2018 was one of the most destructive wildfire seasons in California’s history. According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, by December 21st, close to one million, nine hundred thousand acres had been consumed by fire in a single wildfire season. In many cases, houses would be consumed in minutes while firefighters tried in futile desperation to extinguish the unstoppable flames. “If it’s this big and blowing with as much wind as it’s got,” San Diego fire Captain Kirk Humphries commented “it’ll go all the way to the ocean before it stops. We can save some stuff but we can’t stop it.”
As experts began to look closer, it became clear that there was no single cause to the thousands of fires springing up from the desert. The potential for a fire of this magnitude had been building for decades. Since 1977 California’s population had grown significantly, with large numbers of people moving from crowded urban centers into the vast and growing suburbs in the arid hills. With this influx of humanity, the state took precautions to keep the growing neighborhoods safe from the frequent desert wildfires. But what the San Diego fire dept. didn’t realize was, by putting out every natural wildfire, a surplus of dry brush was building up.
To add to this, homes built from the 70s to the 2000s were often built with cheap, easily accessible materials. Wood shakes were a popular material for roofing and wood facades made up the surfaces of thousands of California homes. In addition, the popular trees used for landscaping in California neighborhoods were Eucalyptus and Juniper, trees whose dry, papery bark and rich, oily sap catch fire like sulphur matches. All these variables, mixed with an extraordinarily severe drought in the summer, lead to a fire which left the world baffled. In the end, the source of the fire was a lack of understanding about the desert’s life cycle. Despite the best intentions, putting out every fire and landscaping for aesthetics resulted in a national disaster, costing many residents all they had.
Sadly, it’s become unignorable for most western Christians today that our churches are burning. It might not always be easy to see, but it’s overwhelmingly felt. Christians of every stripe in America are waking to realize we don’t have a leg to stand on in the public square. Influential society doesn’t give the arguments of apologists or orthodox theologians a second thought, and that vacuum of influence among Christians in America has left many of us feeling vulnerable and powerless to a culture we cannot penetrate. What is called Post-Christian society is not just a dry-spell, it is a new order of affairs based on a new order of thinking, and it’s not going anywhere.
Like the 2018 wildfires in California, many have speculated where the “spark” came from that set society ablaze. There’s a temptation among evangelicals to discern order out of the chaos by pinning Post-Christianity on one source, but like the wildfires, the spark could have been anywhere, there could have been multiple sparks—the spark isn’t the problem. There will always be heat and friction in and around society and the Church, the problem is the amount of kindling we’ve let build up. It’s the way we’ve built our houses, the good-looking trees we’ve imported, and the dry brush we’ve let build up at our gates. The heavenly stronghold of the Church was built and equipped by Christ to stand and spread, such that not even the gates of Hell could stand against her (Matt. 16:18). So then why do Jesus’ words here seem to fall so flat on the church we see today in the west?
“…are they changing?”
Mark Sayers, pastor of Red Church in Melbourne Australia recounts an experience he had preaching to a congregation of young people at a 5:00 PM church service. In the middle of his message his train of thought derailed and he began to consciously consider who he was speaking to, why they had come, and what they were going to do with what they heard. He described the feeling as, “looking out at all of the implications of the [cultural] moment that we’re in. The challenge of post-christianity, the challenge of people bringing a consumer view of Christianity into church, the challenge of the fact that people can now do a DIY, do it yourself Christianity…” He ends his thought by saying, “I don’t know how to turn this around. We can get people in the room, we can get them here but…are they changing?”.
I know Mark’s experience is not unique among western churches. He lists quickly all the “challenges” of the moment we’re in: “Consumer Christianity”, “Post-Christian culture”, “DIY Christianity”, all these shouldn’t sound to foreign to many of us. They have become buzzwords from the pulpit, the same way I’m sure the words, “Visigoths” and “Saxons” were received by congregations in the Roman Church. These ideas are not just, ‘barbarians at the gates’, they’re in the seats, in our auditoriums, in our small groups, in the hearts, habits, and thoughts of each of us. Ultimately, Post-Christianity is baked into the DNA of generations of latch-key-kids fed their worldview through relentless marketing campaigns, popularized sexual ethics, rags-to-riches stories, institutionalized self-worship, and churches self-consciously trying to remain relevant in this kind of environment. There’s a thousand sparks, generations of brush, and generations of houses built for aesthetics and comfort but not for fires.
Out of the three variables it took to make the runaway wildfires of 2018 possible, the most common outcry was not against the fire department, or even the brush crews, but the builders of the houses. Like the spanish-style, clay-roofed houses in other parts of the west coast, they weren’t built to last—they weren’t even built for the California climate. They were built to accommodate the influx of population and to cater to people’s design preferences, but spared little conscious thought for the reality of the environment. The majority of our churches in the west rest on a similar principle: we draw huge crowds, we comply with people’s preferences, but little is done to prepare them for the firestorm they’re going to have to walk through in the world as followers of the narrow way of Jesus (Matt. 7:13–14).
