The Definition of Insanity

Someone has said that the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect to get different results each time. This is where I think the American church is today. For roughly the last century, the church in America has been “doing church” the same way, and the results are not pretty. According to the Christian polling organization, Barna Group, “In essence, the share of practicing Christians has nearly dropped in half since 2000. Where did these practicing Christians go? The data indicate that their shift was evenly split. Half of them fell away from consistent faith engagement, essentially becoming non-practicing Christians (2000: 35% vs. 2020: 43%), while the other half moved into the non-Christian segment (2000: 20% vs. 2019: 30%). This shift also contributed to the growth of the atheist / agnostic / none segment, which has nearly doubled in size during this same amount of time (2003: 11% vs. 2018: 21%).”

Clearly, what the church has been doing vis-à-vis evangelism is not working. Even so, if you study what goes on in a typical evangelical church today, it will not differ significantly from what was going on in 2000 or 1970 or maybe even 1950. Granted, the Baptists have mostly parked their Sunday School busses and the mainline denominations who were preaching liberation theology have gone silent. Generally speaking though, if you walk into most any church at a comfortable hour on Sunday morning, you will hear a short selection of choruses or hymns followed by announcements and a message delivered from a pulpit up front while congregants sit passively in pews or chairs. With only minor differences, you could probably take this all the way back into the eighteenth century.

While the activities that represent “doing church” have remained mostly static, one wonders what has happened to the pastorate. The website, Revival: Outside the Walls, in its “Shocking Stats” section reports that only 51% of America’s pastors have a biblical worldview. If that’s not enough to make you cry, read through the scores of “shocking stats” that follow. Keep your Kleenex handy; it’s depressing. The American church is failing at its most pressing duty: win the lost. While she has been mired in traditional methods that stopped working long ago, the church has been bypassed by the culture it is supposed to be reaching.

One must ask where they are now, all those multitudes who either stopped going to church or have never been. The fact is our society has become largely pagan. By that I mean that they no longer have a sense that there is some higher power to which they owe a responsibility. They are sometimes referred to as “secular,” meaning not religious, but in reality, they do practice a religion; it is called humanism. Secular humanism became the increasingly predominant religion shortly after the middle of the twentieth century with the descent of theology into a battle between neo-orthodoxy and post-liberalism. If those terms sound arcane to you, that is probably a measure of how meaningless the battle was. It is as if the captain of the Titanic was locked in a discussion of what type of coal was better to fire the boilers as the ship slipped below the Atlantic waves.

What I think the church needs to learn from this history is that what used to work doesn’t work anymore. To keep doing the same thing year by year is insanity; it stopped working many years ago, and we need to discover new ways to reach the lost in our pagan culture. Because our post-modern, pagan neighbors don’t believe absolute truth exists, it rings hollow when we try to tell them we have the truth. They will say with Pontius Pilate, “What is truth?” I believe we must demonstrate the truth of the gospel of Christ by living it boldly in front of our neighbors. I believe we must discover what our neighbors need, and then proceed to demonstrate how the gospel of Christ meets that need. Often that will involve getting dirty, stepping into the messes that often characterize modern life. It will cost something: time, talent, and treasure as we used to say. (Some of the old stuff is still relevant.)

I have seen this approach work in a church that focused intently on people who were struggling with addiction issues and those who had recently returned to society after years of incarceration. These unfortunate souls had very specific, very urgent needs that the church could meet while emphasizing that it was God’s love that constrained them to do so. It wasn’t quick, and it was often messy, but we saw many people step out of the darkness and into the light that shone in response to the biblical loving demonstrated by the committed church.

Not every church will be a rescue operation like that, nor should it be. What every church must discover is what needs exist in their target community. I believe that a concerted effort by a church to pray, meditate, discuss, and study their neighbors’ lifestyles will lead to a new form of ministry, that is a new way to “do church,” that will win their neighbors to Christ. We could learn from the first century church prayer in Acts 4: “Lord, see the world’s opposition and grant us boldness to counter their arguments with Your truth.” It’s that or keep doing what we have been doing and hope the church doesn’t slowly die around us. But to keep doing the same thing with hopes for a different result is insanity; isn’t it?