The El Dorado Civitans warmly welcomed their speaker of the week, Father Chuck Chapman, Pastor of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church. His message was not a sermon per se but he still explained the state of Christianity in a rapidly secularized society. He asked how church-goers can reach out to populace of millennials professing faith but not attending church on a regular basis or to people declaring belief in nothing at all. Mainstream media recently called them the “nones” meaning, none of the above.
“Being a Christian in this age has many challenges but it is an important and complicated subject we need to address,” he stated.
He produced statistics that revealed there has been a decline of people attending main denominational churches regularly. He unveiled that in 2007, Evangelical Protestants were the largest population of Christians- second were Roman Catholics. Seven years later, a new class of people slid into the second spot…the nones. They consist of many groups including the religiously unaffiliated.
He broke down this problem down into three areas. What is the present state of Christianity in this country? How did we get to that point? How does the Christian church approach these issues in the future?
Throughout his presentation hey ushered forth statements from the founding fathers and church officials in the past as well as statistics to illustrate his points. What he concluded was that older tactics of evangelism need to be reformed, or returned to its biblical roots, while showing compassion and listening to others before preaching to them.
“Jesus called us to be fishers of men. When you take someone fishing the first time you teach them not to stomp around on the pier or you’ll scare the fish. That is the same way we need to be to millennials, single parents with kids and young adults skeptical of the church,” he explained.
His way of not stomping on the pier is to stop preaching the fire and brimstone sermons. He said that in the past, evangelism was about, what to say. But the next generation of adults now want to be listened to, not told what to do, They do not want to be coerced to stay on the pews out of loyalty to a denomination, or to help pay the bills for the church, or to be a member of any group that excludes certain people. He sees the problem as a generational.
“We understood brand loyalty in the past. My family were loyal Baptists, who only drove with a certain type of gas- only washed their clothes in Cheer detergent. But today, people are switching churches for any number of reasons. They are making decisions on quality value,” Chapman expressed.
As a result, the parents are not passing down a Christian faith tradition to hearth and home as they once did to their children. He also said that more young adults are going off to college and adapting different beliefs. These beliefs tend to be more individualistic and subjective. He cited an example where a woman named Sheila came back and described her religion as simply, “Sheila-ism.” That means, what ever Sheila feels is right.
But for Chapman, he did not see this tension between religion and a secular point of view as being altogether a new emergence.
“We have always been a country that held this tension. In our nation’s birth we had a neutral government ruling over a predominately religious population. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson hardly ever went to church but they knew that Protestantism was good for the country. So we had religious tolerance towards Protestantism. Then when the Irish Catholics came, we expanded it to include them. Because of that divide, a neutral government and religious population, it has always been a struggle,” he told the Civitans.
He brought out some historical samples to explain further. In the 13th century, the age of the church, he said that only a tiny group of people were devoutly, daily, religious. The rest went out of habit and even the Bishops complained of wide spread buying and selling. Many church leaders hardly understood the Latin that they chanted and rehearsed. He then told his hearers only 30 % of people attended church regularly in the Civil War era. It increased 10% in 1965, and currently it is back to 30%.
The only way to fix the problem he said, is to show authenticity to a wary public.
“Churches standing and yelling at society will not help. Churches need to let the secular world handle the secular matters in society. When we regain the sense that we are on a mission to witness to others about what benefits we received from the church, then we can see each other as a family and not just a membership body,” he said.
He elaborated that the biggest examples of biblical mistakes were that the Jewish nation left their tents for the stone temples and forgot they were pilgrims on a mission, and the second was that the new testament early believers left their living rooms to hold services inside the Roman Law courts. In his opinion, that caused the tendency to lose sight of the goal.
To regain that, he suggested that they need to do things the way that Christ did them in the scripture.
“In the Jesus movement, people saw Jesus as a hippy, a cool guy, of sorts, and it was effective. In this day, millennials would see Jesus as something like a concerned social worker. We need to model that for them. That means being authentic,” he exclaimed.
Authentic in his estimation means getting rid of stained glass speech. Words like justification, sanctification, and supercilious naughtiness, do not relate to this generation he said. According to him, modeling Christ rightly will attract those that have kept away from the pews for a long time.
I also means focusing on forming deep spiritual connections- not just committees.
“We still have a religious majority of Christians in this nation with seven out of ten proclaiming their faith. We just have to provide a community to reach them,” he concluded.