Mandate or Invitation?
People are abandoning institutional religion. Church membership and attendance are in decline all across the country. According to Pew Research, only 30% of Protestants attend church every week or almost every week. That number drops to 23% for Catholics. Just two decades ago almost 50% of Americans went to weekly services.
Why has there been such a precipitous drop in church membership and attendance? Researchers point to the secularization of America and the involvement of the church in national partisan politics as leading factors in people’s disenchantment with institutional religion. In other words, secularization has spilled over into the pews of the church. Perhaps the church has grown impatient with the perceived snail-pace by which God works and has turned to politics in an attempt to speed things up by taking matters into their own hands—like mandating that the Bible be taught in public schools or ordering the Ten Commandments posted in classrooms.
Conservative journalist Anne Applebaum writes in her book, Twilight of Democracy, that one of her Christian friends in the early 2000s lost confidence in Christian values, such as truth, honesty, virtue, and humility to effect change in America. She pivoted toward politics and opted for a more secular hands-on approach, advocating the election of public officials who would impose her Christian perspectives upon the nation. If the country wouldn’t voluntarily embrace her interpretation of Christian values, then, in her view, the only recourse was to apply legal pressure to force people to adhere to her religious principles.
From time to time over the past 2,000 years, the church has tried this political model, and it has proven ineffective and even detrimental to faith. Constantine declared the Christian faith the official religion of the Roman Empire, and ordered his legions to march under trees, where priests in the branches above sprinkled holy water over the soldier’s heads to baptize them.
The Crusades were another attempt to either convert the church’s enemies or destroy them. During the medieval period, the church tried to coerce people to faith through fear, intimidation, and superstition. Still later, the Inquisitions introduced a new wave of torture as a means to persuade the unchurched to accept Jesus and be baptized. Children were separated from their Jewish parents and raised by Christian families, and those who spoke out against the church were severely punished, if not killed. Needless to say, the church gained few if any followers of Jesus through tactics like these but did create centuries of resentment, suspicion, and hate that continues to this day.
Today’s church seems determined to follow a similar course of action. Frustrated by the dwindling influence of the church, a segment of the religious population has adopted new tactics to “save America.” What the church has been too weak or unwilling to do in recent years, the new tactics have pushed state legislatures, governors, Congress, the president, and the ballot box to accomplish. In other words, what the church has seemingly failed to do, politics would achieve, or so the thinking goes. Never mind that these new tactics are themselves pagan!
How far the church has strayed from the Jesus Way where invitations, not mandates, welcomed people to a new way of life!
Jesus was a simple man with a simple plan. He was gentle, loving, kind, and forgiving. He never forced his will or way on anyone. He would have been appalled at using the power of politics to advance his teaching. So forbearing was Jesus that he would not break a bruised reed or even quench a dimly burning candle (Matt. 12:20). He wasn’t interested in some kind of political takeover. Instead, he showed his followers how to unconditionally love all people.
Jesus fellowshipped with the so-called riff-raff of society, to the point that the institutional religious leaders severely condemned him as a heretic. He forgave those who were set against him, even those who nailed him to the cross. He never used his power for personal gain.
Does Jesus sound like an institutional religious man? I think not. In fact, I rather think that if Jesus were walking on earth today, he would have second thoughts about attending a lot of our institutional churches. He would be grieved at efforts to politicize the church. He would distance himself from the way many churches spend their offerings. He would deplore attempts to impose his way of life and teachings on other people.
The Jesus Plan does not seek to pressure America to become a Christian nation. The Jesus Plan invites people to a life of service, love, kindness, generosity, forgiveness. The Jesus Plan has no interest in controlling the Senate or House or winning the presidency. The Jesus Plan is a simple plan—love God and love your neighbor. That’s it! Anything other than that is somebody else’s plan, for it certainly isn’t the Jesus Plan.
Maybe if the church would follow the Jesus Plan, people wouldn’t be leaving church. The truth of the matter is, if people followed the Jesus Plan, church wouldn’t be just a place at all. It would be experienced wherever there was gentleness, goodness, and love. Church would be the ineffable presence of divine grace in every space—classrooms, government buildings, homes, businesses—wherever people followed the Jesus Plan. There would be no need to post the commandments or teach the Bible in public classrooms.
There are those, however, who think the Jesus Plan will not work—that it is too weak, too passive, and too spiritual. “Turning the other cheek” just doesn’t work, declared one politician. Obviously, if the goal is to force America to become a Christian nation, then it doesn’t work. Following the Jesus Plan was never intended to elevate anyone to political power or impose religious rules on a nation. That has been tried before and it doesn’t work. People can’t be strong-armed into faith; they must be wooed by being shown a better way to live, a better way to love. Until then, institutional religion will continue to hemorrhage members, because it is not the simple plan of Jesus.
Dallas Willard reminds the church, “Christianity has failed not because it has been tried and found wanting; it has failed because it has been left untried.”