It’s easy to villainize this model of doing church, and many well-meaning Christian influencers have gone to unnecessary lengths to shame the western church into repentance. Shame is not going to produce change—like I said before, human beings are moved by desire, emotions, and relationship, and this is a good and God-given trait. If we want to see change in our churches, we must learn a more desirous way which will satisfy our human need for meaning, satisfaction, and relationship. This is found in the narrow way of Jesus in the Kingdom of God. Our biggest problem in our churches is the fact that many people genuinely believe they know the way, when in fact they are more swayed and influenced by secular modernity than by the Kingdom of God.
The motive behind this is usually quite pure and true to the gospel. We want to make the saving-life of Christ available to ordinary modern people of all stripes—they don’t have to bring anything to the table except belief in Jesus Christ. Church leaders are aware of the sharp edges of the Christian faith and do their best to round the edges and make their churches, what we’ve gotten into the habit of calling “seeker-friendly”. Our assumption is that it is impossible to get people into our churches without seizing their interest, marketing to them, trying to “sell them” on the gospel, or at least church membership. There are undoubtedly good intentions behind this approach, but the result of this model of church is a watery and cheap Christianity which does not fall far from well-meaning secularism. Our church-growth strategies, programs, and gimmicks may fill the seats but they do not transform the inner reality of the individual. Francis Chan, a former megachurch pastor, lamments this fact, where he says, “For decades church leaders like myself have lost sight of the powerful mystery inherent in the Church and have instead run to other methods to keep people interested. In all honesty, we have trained you to become addicted to lesser things. We have cheapened something sacred, and we must repent (Letters to the church p.44)”. The reality of this modern compromise has our churches floundering as young people flood from our gatherings.
The sad reality of the church in the west is that it has been changing—not into the image of Christ—but into the fluid image of the cultural zeitgeist. We’ve put on the mask of the world to draw people in, only to find our face has grown to fit the mold. The threat facing the body of Christ in the west today is not annihilation, like many seem to think it is. For one thing, that would imply our churches are actually built on something contrary to the modern status-quo—they are not. We’ve adopted the cultural status quo as a platform and have become very good at giving the world what they want. Our threat is not barbarians at the gates, as I have said, it comes from what we have already let in.
In a consumer society we can already see churches “going out of business”. Our churches have nervously kept an eye on the statistics (usually based on church membership, which itself is an antiquated concept in the west). We’ve seen the numbers plummeting and, like anyone with good business sense will tell you, a drop in demand means a drop in prices. Only the price of church membership isn’t in dollars, it’s in dedication to growing in Christ-likeness. But we’ve been acting on this for decades, it’s not new information. If we lower expectations for being part of a church the numbers tend to leap. But for people to show up, you have to preach what they want to hear, otherwise the days of your church are numbered. The key to success is to sell secular people what they want to buy.
A good example of this in history is the Renovationist movement in Russia during the onset of the Soviet Union. The extremely conservative and rigorous Russian Orthodox Church had been giving the Soviets trouble from the beginning, but there was little the Soviets could do. The Orthodox faith was baked into the psychological makeup of nearly every citizen. To simply depose the Russian Orthodox Church would lose them a tremendous amount of PR. So what they did was tactically brilliant. The soviet regime backed a reform movement they called, the “Renovationist Church”, a kind of pseudo-non-denominational alternative church organization than the staunchly entrenched Patriarchal body.
They’re goal was to draw people away from the Russian Orthodox Church, specifically clergy, in order to weaken the influence of the established church and allow the Soviet regime greater political power. They drew people away from the church in calculated and practical ways, all aimed at making church “easier”. The changes were subtle. The Russian Orthodox Church had made people stand during services for centuries, so the Renovationist Church installed pews. The Russian Orthodox Church had lengthy liturgies with long Scripture readings and benedictions, the Renovationist Church narrowed down services to convenient time-frames. It removed “unnecessary red-tape” for those who wanted to be ministers and, in general, made it easy to be a Christian. They catered to the cultural tastes of the people at the time, the spirit of the time, which was a revolutionary, radical communist atmosphere.
The Renovationist Church never succeeded in it’s agenda to cripple the ancient established church in Russia. At the beginning of WWII in 1941, funding was cut and the Renovationist Church withered almost immediately. Father Seraphim of Cardoza sums up this attempt to disenfranchise the established church in Russia this way, “Nothing new and nothing novel. It [the Renovationist Church] didn’t work. […] The Orthodox church didn’t change. Same services, same cycles, same time of fasting, same liturgy; all these, what the West thinks are outward, maybe unnecessary, are vehicles to transform us.” (Father Seraphim of Cardoza interview on The Dove).
