An Apocalyptic Vision: Can a Remnant Prevail?

I wrote in a recent article on divorce among Christians that the church has lost membership since the sixties. The best studies show it’s true and anecdotal evidence from local congregations supports the studies: a smaller percentage of Americans are in church week to week. Some would say, yes, but the people still practicing the faith do so with greater fervor, which may be a worthy tradeoff. God has worked with remnants before.

Many remember a time when the church and the culture walked hand-in-hand. Guys named Ike and Jack were in the White House, Andy was taking care of business in Mayberry and that darn Beaver was always in trouble. Maybe we were deluding ourselves even then, thinking God and American culture shared the same values. But even if we weren’t, those days are gone.
This is not to say the culture hasn’t seen some progress on equal opportunity issues like racial equality, women’s rights, gay and lesbian visibility. It has. But progress has come because people were willing to take risks and stand in opposition to the status quo.

Many in the church, good middle class folk, still cling to a baby blanket belief in the American promise that almost everyone embraced after World War II. In fact, they’ll die still believing and therein lies the problem. Who’ll take their place in the pews? For younger generations the church has become irrelevant. It is not a natural fit with the culture, because it’s values are clearly not the same. And it hasn’t generally shown the courage to offer an alternative vision by standing against the wasteland of our modern material culture. It sits impotently in between, the Monarch of Nothingness, a shell of it’s former self and a shadow of what it might be.

If the church is going to prevail in the war for hearts and minds it first needs to realize it is at war -- which is not to say we should put on the angry xenophobic face of those who prosper from the death and destruction of bullets and bombs. As usual Jesus provides a good model. Jesus wore God’s heart on his sleeve, which infuriated the religious leaders who had traded control of their church for a life of luxury. They were willing to turn their backs on Roman oppression and the poverty of their own people as long as temple taxes were paid and their bellies were full.

But Jesus would have none of it and his answer was apocalypse: confrontation to end the current corrupt system, and the beginning of a new era where God’s values of justice, compassion and love would prevail. In other words, restoration of God’s intentions for creation and for human kind.

Right now the battle has been joined on a guerilla level. The church I’m attending has declared itself a “reconciling” congregation and opened its doors all shapes of people. And guess what, those once shunned in both the church and the larger culture are coming in and feeling at home. The Episcopal Church has taken a stand by ordaining homosexual clergy and has paid a price for doing the right thing. These are good starts but only skirmishes if the church is to embrace the kind of covenant responsibilities described in scripture. If the church wishes to inspire a new vision for a new era, it must offer something radically different than the selfish materialism that is the current religion of American culture. I’ll write more about that later this week.