IS IT TIME TO CANCEL CHURCH? How the Church is Canceling Itself
As a full-time pastoral coach, I spend my weeks on the phone, talking with members of Journey Pastoral Coaching across the country. It is both a full and fulfilling ministry. I thank God for what I am privileged to do with my life.
To raise the financial support needed to sustain this ministry, I also travel, preaching in churches, conferences, and retreats across the country. While the travel is tough, the ministry of preaching and meeting people is one I treasure more than ever. I say “more than ever” because as a missionary in French-speaking Europe, I spent twenty years traveling in ministry in the US and across Europe. Then and now, I have done much more than my part to support the automobile and aviation industries on two continents.
A constant theme of my preaching has always been the connection of the modern church to the New Testament church: we are not a different church but a continuation of that church, serving the same Lord, preaching the same Bible and empowered by the same Spirit. It’s a theme that resonates with churches.
But this is not a new thought. It is one given a strong voice in the Word of God and echoed throughout church history. Consider the words of Jude in his New Testament letter:
“Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.”
Jude writes about the “common” or shared salvation of all saints. We sense his urgency as he compels his generation of believers to contend for “The Faith,” the one body of doctrine delivered in God’s Word to all saints throughout history. This is The Faith that existed before Jude’s generation, The Faith that continues unchanged today, The Faith delivered to us by its Author, God Himself. It is the single package of divine truth that was and is to be passed down to “faithful people” from generation to generation (I Timothy 4.6).
“Hold firmly that our faith is identical with that of the ancients. Deny this, and you dissolve the unity of the Church.”
Thomas Aquinas
The Faith Jude compels us to hold to and contend for is not the opinion or perspective of one person or group of people: He makes no appeal to or defense of “Jewish Faith” or “Gentile Faith. Neither is there any defense of: “My Faith,” “Middle-Eastern Faith,” “American Faith,” “Asian Faith,” “Men’s Faith,” “Women’s Faith,” “White Faith,” “Black Faith,” “Red Faith,” “Millennial Faith,” “Baby Boomer Faith,” “Diverse Faith,” “Worship Leader Faith,” “Pastors’ Faith,” “Evangelical Faith,” “Pentecostal Faith,” “Liberal Faith,” “West Coast Faith,” “Dallas Faith,” “Bible Belt Faith,” “My Favorite Online Church Faith,” “My Favorite Podcast Faith,” “My Favorite Preacher Faith,” “My Favorite Worship Style Faith,” “Democrat Faith,” “Republican Faith,” “Independent Faith,” “U40 Faith,” etc. All of these represent nothing more than a Christian version of LGBTQETCETCETC of divisions, factions and schisms, and Jude makes no allowance for them: “The Faith once for all delivered,” he writes.
Nor is The Faith Jude describes a uniquely 1st or 21st Century Faith. It is The Faith “for all”: all centuries, all time. The Faith once and for all delivered to the saints is the truth of God in Jesus Christ. Truth. One. Once. Delivered. For all.
Written thirty to forty years after the ascension of Jesus, Jude already sees The Faith being diluted, privatized, or in danger of being relativized to accommodate the culture, communities, or personal tastes of the later first century. He writes to compel believers to unite in believing, living, and teaching the one Faith given us by God. He urges believers to submit every difference between them to the Cross of Jesus.
One has to ask if this danger existed twenty centuries ago, what dangerous doctrinal times must we live in today? Even a cursory review of the smorgasbord of thoughts and practices referred to as Christian today indicates how seriously we must take Jude’s warning in our time “to contend for The Faith.”
THE MISSING KEY TO THE CONVERSATION
What is the key in responding to Jesus’ call through Jude? How do we fight for the one faith given once and for all time to all saints? Give every generation, culture, community, and sub-community “the right to choose?” Let each decide for itself what is Christian, in conformity to The Faith? Ignore the past and decide for ourselves what The Faith is for us today?
Jude says no. He says we must include “all” saints in contending for The Faith. We must include saints today and saints of the past, all the way back to the first century, and those who first devoted themselves to the Apostles’ Doctrine. We must look back through time, back through the generations of believers who preceded us before we can rightly know The Faith we are to contend for today, The Faith we are to deliver to future generations.
“Everything about modern society is designed to make memory – historical, social, and cultural – hard to cultivate. Christians must understand this not only to resist soft totalitarianism but also to transmit the faith to the coming generations.”
Rod Dreher in Live Not By Lies
Church history does reveal disagreements over The Faith, both its details and its cardinal truths. Understood. But running throughout church history, and especially evident in the historic church councils and the great doctrinal debates, we see the clear crimson thread of the one Faith once “for all” delivered to the saints. Only when the church ignored the contending and comprehension of previous generations that The Faith was at risk or corrupted. It was only by including all saints (past and present) in debates that the Church has been able to protect and keep The Faith. Not The Faith of the 1st Century or 21st Century, not the faith finally understood by this generation after twenty-one centuries of “Dark Ages,” but The Faith once and for all delivered to the saints of all history.
THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
American culture today is infected with atomization and narcissism, diseases that are corrupting The Faith. It is not only evident in the consumer and entitlement mentality that pervades the body of Christ, but in the church’s current obsession with this moment in time to the exclusion of the past. The American church has in many ways disconnected itself from the “common” or shared aspect of The Faith, preferring only Our Faith and Now Faith, the chosen beliefs of our generation, and even the particular group(s) with which each of us identify: “I am contending for the faith once for all delivered to the white, Millennial, urban, female, career-focused, K-Love, ESV, non-denominational Christian.” Feel free to substitute your demographic details for a more personal or your-faith-community experience.
