“We do not smell the stink of death hanging in the enemy’s breath. There is blood on his gums, slivers of bone matted into his fur. The blood of our sons, the bone of our daughters.” So says John Dickerson in his book The Great Evangelical Recession: 6 Factors That Will Crash the American Church… and How to Prepare. The book describes, in alarming terms, how the evangelical church in the US is declining.
According to the author, there are six trends of decline, and six corresponding fixes for those trends:
- Inflated: the evangelical church is much smaller than it thinks it is; the solution is to exchange our weakness for God’s strength.
- Bankrupt: the church’s income is declining, and this trend will accelerate; the solution is to seek more cost-effective ways of funding ministry.
- Hated: outsiders are becoming increasingly antagonistic towards the faith; the solution is to rediscover our role as ambassadors to a foreign culture.
- Dividing: evangelicals are becoming increasingly divided over political and theological issues; the solution is to renew our pursuit of unity.
- Bleeding: young adults are leaving the church in unprecedented numbers; the solution is to rebirth discipleship and shepherding.
- Sputtering: the church is failing to make disciples; the solution is to resurrect personal evangelism.
There are plenty of worrying prognostications in the book to feed your paranoia, if you are that way inclined. I found many of the statistics a bit hard to follow, other than by gaining a general sense of impending doom, because different surveys quoted by the author seemed to relate to different definitions of terms such as Christian and Evangelical.
On the whole the facts do indicate the trends which the author has outlined, but the general trends do not cater for significant differences in different areas. Some churches are doing really well, while a much larger number are declining. Current trends may look bad, but the Christian faith is about believing that God will prevail.