Therefore, since through God’s mercy we have this ministry, we do not lose heart. Rather, we have renounced secret and shameful ways; we do not use deception, nor do we distort the word of God. On the contrary, by setting forth the truth plainly we commend ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.

2 Cor 4:1-2

My parents were Baptist missionaries in Papua New Guinea before returning to pastoral ministry. I grew up in Baptist churches.

I left the church in my teens and came back to faith through the influence of a Baptist youth leader. My early years of discipleship were spent in a Baptist church.

Eventually I served as an intern in that church before being sent out with my wife Michelle to plant a Baptist church in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne.

Today we serve with CRMAustralia multiplying churches. We’re back at the Baptist church I grew up in. It has adopted us as one of their missionary families and is the only Baptist church in our state intentionally planting churches.

Baptist churches were not the only influence on my development, but they have been at the centre.

Many years ago I studied Reformation history at the Baptist College. I was struck by the fluid nature of church history. Great religious movements come into being, they exist for a time and unless they are renewed by the Word and the Spirit, they decline.

My denomination is in decline and desperately needs to be renewed by the Word and the Spirit. It’s the sort of decline that cannot be fixed by missional initiatives, management consultants, or church growth principles.

The Christian movement is a missionary movement. The book of Acts tells the story of the ministry of the risen Christ as he deploys his word and the Spirit to advance the spread of the gospel through his people.

Despite insurmountable odds, the gospel advances because of Jesus Christ, the risen Saviour of the world. We are not the masters of our destinies. He is. We do not determine truth from error. He does.

The church of the prosperous West has been captured by the spirit of the age, and is paying dearly for its unfaithfulness. In the West we have the learning and the resources, but our secularized faith cannot win disciples and plant churches. Instead we empty churches, and close them down.

Meanwhile I rejoice that all over the world the gospel advances where God’s people place themselves under the authority of his Word and are empowered by the Holy Spirit. Jesus is Lord and will have the final say.

Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.

Blaise Pascal

I caught up with an old friend a few years ago over coffee. He confided in me that he wasn’t sure if he believed in hell any more. He was a church leader with an evangelical background. He didn’t seem concerned. After all, he told me, it could have been worse—he knew a church leader who wasn’t sure if he believed in heaven any more.

Over time, movements tend to plateau, institutionalize and decline. At the heart of their demise is often a drift to a more secular faith that is led by religious professionals.

By “secularized” I mean that this life becomes more important than the world to come. Conceptions of God become vague and distant. Moral restrictions on members are relaxed and, the exclusive claim to truth is surrendered (see Stark and Finke).

It strikes me as curious that we would take upon ourselves the right to exchange biblical beliefs that no longer suit us. As though we had the power in ourselves to determine what is true and what is right.

At a whim we abolish heaven and hell. We recast the image of God in our own likeness. We sit in judgement on scripture rather than let it judge us. We redefine sin and remove the need for the Cross.

Worst of all, is the harmony carefully preserved within Christian movements as they calmly drift from the gospel.

About a year ago my denomination (Baptist Union of Victoria) reappointed its New Testament professor, Dr Keith Dyer. The appointment was supported by the denominational leadership and theological college and affirmed by a two-thirds majority of a BUV Assembly of ministers and church representatives.

Historically, the BUV has been an evangelical denomination with a conservative statement of faith that upholds the supremacy of scripture.

Keith’s reappointment, despite his teaching on sexuality, says a lot about the state the BUV is in.

In an unusual interpretation of Genesis 1:27 Keith Dyer argues that God created humanity, male and female not male or female. Therefore, humanity, made in the image of God, is a continuum stretching from male to female and everything in between. This view of human sexuality, he claims, was reaffirmed by both Jesus and Paul.

For Keith, these are issues of justice and righteousness. Therefore he supports the marriage of homosexuals and their right to child adoption.

Keith responds to those who appeal to the “plain sense of Scripture” that they are in danger of reducing God’s Living Word to a book of dead letters and laws. “For the written code kills, but the Spirit gives life (2 Cor 3:6).”

Keith states that the affirmation of the ‘homosexual’, the ‘intersexual’ and the ‘transsexual’ is needed to awaken the church to its full glory as the body of Christ.

I’ve written a response to Keith’s teaching. My concern here is what this case study can teach us about the decline of a denomination and how to prevent it. More on that later.

Here’s the full text of Keith’s article: A Consistent Biblical approach to (homo)sexuality

I’ve just listened to a two part series on “Progressive Christianity” based around interviews with keynote speakers and participants.

The interviews are candid and provide important insights into final stages of decline and decay in the lifecycle of a movement.

Note the denial of the very core of the Christian faith. Note the willingness of denominations to tolerate clergy who deny the faith. Note the self interest that keeps clergy within denominational systems even while they undermine them.

On Christianity’s lack of originality . . .

