by Campbell Campbell-Jack, A Grain of Sand:
The church must ‘change or die’, or so say progressive Christians. The core of their argument is that if the church resists the demands of the modern world it will be doomed to irrelevance.
This might have some force if the evidence bore it out. However, those denominations which have gone the furthest with the progressive programme have seen a fatal decline in numbers of worshippers and clergy, along with a distortion of liturgical practice.
To reach the world with the saving news of Christ, the church has to present the unchanging gospel in a way which people understand and which addresses their needs. It is when understanding the surrounding culture becomes adapting to and even adopting the surrounding culture that the church destroys itself.
A Dying Church
The clearest example of this is probably the most progressive church in the West, the Episcopal Church (TEC) in the US. It has gone much further than most mainstream denominations elsewhere, and is paying the price. According to TEC’s executive council and reported in the excellent Virtue Online, in 2021 the number of funerals, (23, 127) outweighed the number of baptisms (13,859) by nearly two to one. Six dioceses had no children confirmed, one diocese had no baptisms, child or adult. In the meantime hundreds of parishes are unable to find priests. Total average attendance has dropped by 24.7% percent from 2008 to 2021. The Episcopal Church is dying, if not dead.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
