Predicting Faith

Trends and surprises on the way to the future of faith and the church

Mar 18, 2023

A few years ago, a friend, no longer a part of the church, asked me if I was worried about the church. This was pre-pandemic but after the heightened polarization that accelerated starting in 2015. I said that I wasn’t, because the church is strong in much of the world, because so much of the church exists below everyone’s radar, even as what is on the radar isn’t always pretty - and because the Christian church belongs to Jesus Christ, and our plans and trends don’t always dictate everything we may think they do. But, in my friend’s defense, everyone knows why someone might ask that question.

If anything, the years since his question has given those prone to worrying about the church more to worry about. According to the most recent Pew Research study of Christian belief in America, U.S. Christians are projected to fall below 50% of the population, perhaps within a decade or two.

The trends behind this meta-trend include what has been called the rise of the Umms … and the nons … the nones and never weres … all indicate a turning away from the institutional church. The “nons” are the increasing number of people with an Evangelical heritage attending non-denominational churches, insulated from any baggage associated with a denomination. The “nones” are those who indicate, when surveyed about their religious affiliation, “none” or “none of the above”. These people may indeed be people of faith with no affiliation or people who are spiritual but not religious, or, perhaps, neither spiritual nor religious. The “never weres” are those who, well, never were in a church and see no reason to start looking for one. The “umms” are those who were in a church before the pandemic and became dislocated from their home congregation. They don’t know where they are with respect to their church.

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None of these trends are happening in a vacuum. Many of those who are struggling with their faith grew up in the church. They have seen leadership failure and institutional failure occurring in an era where, no coincidence, people trust institutions less and less. Some are not sure about truth claims in general in an era where there are competing ideas of what truth is or if it even exists in a form that applies to everyone. And in this arena, faith becomes personalized. As Ross Douthat put it -

But the dissolution of the old order of American religion — the decline of churches and denominations and the rise of deinstitutionalized spirituality — means that more and more religious lives are lived in between worldviews, in experimental territory where it’s a mistake to expect coherence, theological consistency, a definite set of prior assumptions or beliefs. (NYT)

To make Douthat’s point a different way: if, as I believe, we are all wired for faith - faith in something - these trends don’t eliminate faith, they just unmoor it from what used to hold it. G.K. Chesterton (who refers here to the modern world as everything after the Enlightenment and the Reformation) said this over a century ago -

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered … it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful” (Orthodoxy - 1908)

And 115 Years later, the situation has not gotten better - we remember virtues only to remake them in our own image, even Christianity is remade in the image of lots of Americans - to the point where it is no longer recognizable as Christianity - or would not be recognized by Christians of 200 years ago - and perhaps by Christians today who are 10,000 miles away. And yet the condemnation of people for their offenses that is now so frequent reminds one of Maoist struggle sessions or the Spanish Inquisition or of the Pharisees of Jesus’ day. At any rate it is morality at work - moralism, really - a new moralism with lots of the old condemnation. All of this helps us understand, if we needed any explanation, the trends revealed in the Pew study.

And yet … Christianity did not arrive by way of a trend. The Reformation wasn’t a trend, the First and Second Great Awakenings in America were not trends. All of these things reversed trends. It is good for us to remember this when we hear the accounts of the recent revival at Asbury University in Kentucky.

For two weeks, tens of thousands of people have made a pilgrimage to a tiny Christian college, about 30 minutes south of Lexington, for what some scholars and worshipers describe as the nation’s first major spiritual revival of the 21st century.
Drawn by posts on TikTok and Instagram, plus old-fashioned word of mouth, Christians from across the country poured through a chapel on the campus of Asbury University to pray and sing until the wee hours of the morning, lining up hours before the doors opened and leaving only when volunteers closed the chapel at 1 a.m. to clean it for the next day. (NYT)

What is the larger meaning or impact of the Asbury revival? We don’t know. That really is the point. Perhaps the accumulation of all of the above laid the foundation for a revival, but we can’t know. Is this the beginning of something? It is hard to say, and if it is, it may not be recorded in the New York Times. The bottom line is we didn’t see this coming. And that is what we need to remember when we think about the future of the church. Things don’t always happen as we might expect. Even religious leaders don’t necessarily have an inside track on what it all means.

John the Baptist heralded the arrival of Jesus, the Messiah. But the ministry of Jesus was not what John expected - different enough that he began to wonder if he had been wrong.

When John, who was in prison, heard about the deeds of the Messiah, he sent his disciples to ask him, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?”
Jesus replied, “Go back and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor. Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me.” (Matthew 11:2-6)

It is likely the political situation did not change as John (and many others) assumed it would. Many thought the Messiah would come to rule (right away). Jesus told John to look elsewhere, to discern what the true mission of the Messiah (and coming church) was. Don’t lose the spiritual transformation in all the political cultural trendlines.

Nicodemus, a Pharisee, a public religious leader of the time who taught people what the coming of the Messiah would entail, was similarly confused when the Messiah walked and taught and stood and spoke before him. Nicodemus, to his credit, left open the possibility that he might have been wrong. When he approached Jesus about his dilemma, part of Jesus’ response was

“The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” (John 3:8)

Nicodemus didn’t have a category for this.

“How can this be?” Nicodemus asked. (John 3:9)

I believe that Christianity teaches that spirituality is real. It has a reality of its own, predating ours. We can’t really make it up, neither can we make it go away. I believe that Christianity teaches that we are in a big story in which we have agency and responsibility, but where we are not the authors.

And if you’re imagining a renewal for American Christianity, all the best laid plans — the pastoral strategies, theological debates and long-term trendlines — may matter less than something happening in some obscure place or to some obscure individual, in whose visions an entirely unexpected future might be taking shape. (NYT)

God has established his church. It is His chosen vessel for transformation and redemption. It is important to understand the trends and to understand why people are responding, or not responding, to the church in our time. But all the real fruit does not come from the church, but through the church. We may be surprised by how and when that fruit comes, or where. In any case, we who are Christians are called to embody that transformation and redemption and to be ambassadors for that transformation and redemption into this current moment. When that happens, anything can happen. When that doesn’t, it won’t much matter.