Although the modern church in the west isn’t facing a Soviet take-over, it is facing a cultural take-over, one which has been gradually seeping into our collective blood-stream for more than 70 years. The church’s threat today is not annihilation, it’s assimilation. Selling out to the spirit of the time doesn’t look drastic to the generation experiencing it. It isn’t an invasion. We find it comfortable when we feel a connection between culture and Church—we get uncomfortable when they don’t match up. However, in a classic case of the cart before the horse, we have allowed the Church to become subsidiary to culture, allowing our preferences to govern our lifestyles, rather than looking to Jesus and really intending to follow his example (Heb. 12.1-3). Dissatisfied with the way of the will of God, we join ourselves to social movements, racial and sexual identities, economic demographics, and political parties, saying just like the Israelites did in the time of the Judges, “Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us” (1 Sam 8.19). The fact is, for most modern westerners today, a serious look at the character of Jesus is unsettling, even repulsive. A suffering, self-denying, meek, rigorously moral, and uncompromising Christ doesn’t have a place to stand in cultural modernity.
David Platt, tackled this discord between culture and Christ brilliantly in his book, “Radical”, where he says,
“We are giving in to the dangerous temptation to take the Jesus of the Bible and twist him into a version of Jesus we are comfortable with. A nice, middle-class, American Jesus. A Jesus who doesn’t mind materialism and who would never call us to give away everything we have. A Jesus who would not expect us to forsake our closest relationships so that he receives our affection. A Jesus who wants us to be balanced, who wants us to avoid dangerous extremes, and who, for that matter, wants us to avoid danger altogether. A Jesus who brings us comfort and prosperity as we live out our Christian spin on the American dream.”
For a lot of us, this kind of talk is nothing new. There’s a whole genre for ‘holy-discontent’ literature for the Church today in Christian publishing. We know the Church is selling out to the world, it’s been a problem since day one! We know the only answer is to change, to be disciples (whatever that means) and to be filled and led by the Holy Spirit (whatever that means)— but how do we change? Where do we start with a problem so enormous and involved? The fact is, nothing will change until we want it to change, and sadly most of us don’t really want anything to change. We don’t want the life of Jesus more than we want the life of our cultural environment. We won’t say it outright, but we like the secular narrative which tells us: free sex, more gadgets, more securities, more empowerment, and personal autonomy are what we need to live a self-actualized existance. We’d rather synthesize the two narratives than abandon one for the other, but in the end if we do not whole-heartedly sell out to Jesus’ narrative we can never actually retain it. The fact we must confront and repent of is a deep dissatisfaction with the salvation of Jesus, and a tacit endorsement of the salvation of secularism.
The Salvation of Secularism
It is not too bold of a statement to say that all human beings experience the need for salvation, a term developed biblically from the idea of deliverance. If human beings share one thing in common, it is suffering—whether we suffer pain, suffer from lack, suffer from hopes deferred, suffer injustice, suffer fear, suffer from meaninglessness, every human in every time and place has suffered. Our suffering is a vacuum which demands to be filled, or in more positive terms, a mountain which must be climbed. Our salvation or deliverance comes from conquering the thing which makes you suffer and brings meaning, wholeness, and peace.
Secularism has an equation for salvation. It is the elimination of needs leading to the autonomy of the self—what early modern psychologist Kurt Goldstein coined “self-actualization”, what can basically be understood as personal fulfillment. In this gospel of salvation, the final deliverance of the individual is to become a “self”: a successful, empowered, realized individual. Psychologist Abraham Maslow later borrowed Goldstein’s “self-actualization” as the top of his famous hierarchy of needs, beginning with the basest needs of human life leading up to the peak of “self-actualization”. This salvation message stands at the summit of a long history of development stemming from the belief that the human individual is self-directing and autonomous, a belief Philosopher Francis Schaeffer has called, “man beginning only from himself”.
It is a very convenient world-view for the average human being, as it builds off of desires and impulses we find in ourselves from birth. It fits very well with the world we see, whether it be in our economics, politics, history, the natural world, observable unaided human behavior, etc.—everything will grow as much as it can until it has been delivered from the burden of being dependent on anything. It allows us every pleasure we can practically achieve and offers all human beings a shared ground of experience. Without realizing it, this modern western world-view has its hand in its father’s pocket most of the time. Its father being reformation protestantism, and puts to use many of antiquated virtues here and there to police the otherwise unchecked power of individuals.