But in separating from The Faith once and for all delivered and individualizing our faith in this way, we divide ourselves, the body of Christ. And in so doing, we divide Christ. And we subjugate Him, Lord of Lords, to our self-identities, cultures, and subcultures. This is why the American church of the 21st Century no longer knows who it is. This is why the American church of the 21st century no longer knows who its Head, Jesus Christ, is (see below).
HOW HAS THIS HAPPENED?
It has happened through two means: a disregarding of the past and the idolatry of the present.
Much of the church, even popular preachers, wave off the theologians and writers of previous generations as passé, their writings irrelevant in this day, Our Day. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for; our writings and teachings are sufficient.
Second, this break with The Faith Once For All Delivered has happened through mediacentric atomization: individual believers are separating from traditional communities (family and church) to absorb and then conform to the virtual world presented by major media. Who hasn’t sat in a room of family or friends, everyone silent and fixated on their phones? The race is on to keep up with the media’s language, values, and styles or face being labeled passé. The pressure is on to measure up, obey, and parrot these things or risk being canceled. And make no mistake about it: the external pressure is intense. Neither mistake that the internal drive is equally intense: like salt on the tongue, media creates an insatiable thirst in many for more, more, more.
This generation of believers finds its prophets and priests more in media than in church, present or historical. The massive amount of time believers invest in secular media makes this evident. A 2022 study shows Americans spend two and one-half hours each day on social media alone – not including TV and movie viewing. A 2019 pre-COVID study found Americans spent over six hours a day on all media. Meanwhile, Christians spend less and less time with other believers in worship and the study of God’s Word.
Based on time alone, this generation of believers listens far more to the media and tech high priests of our day than the saints of history. We’re more under the influence of Mark Zuckerberg than the Gospel of Mark, more up on the latest from TikTok or Instagram than the eternals of Peter and Paul. Yes, pastors too: our phones are hot, our Bibles and places of prayer cold.
All of this is not without effect. Based on opinion polls, much of our faith, views of each other, hopes and fears, and values come not from The Faith Once For All Delivered but from the latest TV show, movie, or post in our social media feed. Studies consistently demonstrate that fewer and fewer Christians agree with the cardinal doctrines held by the church for centuries: the fidelity of the Word of God, salvation, eternal life, the work of Christ on the Cross, and even the nature of Jesus. More and more, Christians are confessors of the gospel of American culture.
Modern hunger for news and information has displaced previous generations’ hunger for knowledge, truth, and wisdom in much of the church as we race to keep up with secular culture, its current cultural kings-and-queens, and what we are to believe treasure, and emulate. However, this pursuit of relevance places us in grave danger of losing our connection with The Faith once and for all delivered to the saints, and so, much more likely to deliver to future generations a faith that conforms to our own image and ideas, not The Faith once for all delivered by God.
“The Christian church, and evangelicals especially, must face up to modern generational-ism and break with it. We must discern and demolish its idols and repair its spreading damage. We must restore our own healthy practice of Christian tradition and renew its life-giving transmission that reflects the character of the Lord, whom we worship. We are each significant, but we are only links in the longer chain, Notes in the grander melody and pages in the larger story. In the long succession of the generations of faith that stretch back to our Lord himself, there are a few more critical links than that of the present generation to the next – because of the particular crisis of our time. What we hand over to coming in generations at such a time as this will be especially critical. But as ever, our first priority must be to ensure that will be pass on is fully faithful to our Lord and worthy of being handed over to the next generation – for his sake as well as theirs.”
Os Guinness, Impossible People
FINAL THOUGHT
Pastor, how critical it is that our people experience community: believers need to come together for Word, worship, and fellowship. But even this will be meaningless if it is only a contemporary community founded on our own interpretation of reality rather than the collective interpretation of the church over the centuries. As Jude writes, to know we are building on the foundation of Christ means sharing community with all saints, including the saints of all time, as we reach back for The Faith delivered once for all that we might then deliver it forward to generations to come. Only then is our shared community today founded on and centered in Jesus Christ.
In 2008, eighty Evangelical leaders from across the spectrum signed what they called the Evangelical Manifesto. In its twenty pages, Evangelical leaders attempted to spell out what it is to be an Evangelical in the 21st Century. Note this critical statement contained in its pages:
“A loss of community and continuity, as “the faith once it delivered” becomes the faith of nearly one people and one time, and cuts itself off from believers across the world and down the generations.”
And cutting us off from the body of Christ, this threatens to cut us off from Christ. Pastor, let us take the charge of Jude seriously: let us contend for The Faith, once for all, delivered to all saints throughout all time. It’s time to cancel the canceling of The Church.
The Faith. Once. For all. Delivered. All Saints.
I’ll end where I began: we are not a different church from the New Testament church. We are the same church, a continuation of that church, serving the same Lord, preaching the same Bible, and empowered by the same Spirit. When we stand before the Head of the Church, may He say to us, this generation of His Church, that we were found faithful to Him as we were faithful to The Faith He once and for all delivered to His saints.
“The church always goes forward best by going back first.”
Os Guinness, Renaissance
Saddled with large student debt, just beginning to set up homes and start families, and serving in low paying first and second positions, Millennials are those who most desire but can least afford to pay for pastoral coaching.
We are able to do so thanks to the faithful and generous support of individuals and churches like yours who want to see young leaders not only enter the ministry, but remain in the ministry.
Now, more than ever, we need your help.
If you or your church would like to help Millennial ministers across the US and overseas build strong for a lifetime in ministry, please click here to support Journey monthly or with your one-time gift. Thank you.
We also invite you to click and subscribe to our twice-monthly blogs at journeypastoralcoaching.com