In the last 20 years, there’s just been an explosion of information about how Christianity really got started and all the changes that were made. And for the first time, people are learning that there’s nothing in the Christian tradition, not the Virgin birth, not the death on the Cross, not the three-day later Resurrection, not the Ascension, not any of those things that we have laid upon Jesus, are unique to Jesus. They have existed in mythologies in Egypt and other areas as much as 500 years before Jesus.

Reverend Fred Plumer President of The Center for Progressive Christianity in Washington

On taking Jesus down from the cross . . .

In simple language I think what I would like to see is us let Jesus become the human that he was – albeit we might say an enlightened teacher, prophetic teacher, a wise teacher, a wisdom teacher, but essentially taken back down from the cross – and eliminate the need to worship as opposed to becoming a follower. I had a great vision while I was in seminary, literally of a picture in my mind of having a conversation with Jesus and having him say to me ‘Take me off the cross, so that you can follow me, you cannot follow me if you’re worshipping me.’ I don’t know where that came from, or what the effect was but that’s really the heart and soul of the Progressive movement, at a theological, Christological level.

Fred Plumer

On the doctrine of the Atonement (Christ dying for our sins) . . .

I really do think that’s been a curse to the faith.

Fred Plumer

On the nature of mission . . .

A lot of us who are interested in Progressive Christianity are white, middle class Western people and that we really need the voices of people who are marginalised and excluded, to join that progressive conversation, and that we need to examine some of the ways in which we perpetuate other people’s oppression, and I think the voices of gay and lesbian people are one way that that comes into the conversation. ,

Reverend Dr Margaret Mayman, senior minister at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Wellington, New Zealand

On the historic Christian faith . . .

I’d be happy to abandon the Apostles’ Creed.

The Very Reverend Jeremy Greaves, Dean of the Anglican Cathedral in Darwin

On why “Progressive Christians” are white, middle class and greying . . .

I remember Jack (Bishop Shelby) Spong saying last time around, when I was clearly the youngest person at the conference, that it doesn’t surprise him that young people are absent form this sort of event because so many of these questions are questions that for so many people in their 20s or even 30s, aren’t on the horizon yet, and so I’m not sure what it looks like. I don’t think that Progressive or this part of the church will ever be full of young people, but I think it certainly has a future, but I’m not sure what that looks like.

Jeremy Greaves

On quietly leaving traditional Christianity behind . . .

For so many of us in ministry, we’re locked into a model where the people who sit in the pews pay our salaries, pay our way. I have a wife and three small children to support and so the challenge of being too prophetic and changing too many things too quickly is that there won’t be enough people left in the short term to help me survive financially, and that’s a brutal and very difficult challenge.

Jeremy Greaves

On the fear that induces silence . . .

For so many of my colleagues in their 60s, which the majority, certainly in the Anglican church clergy are, they can probably get away with doing the same thing for another three or four years, and I have probably 30 years of ministry ahead, and that won’t work. And so the real challenge . . . is knowing that we need to be somewhere else, but for me it’s the fear that comes with that and perhaps lacking the courage sometimes to go quite as far as we perhaps need to go.

Jeremy Greaves

Full text and audio of the interviews.

The Ugly Vicar explains the dynamics of how church leaders come to undermine the very beliefs and values they are called to uphold.

Note the public silence of key moral issues until they build a consensus to change rules and regulations.

The only effective response to this undermining of the Christian faith? — radical principled action. Sometimes “nice” can be a health hazard.

Here are some edited highlights.

When a system — or a person — is under stress, collapse may be a long time coming, but when it comes, it tends to be abrupt rather than gradual.

What we are now seeing in the House of Bishops on the matter of homosexuality is an increasing number of ‘wobbling plates’. When they fall, though, I predict they will do so both dramatically and abruptly.

Richard John Neuhaus observed, the crucial damage is done not when orthodoxy is overthrown, but when it is included as an option.

Thus traditionalists are held together with revisionists until, such time as revisionists can “build a consensus to change rules and regulations”.

Of course, the traditionalists will never be rubbed out or ruled out — not until there are too few of them for anyone to care any longer — but the very act of establishing the consensus between orthodoxy and change establishes that only those who accept the consensus will henceforth be allowed centre place in the institution.

Why don’t wobbling bishops take a stand and openly challenge the Church, instead of sneakily undermining it?

The answer, I would have thought, is obvious. They are biding their time. But the time will certainly come.

When it does, and it cannot be far off, there is only one possible way that traditionalists can respond effectively — the way that has always most affected and changed the Church of England — and that will be radical principled action.

Issues in Human Sexuality: the bishops begin to wobble

HT: Dave Price

It was not a marriage but a “sacred union”.

But the intent of the same-sex ‘‘sacred union ceremony” at Brunswick Uniting Church was fairly clear: vows and rings were exchanged, there were prayers and blessings, and a multi-tiered white cake to aid post-service celebrations.

The Uniting Church of Australia has come a long way in the last 30 years since it was formed out of the union of Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational churches. John Wesley and John Calvin—founders of two of those denominations—disagreed about some important issues. They would agree today that they can no longer recognise any relationship between the movements they founded and the Uniting Church.