The result is a seemingly sustainable hodge-podge of virtues and laws aimed at allowing each individual a chance to gratify their impulses and desires and finally, self-actualize. From this underlying salvation narrative we see the rise of western consumerism in the 1920s. We see the post-WWII white suburban sprawl. We see the sexual revolution of the 1960s. We see the explosion of demand for entertainment in the 1970s. We see the dawn of credit-cards and shopping malls in the 1980s and the mad rush for personal devices beginning in the 1990s. All these advances, though with many good implementations, all predicated on the advancement of personal affluence and fulfillment—and through it all we see a contemporary church conforming to the cultural tide.
However, as modern western culture has already begun to discover, a salvation narrative climaxing in self actualization is not only unsustainable but impossible. Meaning and fulfillment cannot come through increased levels of power and self-isolation. The human being is not what we make of him/her, but what it was designed to be. We were never designed to be autonomous—we were designed to be dependent. The result of the heroic leaps and bounds of the most influential western secular saints and evangelists is a generation bogged down in anxiety and depression almost from birth, and a resounding unrest and dissatisfaction with life from every quarter. Mark Sayers says elsewhere about this cultural crisis, “We’re going through a mental health crisis—and actually, it doesn’t make sense if you read that through the metrics of the last age. […] We’re told if you have great experiences, more stuff, you’re going to be happy. But we’re not happy. We’re now living at this point where the gods of the age are being pulled down.” In a time when life satisfaction and personal well-being should be almost guaranteed by the establishment, we are seeing record suicide-rates and a ubiquitous cynical disallusionment with the secular salvation narrative we’ve been fed. People are hungry for something real and true.
The Salvation of Jesus
It is a miracle in itself that the message of Jesus had the reception it did, spreading like an unstoppable wildfire nation to nation throughout the world of the first century and on. It’s a miracle because very little in the message of Jesus finds an echo in our unaided thoughts and inclinations. His message did not lead to, what we would call, self-actualization but to self-denial. His message was and is rooted in the cross, and that not just our forgiveness, but as our calling as Christians (Matt. 16:24–26).
The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. It is that dying of the old man which is the result of his encounter with Christ. As we embark upon discipleship we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with his death—we give over our lives to death. Thus it begins; the cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise god-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship).
What kind of a salvation is this? It is the unraveling and discarding of everything our secular model of salvation calls a real and good life. How could anything so hard and seemingly needless be considered good news? The salvation of Jesus is not about having a successful life, it’s not about two cars in the garage and a mortgage—it’s not even about having life after death “nailed down” or the forgiveness of your sin, although those are part of it. The salvation of Jesus is the availability of new life through Himself in the Kingdom of God.
This was the salvation Jesus and the Apostles preached—there is a new order to reality called the Kingdom of God which goes beyond the visible world we’ve been born into, and in order to begin to see and live in this new world we must be “born from above”, as Jesus told Nicodemus (John 3:3). Jesus didn’t come to fix the world He came into, He came to make it something it was not, to recreate it and us, to infect it with, what C.S. Lewis has called the “good infection. Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.” (C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity). That is the final goal, and in fact the only possible actualizing any human being can experience, to be made one with God in the fellowship that began and sustains all life.
This is the subtle and powerful message of salvation which Jesus came to bring—real and sustainable deliverance from sin, death, and the world in the Kingdom of God, which is both present and coming with the return of Jesus (what George E. Ladd has called the Now and not yet). But if this is the gospel, why do our modern contemporary gospels fall so short? Why don’t our churches, which ought to be flaming mountains of divine transformative power, seem to show any serious evidence of this new reality? Why don’t they seem to have the same power which Jesus and the Apostles, and even many centuries of church history, all seem to share in common? Have we been spiritually duped, or have we opted for a gospel of our own design? The answer lies in the Kingdom of God—what it actually is, where it is seen, and how it is lived in. No teaching of Jesus can be divorced from the fact that the core of His message came from the notion that the Kingdom of God had actually come into the world through Himself, and that apart from the life He gives, no one would be able to see or enter it. The true and undoctored message of Jesus is not an easy message to swallow—that is why we call the endurance of the Christian faith a miracle. It’s message would not have spread unless people were in fact experiencing a new life in Jesus as a consequence of laying down their lives in the world to follow Him. From St. John to Mother Teresa, Christian history is alive with people who completely abandoned the secular schema, put their complete trust in Jesus, and experienced an overpowering new life in the Kingdom of God. This same life in Jesus continues to this day for those who are willing to deny themselves, take up their cross, and abide in Christ. That is what this book will be about—uncovering what is the new life in the Kingdom of God, as Jesus taught it, and how we can enter into it today. This is the only hope for the withering church in the west—the gospel of the Kingdom of God.
