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Many others have undertaken to write numerous critiques and criticisms on the church; thus, I will try not run into the trap of "church bashing". However, I do want to point a few things out about the modern "church" that need to be addressed if the body of Christ truly wants to thrive. As of now, the American church is dying-- rapidly-- very rapidly. In this series of posts, I'm going to try and dive into this disease to see if we can find what indeed is infecting Christianity. The American church is currently tempting consequence by continuing on this path. Decisions have consequences; bad decisions have bad results. Welcome to life. However, before I try to address the problem, I need to show you that there actually is a problem in the first place. Well, to ease your mind, I will do just that. The accepted number right now is that 70-88% of "Christian" young people "leave" the faith by their sophomore year in college. Without getting into the deep theology behind this assumption, let us extrapolate these numbers out into the future. We'll use 80% as a relatively average number. Thus, for every 10 Christians under the age of 20, only 2 will be left by the time they graduate. If we take a small sample of 100,000 Christians, there will be 20,000 left after the first generation. If they take Paul's command seriously to not be unequally yoked, there will be 9,000 Christian couples within this group (assuming a marriage rate of 90% and a 50/50 male/female ratio). Going with an average birth rate of 2 children per family, we get 18,000 children. This is just after the first generation. Using the same numbers, the statistics line up like this: gen A: 100,000 gen A: 100,000,000 gen B: 18,000 gen B: 18,000,000 gen C: 3,240 OR gen C: 3,240,000 gen D: 583 gen D: 583,200 gen E: 105 gen E: 104,976 After just 5 generations, the numbers have decreased by a factor of roughly 1000x! Granted, this excludes converts, but when the numbers are decreasing this rapidly, the conversion rate will drop significantly as well. Ronald Reagan said once, "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same." I would submit the same is true for Christianity. I have my theories as to why the American church is degrading as quickly as it is, but I will get into those in future posts. The purpose of this was merely to show the fact that there is a disease within Christianity. I know that some will disagree with my usage of numbers saying things like, "Christianity is so much more than church attendance". While this is true, it is also true that the numbers are the only things we have to gauge the the growth of the church. Jesus did not send us into the world to blend into the world, but rather to show Jesus to the world. There is something wrong within "Christianity". I do not mean to say that there is something wrong within Jesus Christ; rather, we as humans are completely fallible and given the chance... we will screw things up. I'm sorry if I stepped on anyone's toes; or rather, I'm sorry that your toes were sticking out where they could be stepped upon. I don't write the mail, I just deliver it. -Cheers
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