The Evangelical Collapse... quickly come

"The Coming Evangelical Collapse"
An anti-Christian chapter in Western history is about to begin. But out of the ruins, a new vitality and integrity will rise.

By Michael Spencer
from the March 10, 2009 Christian Science Monitor

Excerpt:

...the end of evangelicalism as we know it is close. Why is this going to happen?

1. Evangelicals have identified their movement with the culture war and with political conservatism. This will prove to be a very costly mistake. Evangelicals will increasingly be seen as a threat to cultural progress. Public leaders will consider us bad for America, bad for education, bad for children, and bad for society.

The evangelical investment in moral, social, and political issues has depleted our resources and exposed our weaknesses. Being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of Evangelicals can't articulate the Gospel with any coherence. We fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith.

2. We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we've spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.

3. There are three kinds of evangelical churches today: consumer-driven megachurches, dying churches, and new churches whose future is fragile. Denominations will shrink, even vanish, while fewer and fewer evangelical churches will survive and thrive.

4. Despite some very successful developments in the past 25 years, Christian education has not produced a product that can withstand the rising tide of secularism. Evangelicalism has used its educational system primarily to staff its own needs and talk to itself.

5. The confrontation between cultural secularism and the faith at the core of evangelical efforts to "do good" is rapidly approaching. We will soon see that the good Evangelicals want to do will be viewed as bad by so many, and much of that work will not be done. Look for ministries to take on a less and less distinctively Christian face in order to survive.

6. Even in areas where Evangelicals imagine themselves strong (like the Bible Belt), we will find a great inability to pass on to our children a vital evangelical confidence in the Bible and the importance of the faith.

7. The money will dry up.

FULL ARTICLE HERE: http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0310/p09s01-coop.html

Great article and I agree almost entirely, (especially with his list 1-7) but with a few exceptions. The largest being this:

The ascendancy of Charismatic-Pentecostal-influenced worship around the world can be a major positive for the evangelical movement if reformation can reach those churches and if it is joined with the calling, training, and mentoring of leaders. If American churches come under more of the influence of the movement of the Holy Spirit in Africa and Asia, this will be a good thing.

This movement is primarily devoid of the very things the author says Evangelicals problematically lack in #2

2. We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we've spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.

...so I don't see how the author thinks that movement will sustain or be a "good thing." It is growing in poverty-ridden areas because it often preaches a false gospel of self-improvement, holiness and works-based righteousness benefits and wealth according to "faith". So it preys on the praying poor, but it is NOT Christianity, in fact it's the antithesis. In my line of work we've seen vibrant growth in healthy faith in Africa that eclipses some of the best the Western church has produced, but we've also seen growth in bastardized faith with a false gospel and most of it has come from these very Charismaniacal circles.

The Christian "church" as a whole is bigger than it's ever been and the center of Christianity is no longer Europe, nor the U.S., but South America, Africa, & Asia. People talked the "death" of the church many many times before and they will continue to do so. The author is primarily correct about his evaluations of the Western church and the resurgence of Orthodoxy. Orthodox faith (not Eastern Orthodox, but Biblical based traditional faith) is growing slowly, especially in Europe and centers of education rather than declining as popular opinion suggests.

What is true and troubling is that as the American "Evangelical" church declines, which it is, it will not die out but rather become more troublesome and hard-lined. Like a dog in a corner (literally, because as the author suggests correctly, these groups will retreat further and further into their subcultures) it will lash out and become more hateful and destructive and entrench itself further into its culture wars of irrelevance and continue to serve as fodder and a red herring for critics of Christianity.

Finally, I do also agree with the author that this is all mostly GOOD news for the Church. True Christianity has stood strongest and most in line with its own teachings when it acts as counterculture and in opposition to the lies and destruction of its particular place in time (the irony is that now it needs most to be those things to its own adherents!). The Church was most successful when it stood against the Hellenists and the Romans and offered its alternative even in the face of persecution. It was then most successful again when it stood against its own co-option with the State and the abuses of the Catholic heads during the Reformation. It will be so again if it will stand against is new idols and false leaders and actually teach the Gospel instead of social conservatism, prosperity theology, and numerous other distractions (at best) and murderous lies (at worst).

The author says, "The integrity of the church as a countercultural movement with a message of "empire subversion" will increasingly replace a message of cultural and political entitlement." Let's hope so, because that will not be the legacy of our parents, but maybe it can be ours.