How is it that virtually every movement in history eventually drifts from a commitment to the truths upon which it was founded? A key is the deafening silence in the early stages of decline.

With few exceptions the drift begins with the professional clergy, the academic institutions and the denominational bureaucracy. In these early stages they remain silent about their changing beliefs lest they offend their more conservative constituency. Eventually, they become bolder in their pronouncements. By then it’s too late.

As the denomination loses spiritual vitality it dwindles in numbers and its members grow old and die without being replaced.

Property sales from church closures and mergers are a gold mine for religious bureaucracies. They can survive on this artificial life support for generations to come.

Meanwhile somewhere out on the fringe God is up something new . . .

In 1997, Scott Adams the creator of the Dilbert cartoons, masqueraded as a management consultant to Logitech executives.

He convinced the executives of the Logitech company to replace their existing mission statement with this one:

to scout profitable growth opportunities in relationships, both internally and externally, in emerging, mission-inclusive markets, and explore new paradigms and then filter and communicate and evangelize the findings.

Our contemporary angst over the meaning of “mission” is not the child of postmodern Christianity, although it has its postmodern expressions.

The angst popped up during the 1920s in the wake of the influence of nineteenth century secularized theology, coupled with the disillusionment that followed the horror World War I.

Ironically the previous century had been the “Great Century” of missionary advance and the rise of indigenous movements in the developing world that later resulted in Christianity becoming a global faith.

Western and Westernized church leaders spent much of the twentieth century discussing their theology of “mission”. The outcome of those discussions tended towards view of mission that was far broader and more intent on improving this life, rather than preparing for the next.

Unfortunately every time the church leaders returned from their gatherings, they returned to dwindling and aging congregations. A broadly defined, secularized mission was the cause and the fruit of institutional decline and decay.

Many of the ministers I knew as a young boy in the 1960s began their careers as pioneer missionaries, then became local pastors before moving on to become social workers in what they called the “marketplace” or “real world.”

Since the heyday of the early 1960s, liberal Christianity has been in free fall.

These things go in cycles of about forty years. So it should be no surprise that a new generation of evangelicals and “post-evangelicals” are seeking to broaden and secularize their understanding of mission.

Perhaps a better title for this post would have been, “Missional Deja Vu”

I’ve come to see institutional decline like a staged disease: harder to detect but easier to cure in the early stages, easier to detect but harder to cure in the later stages. An institution can look strong on the outside but already be sick on the inside, dangerously on the cusp of a precipitous fall.

Jim Collins

David Mays has summarized Jim Collins, How the Mighty Fall. The five stages on the road to ruin:

1. Hubris Born of Success: Great enterprises can become insulated by success … and lose sight of the true underlying factors that created success in the first place.

2. Undisciplined Pursuit of More: Companies in stage 2 may overreach by making undisciplined leaps into areas where they cannot be great or growing faster than their ability to fill key spots with capable people.

3. Denial of Risk and Peril: Companies in stage 3 begin to discount or explain away disturbing data, blame outside forces, and take outsized risks without giving enough weight to the consequences.

4. Grasping for Salvation: Instead of getting back to the disciplines that made them great, companies take dramatic action, seeking a silver bullet solution.

5. Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death: Some companies move quickly through the stages while others take years or decades.

Read the complete summary.

“How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In” (Jim Collins)

Brian’s new kind of Christianity is quite old. And the problem is that it’s not old enough.

Scott McKnight

McKnight does an outstanding job of reviewing Brian McLaren’s ‘A New Kind of Christianity’ and explains why he thinks McLaren has drifted from both evangelicalism and orthodoxy and wandered wandered down the path of 19th Century theology.

Perhaps you have joined Brian McLaren in his wanderings, hoping that somehow this ‘fresh perspective’ will give birth to a ‘missional church’. It won’t. It can’t. It never has been anything more than the symptom of a faith that has lost its way.

We are prepared to go out of existence not because we are declining or failing in mission, but for the sake of mission.

Rev David Gamble, Methodist Conference President (third from right). Addressing the Church of England’s General Synod, February 11, 2010.

Once a world changing movement under John Wesley, the Methodist church has seen its membership shrink to just 265,000.

Dave Price comments:

Winston Churchill said after the successful evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940 that, Wars are not won by evacuations. In other words, defensive measures may be necessary, but, as every chess player knows, attack is the best form of defence. A merger of the Methodist Church with the Anglicans may be necessary, but it is a defensive measure. At face value, it doesn’t sound as if it is going to win the war.

Despite assurances to the contrary, this proposed merger is not driven by a commitment to mission or unity. Overwhelmingly mergers are driven by a) institutional decline, and b) lack of clarity and commitment to the movement’s founding cause and core beliefs. They do nothing to arrest mainline decline.

The Methodists of Britain have gone down the same path as every other mainline Protestant denomination of the last fifty years. The sad reality is that attempts at union will actually speed up their decline. There is no other historical pattern.