Description
Is the Church in Decline? Exploring Morality, Truth, and HopeIn this teaching episode, we answer the pressing question: … (visit YouTube for more)
Transcript
Is the church growing or shrinking? Opinions differ. Who do you believe? And if it’s shrinking, what’s the cause? And can we do anything about it? If, like me, you’re concerned about this, please stay with me to the end where I’ll talk about some encouraging signs and reasons for hope.
To me, the church seems to be in decline in the West and certainly in the UK. I’ve spoken with church leaders who tell me that since 2020, COVID, lockdowns, etc, many church members have reduced the frequency of their church attendance. People who previously would attend faithfully week in, week out, now worship at the Sunday gathering once every three weeks. And so on a Sunday morning, that makes it look like your congregation has been decimated.
Now this is a channel for biblical meditation, so we are going to dwell on what the Bible has to say about this, but first a couple of thoughts.
Morality.
Does the church have anything to say about morality, and if so, is it still saying that?
The culture I’m living in today is dramatically different from that of my childhood, and not all changes have been for the better. The family unit has been radically redefined by our culture. There’s no two ways about it. Society no longer views heterosexual marriage as the benchmark for families.
The Ten Commandments were once reasonably well known and still taught in schools. How many people give them a second thought today?
What should the Church be saying about morality?
Truth.
What about truth? Truth has been attacked violently. Political candidates have been demonstrated to be outright liars and yet they win elections. Based on what? Can you trust the promises of liars?
Social media distributes misinformation on a massive scale and this might be just for likes and shares, but in the worst cases, this misinformation is used to manipulate opinions and elections.
What should the Church be saying about truth?
If the universe was created by a God of truth and justice, do those principles of truth and justice only apply to Christians? Or do those principles not permeate the entirety of His creation, giving people a conscience whether or not they pay attention?
Has the Church, terrified of causing offence, shrank back from its duty to be a beacon of light and life for the nations? Food for thought.
Let’s turn together to the Word of God and dwell on what He has to say to us through His Word and through the Holy Spirit. 1 Timothy chapter 4 verses 1 to 3. Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times, some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth.
When we meditate on scripture, one of the questions we ask is, what does this passage say to me today?
Well look, some will depart from the faith. That’s what we’re seeing, isn’t it? In the 2021 UK census, 46 percent of the population described themselves as Christian. And that might sound like a good number to you, but in 2011, the figure was 59%. So we’ve lost 13 percent in 10 years. But the Spirit expressly told us this would happen.
And what are they believing instead? They’ve turned to deceitful spirits. They’ve been caught up in the insincerity of liars. Isn’t that what we’ve been talking about?
Morality and truth have been eroded. People have turned away from the church to other things, other beliefs they think will satisfy them.
Paul mentions the forbidding of marriage. Well, perhaps we’re not quite there yet. But we are certainly pressurised to celebrate other forms of relationships, non biblical approaches to love, sexuality and child raising. What sort of reaction do we receive when we say what the Bible has taught and what has been accepted for thousands of years as right and appropriate?
Paul was right, wasn’t he? The Bible explicitly teaches us that these things will happen.
So it’s a lost cause then? We should just accept our fate?
By no means. Let’s skip to verses 6 and 7. If you put these things before the brothers, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, being trained in the words of the faith and of the good doctrine that you have followed. Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Rather, train yourself for godliness.
One of the other questions we ask ourselves when meditating is, How should I respond? What is God asking of me?
Paul tells Timothy to put these things, truth, right doctrine, God’s principles of justice, before fellow believers, so that we are all together trained back into the truth, that we are rejecting the lies of society, the corrosive attitudes of our culture, and reclaiming our God given inheritance as champions of his way, as representatives of Jesus Christ, who gave his life so that we would be free of all this nonsense. All of the muck that arises from our flesh, and from the tactics of the enemy, Satan.
Have nothing to do, Paul says, with irreverent, silly myths. Whether inside the church, or outside of it. We are to cast aside utterly every ungodly principle, every unholy motive, all that deceit that is being pushed through our TVs, our screens, our so called "smart" devices, 24/7.
We must wake up and rise up and stand as the ambassadors of the gospel, the true good news, that God intends us to be. This is the message of Scripture. Will we do it?
Now I said it’s not all bad news. We have reason for hope in our Saviour, of course, and we also have reason to take comfort from the way the Gospel continues to spread and grow even today. Christianity is actually growing across the world. That’s most quickly in Asia and Africa. In fact, it’s growing faster than the rate of population growth.
Interest in atheism is declining. It’s a slow decline, but nevertheless, people are discovering that as a belief system, it doesn’t have the answers.
In 2020, there were 4 million churches worldwide. That’s tenfold growth over 120 years. In the next 30 years, that figure is expected to rise to 5.4 million.
The Bible has been translated into 2, 400 languages, with many more in progress. I didn’t even know there were that many languages.
And worldwide today, there are about 2.4 billion people who confess that Jesus Christ is their Lord and Saviour. Now all we need is for those 2.4 billion people to unite, to agree in the Lord. What an unstoppable force for good that would be.
Let’s pray. Lord, we know that even though this is a fallen world, it is still your world. And even though the church sometimes seems in disarray, it remains your church. Please help us, as members of your church, to lift our gaze above what we can see with our own eyes towards heaven, seeking always the advance of your kingdom and seeking also love and fellowship within the church, reaching out in mission and sacrifice towards a hurting and broken world. Amen.
