Sermon Tone Analysis

**PRAYER

Today we are going to look at the bigger picture as opposed to just focusing on our church.

“Revolution” ?? why use such a drastic term?

Partially because I recently read a book by George Barna called Revolution.

Celebrates the work of the individual apart from the church.

Pros/Cons

Pros:

Wonderful that people are not allowing themselves to be defined by bad leadership or churches that are not interested in engaging the overall culture.

Wonderful that they realize that God is not limited by whether or not a local body of believers can get their act together or not.

It is wonderful that people are able to look around them in this world and ask Jesus to help them make a difference.

They don’t wait for an invitation to do the right thing but rather set themselves to the task of doing something.

Barna points to Jesus as the ultimate revolutionary and he is absolutely right in doing so.

No one has transformed the world the way Jesus has…not even close.

Not Gandhi, not Churchill, not any pope, not any President…no one!

But one of Barna’s continual points in this book it that small groups of people that are gathered around a single objective can make big waves.

Again he is right!

Cons:

Here’s where I have a problem.

This kind of thinking is typical of the American celebration of individual and is always short-sighted.

We have the Rambo mentality.

If we look at the ministry of Jesus, he didn’t gather people around Him who were exactly like Him or each other.

He gathered fishermen, tax collectors, a political zealot, a couple of momma’s boys.

And it wasn’t to address one particular subset of problems in isolation from the rest, it was gathering and investing into all different kinds of people, connecting them not only to Himself but also to each other.

This is what the church is and this is one reason why it has been so successful throughout the centuries.

To focus on one particular problem area is great and can be incredibly effective, but only in the short term.

I’m not saying don’t give yourself to causes, but don’t do it so exclusively so that when you are at a different place in life you all of a sudden find yourself with an identity crisis.

What if there was a church that sought to make room for and equip revolutionaries rather than stifle them as well connect them to health and ministry in all areas of life?

There is no denying that we are more effective with larger cohesive numbers than we are as a bunch of individuals or small groups running around with separate and sometimes conflicting agendas.

State of the Church:

Church in the West is in trouble.

There is no doubt that church attendance is falling in virtually every Western country in the last few decades.

It is really difficult to get accurate church attendance figures.

There is no central clearing house for church attendance in North America or in Europe.

There is no agency that does an actual census.

Most polls of church attendance are notoriously inaccurate because most churches lie.

A lot of people are liars too.

If you ask someone, “were you in church last week?”

Many people would say “yes” even though the answer is “no” because it is still considered respectable to be a church attender.

So Gallup surveys of church attendance in the US wildly exaggerates the percentage of Americans who actually are sitting in a church on any given Sunday.

Gallup surveys say that 40% of our fellow citizens are in church this weekend.

But when poll takers ask the question differently, and they do a “time study poll” where they say: “tell me what you did Friday during the day?” “Tell me what you did Friday night, Saturday morning, Saturday night, Sunday morning and Sunday night?,” they find that only 20% of Americans are in church on any given weekend.

This was confirmed by a really accurate study done in Ashtabula County here in Ohio just a few years ago.

Some social scientists actually physically counted every single adult in every single church in Ashtabula County.

They discovered that whereas 40% of the adults in the country reported they were in church that weekend, only 20% actually were. 1 in 5 Americans this weekend are in church.

Now about half of that 20%, about 9-10% attend churches like this one – an evangelical church.

The other 10% are split between Roman Catholic Church attendance which is about 6.5% and Mainline Protestant church which is about 3.5% of our fellow Americans.

Now, Ohio is about average for the US.

About 20% of Ohioans are in church on any particular weekend.

And for those of you who are interested in these kinds of figures, the lowest church attendance in the US is found in the Northeast in New England and in the Northwest in Oregon and Washington.

The highest church attendance is found in the Northern Plains states – the Dakotas, Iowa, Wisconsin, and the South – Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama.

But by almost every conceivable measure the church in the US is in trouble.

60 years ago 91% of Americans identified themselves as some kind of Christian.

That number is down to 77%.

It is still 3 out of 4, but the trend line is going down.

And that is just people who say, “Well, I’m not Muslim; I’m not Jewish; I’m not Buddhist; I guess I’m Christian.”

The fastest growing segment of religious opinion in the US is the 1 out of 8 Americans who now claim no official religion at all, but rather label themselves an atheist or agnostic.

Western Europe is far more secular than the US.

Unlike in the US European politics are generally entirely devoid of religion.

There are no prayer breakfasts; leaders rarely, if ever, invoke God in any of their official statements.

They rarely, if ever quote the Bible.

The ravages of WWII and the communist takeover of Eastern Europe left many Europeans cynical about God and cynical about larger truths.

Many Europeans are quite cynical about anyone who comes along claiming that they have “the truth” because of their experience of totalitarianism and total explanations for life.

Social Challenges

Scandals

And certainly a part of the decline in Europe and to some degree here in the US springs from the massively publicized child abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church involving priests and to a large extent teenage boys.

This past spring fallout from the Roman Catholic sex abuse scandal spread across Europe and made front-page news day after day and week after week in most European newspapers.

It would be impossible to exaggerate the negative impact of the sex abuse scandal on the credibility of Christianity in the church in Europe.

Just to take one example, Ireland was seen as a stronghold of Roman Catholicism for 1500 years.

Well into the 1980’s Irish church attendance was many times that of western secularized Europe.

And because of Irish devotion to the Catholic faith many Irish young men grew up to become priests.

And there was a pipeline of Irish priests coming to the US.

That pipeline has been cut.

Some people estimate that Irish church attendance has been cut in half in the last 10 years - one of the most massive de-churchings of any nation in church history.

Bias Against Truth

When we look closer to home and do surveys of American churchgoers like the ones that Barna’s organization does, there is a growing percentage of American churchgoers that do not believe that the Bible is God’s infallible Word.

Surveys tell us a growing percentage of American churchgoers don’t believe that Christ alone saves.

Many American churchgoers believe that there are many paths to God apart from Christ.

There is a growing percentage of churchgoers who do not practice Christian moral teaching regarding sex, regarding divorce and remarriage, regarding abortion.

The church is seen increasingly as out of step and out of touch especially about gay rights.

Gay activists have actually attacked churches in New York and San Francisco and Michigan (Susi’s old church).

There is no doubt that the church in the west has fallen on hard times.

Bias Against Authority

And totally apart from the particular problems facing the church there are the larger concerns of secular society which suggests a negative trend for the Western church.

And the growing secular trend lines communicate a bias against institutions of all kinds.

There is no institution that fares well in the contemporary West.

People are cynical about government.

They are cynical about the Presidency.

They are cynical about Congress.

They are cynical about the media.

They are cynical about big business.

They are cynical about unions.

There isn’t a week that goes by where I don’t hear someone complaining about government or the president, and no one has any hope for change with new elections.

Every election seems like a choice of the lesser evil.

Every institution is seen as corrupt and self-interested.

And this anti-institutional bias affects the way people approach church.

There is also a bias against truth.

There is a bias against authority.

And I haven’t even begun to talk about attacks on our Christian brothers and sisters around the world in places like India, Pakistan, the Sudan, and Egypt.

In the midst of all the obstacles facing the church in the 21st century, we are attacked from without and we are corrupt from within…it is time for a revolution.

A revolution that restores honor and glory to Jesus Christ in the church again.